Current Research

The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds

The Marvelous Hairy Girls by Merry Wiesner-Hanks tells the extraordinary story of three sixteenth-century sisters who, along with their father and brothers, were afflicted with an extremely rare genetic condition that made them unusually hairy. Amazingly, the Gonzales sisters were welcomed in the courts of Europe, and spent much of their lives among nobles, musicians, and artists. Their double identity as humans and beasts made them intriguing subjects of medical investigations and of a considerable number of portraits, some of which still hang in European castles today. 2009. Yale University Press

Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration

Moving Images by Jasmine Alinder is an in-depth analysis of photography during the Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Moving Images examines the work of photographers operating both during and after the incarceration. 2009. University of Illinois Press

Rome's Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914-1939

Based on original research in the libraries and depositories of four countries, including recently opened collections in the Vatican Secret Archives, Rome's Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914-1939 by Neal Pease presents the first scholarly history of the close but complex political relationship of Poland with the Catholic Church during the interwar period. Pease addresses, for example, the centrality of Poland in the Vatican's plans to convert the Soviet Union to Catholicism and the curious reluctance of each successive Polish government to play the role assigned to it. He also reveals the complicated story of the relations of Polish Catholicism with Jews, Freemasons, and other minorities within the country and what the response of Pope Pius XII to the Nazi German invasion of Poland in 1939 can tell us about his controversial policies during World War II. 2009. Ohio University Press

The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations

The State of Sovereignty: Territories, Laws, Populations was edited by Douglas Howland and Luise White, 2008. It examines how it came to pass that the nation-state became the prevailing form of governance in the world today. Spanning the 19th and 20th centuries and addressing colonization and decolonization around the globe, these essays argue that sovereignty is a set of historically contingent practices, and not something that accrues naturally to states. The contributors explore the different ways in which sovereign political forms have been defined and have defined themselves, placing recent debates about nations and national identity within a broader history of sovereignty, territory, and legality. 2008. Indiana University Press

Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

Immigrant Rights by Rachel Ida Buff brings prominent activists and scholars together to examine the emergence and significance of the contemporary immigrant rights movement. Contributors place the contemporary immigrant rights movement in historical and comparative contexts by looking at the ways immigrants and their allies have staked claims to rights in the past, and by examining movements based in different communities around the United States. Scholars explain the evolution of immigration policy, and analyze current conflicts around issues of immigrant rights; activists engaged in the current movement document the ways in which coalitions have been built among immigrants from different nations, and between immigrant and native born peoples. The essays examine the ways in which questions of immigrant rights engage broader issues of identity, including gender, race, and sexuality. 2008. New York University Press

Interwar Vienna: Culture between Tradition and Modernity

Although beset by social, political, and economic instabilities, Interwar Vienna was an exhilarating place, with pioneering developments in the arts and innovations in the social sphere. Research on the period long saw the city as a mere shadow of its former imperial self; more recently it has concentrated on high-profile individual figures or party politics. This volume of new essays edited by Deborah Holmes and Lisa Silverman widens the spectrum, stretching disciplinary boundaries to consider the cultural and social movements that shaped the city. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire resulted not in an abandonment of the arts, but rather led to new forms of expression that were nevertheless conditioned by the legacies of earlier periods. The city's culture was caught between extremes, from neopositivism to cultural pessimism, Catholic mysticism to Austromarxism, late Enlightenment liberalism to rabid antisemitism. Concentrating on the paradoxes and often productive tensions that these created, the volume's eleven essays explore achievements and anxieties in fields ranging from modern dance, theater, music, film, and literature to economic, cultural, and racial policy. 2009. Camden House.

Race, Labor, and Civil Rights: Griggs versus Duke Power and the Struggle for Equal Employment Opportunity

In 1966, thirteen black employees of the Duke Power Company's Dan River Plant in Draper, North Carolina, filed a lawsuit against the company challenging its requirement of a high school diploma or a passing grade on an intelligence test for internal transfer or promotion. In the groundbreaking decision Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding such employment practices violated Title 7 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when they disparately affected minorities. In doing so, the court delivered a significant anti-employment discrimination verdict. Legal scholars rank Griggs v. Duke Power on par with Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in terms of its impact on eradicating race discrimination from American institutions. In Race, Labor, and Civil Rights, Robert Samuel Smith offers the first full-length historical examination of this important case and its connection to civil rights activism during the second half of the 1960s. 2008. LSU Press