The Department is delighted to welcome two excellent young women to its faculty, both of whom will add strength and breadth to the world history focus of its programs.

Dr. Katherine Luongo began a tenure-track assistant professorship in September 2007. Dr. Luongo received her doctorate from the University of Michigan, with specializations in African and South Asian history, and expertise in anthropology.

Her research focuses on the twentieth century British colonial encounter with witchcraft in Kenya. At Northeastern she will teach courses in Colonialism and Contemporary Africa, Introduction to World History and the graduate seminar in Theory and Methodology in World History. Her methodological and regional expertise will be of enormous value to our World History program.

Dr. Karin Velez will join the Department as a tenure track assistant professor in September 2008, following a year of post-doctoral fellowship at Duke University. Dr. Velez’ holds her doctorate from Princeton University, with expertise in the history of the early modern Spanish Atlantic World. Her research focuses on transatlantic religious movements, particularly the Jesuits and the diffusion of worship of the Virgin of Loretto. Dr. Velez will teach courses on the Spanish Atlantic, Religion in World History and historical methodology as well as the Introduction to World History.

Two of our doctoral students have won major awards this past year.

Stephanie Boyle was the recipient of a Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship to support a year of research in Egypt during 2007-2008 for her doctoral dissertation focusing on religion and gender in the process of urban modernization in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Egypt.

Samantha Christiansen won a US Department of State Critical Language Scholarship for participation in the Bangla program in Dhaka, Bangladesh this summer. Undergraduate History major Sarah Robey was been awarded a Matthews Honors Undergraduate Award for 2007-2008 for her project, “Migrant Mother: an American Icon.” Sarah will be advised by Professor Harvey Green.

Five members of the History faculty published books this past year. Professor Thomas R. H. Havens published his Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts (University of Hawai‘i Press); Professor Harvey Green published his Wood. Craft, Culture, History (Viking); Professor Jeffrey Burds published Soviet Agentura Outlines in the History of the USSR in the Postwar Years (“Sovremennaia Istoriia”); Professor Laura Frader published The Industrial Revolution (Oxford University Press), and Professor Clay McShane (with Joel A,Tarr) has just published his Horse in the City. Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins, 2007).

Finally, the Department admitted 11 students to its doctoral program in World History, the largest entering PhD class in the history of our program, and among them the best and brightest doctoral students in the College. And our undergraduates continue to delight us with their accomplishments.

But enough of blowing our horn. Tell us your news! We look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,
Laura L. Frader
Professor and Chair

Professor Luongo received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2006. While there, she honed her skills in using anthropological methodologies as a means to get at social history. Professor Luongo relied upon this approach for her dissertation which looked at witchcraft and the criminal legal system in colonial Kenya during the mid-twentieth century. For Luongo, the crime of witchcraft offers a lens into larger issues of justice in an imperial setting.

For the future, she plans to expand upon her dissertation topic, exploring how legal systems in contemporary Africa reflect every day life. Additionally, Luongo hopes to examine the Bantu Cinema Project, an undertaking in which the British colonial state used a series of didactic films to teach Africans the British vision of social life and domesticity. An advocate of cross-disciplinary approaches, she hopes to combine the methodologies of film studies with social theory to examine the impact of the Bantu Cinema Project.

Although Professor Luongo has devoted her professional career to the study of Africa, she was initially interested in contemporary British history. As an undergrad at Vanderbilt University, her senior thesis examined the overhaul of the welfare state in Britain under Margaret Thatcher. However, intrigued by post-colonial theory, Luongo’s focus gravitated toward British imperialism. From there, she became interested in women settlers in colonial Kenya. The cultural, social, and political diversity of this colonial African setting inspired Luongo. She quickly abandoned her focus on domestic Britain and committed herself to the study of African history.

Professor Luongo is originally from Westchester County, New York. Her research has taken her throughout the United States, Great Britain, and Africa. While relatively new to Boston, she has already been impressed by the intellectual and cultural vibrancy of the city as well as its distinct “sense of place.”

Her experience and expertise in African history will undoubtedly contribute to the diversity commensurate with the ambitions of the department’s World History program.

This September the University admitted 18 freshmen majoring in history, down slightly from last year.  By statistical measures they are the best crop of freshmen that I’ve seen.  The majority was in the top ten per cent of their high school class with a mean average of 3.6.  All had combined SATs over 1200 and almost all had math SATs (a traditional weakness of history majors) over 600.  Verbal SAT’s were over 700 in many cases.  All of them passed the Math Department’s placement exam for admission to calculus classes. Almost all had taken AP courses in high school, often two or three classes.

Ten of the eighteen are women.  Most are from the northeast, especially the outer suburbs of New York and Boston.  Only two are from Boston or its inner suburbs (Revere and Chelsea). Two come from the Midwest (Wisconsin and Missouri).

I’m quite familiar with them as their advisor and instructor in the freshman colloquium and they have other qualities that can’t be described statistically or demographically.  First they are quite ambitious—most are thinking about graduate school already, most commonly in law, but in two cases medical school.  Many plan a double major and most expect to participate in the University’s overseas programs.  

Secondly they seem quite well prepared--most have good writing skills and they have excellent computer skills (several take class notes on laptops and they all can do power point presentations). I suppose that it is typical of their generation that their preferred means of communication is e-mail, not face-to face.  They are a lively active group in the classroom.  

Of course, they’re still college students—there is always one kid in the back row surreptiously doing a sudoku puzzle.

Clay McShane

This fall we welcomed a large cohort of incoming graduate students who swelled our ranks to 57 (37 in the Master’s program and 17 in the doctoral program). 

In addition to this growth, our doctoral program has been recognized for its excellence:  the Provost’s Office decided to award two of the newcomers with its newly instituted University Excellence Fellowships and the Graduate School of the College of Arts and Sciences reported that our entering doctoral students had the highest combined GRE scores of any doctoral program in the college. 

Rachel Gillet returned from a year in France, where her research on a doctoral dissertation “’Going Big Over There’: Black American Musicians, Race, and Gender in Transnational Perspective” was funded by a Chateaubriand Fellowship. 

Stephanie Boyle has done to Egypt to conduct research on her doctoral dissertation funded by a Fulbright Dissertation Research Fellowship. Two other new developments planned for the spring of 2008 are the inauguration of a Speaker’s Series in Global History which will bring four renowned scholars to campus and a Public History conference.

Christina Gilmartin

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