Department News

Raechel Lutz publishes "Petroleum's Park: How Oil Shaped the Palisades Interstate Park, 1900-1960" in the journal Technology and Culture and "Get a U.S. High School Teaching Job" in Environmental History Now.

Published in the premier journal of the history of technology, "Petroleum Park" explores the impact the oil industry had, ironically, in conservation and park creating in the U.S.   Highlighting the rewards of teaching at the secondary level with a Ph.D., "Get a U.S. High School Teaching Job" appears in a new on-line journal that advocates for broader representation in the field of environmental history.  After receiving her bachelor's degree at IC, Raechel went on to receive a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.  She has returned to campus in person and virtually on multiple occasions to mentor IC students.

Congratulations to Professor Michael Smith who has been named a faculty fellow in the Center for Faculty Excellence.  He will be working on the Climate Emergency during the 2020-2021 academic year after he returns from his sabbatical appointment teaching at the London Center in Spring 2020.

• Zenon Wasyliw gave an invited talk at SUNY Cortland on Thursday, November 14 on "The Many Ukraines of 1917-1922."  It was organized by the Project on Central and Eastern Europe (PECE). 
• Karin Breuer presented her sabbatical project, "Fraternity Students, Lola Montez, and Revolutions in the German Confederation, 1830-1847," at the Provost's Post-Sabbatical Colloquium on November 21.
• Jonathan Ablard presented his sabbatical project, "Disinformation, Conspiracy Theories and Rumors in Argentina and Beyond," at the Provost's Post-Sabbatical Colloquium on November 4.
• Michael Smith presented “Paths to Resilience: A Community Environmental History Project in Nicaragua” at the 42nd Annual Fulbright Association Conference in Washington, D.C. in October.
• Pearl Ponce presented "Terror and the Territories of the 1850s” on October 19 at the Western History Association.
• Professor Ablard's review of Benjamin Bryce's To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society, appears in the October 2019 issue of the American Historical Review, the preeminent journal of the history profession in the U.S.
• Jonathan Ablard presented (via Skype) "The Hidden History of the Participation of Mental Health Professionals in the Argentine Process of National Reorganization (1976-1983)" at the Journée d'Etudes Internationale: : La santé dans les Amériques au prisme des sciences sociales hosted by the Université de Rouen (France). 

• The Ithacan covered Professor Smith's Environmental History student presentations on December 11, 2019 at the History Center.
• Minor Reagan Black will be presenting a paper she wrote in Professor Wasyliw's course at the national Phi Alpha Theta conference in Houston in January 2020
• Karin Breuer was appointed to a three-year appointment as director of Integrated Studies on August 16, 2019.
• Michael Smith, jointly appointed in History and ENVS, was promoted to Professor on August 16, 2019.
• Zoe Shan Lin was awarded a Summer Research Grant for 2019.
• Vivian Bruce Conger was promoted to Professor--the first woman in the History Department to earn that rank--on August 16, 2018.
• Jason Freitag was named a Presidential Fellow for the academic year 2018-2019, part of the inaugural cohort of fellows.  He is continuing his work on the strategic plan and global engagement during the 2019-2020 academic year.

• Vivian Bruce Conger was one of 25 scholars chosen to participate in the Biography Writers’ Workshop, held on Thursday, July 18, 2019, at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Cambridge, MA, July 18-21, 2019.
• Vivian Bruce Conger presented "Forgotten Labor: Deborah Franklin and Sally Franklin Bache in the Eighteenth-Century World of Commerce" at the 2019 International Conference on the Enlightenment, July 14-19, 2019, in Edinburgh, Scotland.  
• Pearl Ponce presented “Territorial Terrorism and American Governance in the 1850” on June 21, 2019 at Queen Mary University London during its Biennial Symposium in American History.