September 30
Empire and Toleration: Some Comparative Thoughts
Karen Barkey, Department of Sociology, Columbia University

October 28
Law, Crime and Sovereignty on the Hyderabad-Bombay Frontier
Eric Lewis Beverley, Department of History, SUNY-Stony Brook

November 18
Be a Shareholder in Victory! Financial Nationalism and the American Citizen Investor in World War I
Julia Cathleen Ott, Committee on Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research

All meetings in Wednesdays 12:50-2:10 pm in SBS N320.

See IHSS homepage for more information.

April Masten, Associate Professor of American History at SUNY Stony Brook, has been awarded a highly competitive resident fellowship at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for the Spring 2008 semester.

The Davis Center was named in honor of an alumnus who provided a generous gift to ensure the continuance of excellence in scholarship and the teaching of history at Princeton.  Each year, about a half-dozen scholars are chosen to participate in the seminar and pursue research related to a particular theme.

The Center’s focus for the academic years 2008-09 and 2009-10 is the problem of “Cultures and Institutions in Motion.” Issues to be studied include the diffusion of religious and cultural practices; the migration of technologies and objects; the circulation of ideas, traditions and aesthetic forms; the transfer of policies and legal practices; and the dynamics of traveling social movements.

The title of Masten’s project is “The Challenge Dance: Transatlantic Exchange in Early American Popular Culture,” which explores the form, content, and context of challenge dancing in Antebellum America to show how the aesthetic and global movements of people contributed to the formation of national identities.  Part theatre, part sport, challenge dances were jigging contests among white and black men, and sometimes women.  They took place on street corners and plantations, in halls and taverns, and in theatres and circuses as part of blackface minstrel shows. Challenge dances drew large, raucous crowds and were viewed, judged, and bet on like boxing matches.  These matches were the product of decades of exchange among Irish, English, African and Dutch sailors, slaves, and immigrants throughout the Atlantic world. 

Masten, who has taught at Stony Brook since 2001, specializes in the relationship between culture and political economies. For this project, she has received a John M. Ward Fellowship in Dance and Music for the Theatre from Harvard University’s Houghton Library, a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, and a John Hope Franklin Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society for research travel to Ireland and England.

Since its inception, the Davis Center’s primary role has been to conduct a weekly seminar in which members of the faculty, visitors from other institutions, graduate students and selected undergraduates participate. For a period of two years, the Center focuses on a specific theme or aspect of history. Emphasis is placed on interdisciplinary approaches and subjects that span different geographical areas or periods.

The new director of the Davis Center Daniel Rodgers has been a member of the Princeton faculty since 1980.  His specialty is American ideas and culture, about which he has written several books.  Rogers has also held several fellowships, been a Fulbright lecturer in Germany and Japan, taught at Cambridge University, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 for his project entitled, “Transformation in Social Thought in 1980s America.”

All presentations will be held in SBS N303.

Dr. Chris Sellers, “What was Earth Day?”
Thursday, February 9, 2007, 2:20-3:40pm

Dr. Robert Goldenberg, “When did ‘the Jews’ begin to Notice Christianity?”
Thursday, March 1, 2007, 12:50-2:10pm

Dr. April Masten
“The Challenge Dance: Mid-Nineteenth Century Migrations of Afro-Celtic Popular Culture”
Thursday, March 22, 2007, 12:50-2:10pm

Alberto Harambour
Thursday, April 12, 2007, 12:50-2:10pm