November 2010

Simon Payaslian co-edits collection ofessays on Armenian Constantinople

Professor Simon Payaslian has co-edited a book with Professor Richard G.Hovannisian (UCLA) entitled Armenian Constantinople (Mazda Publishers). Thisvolume offers an overview of the history of the Armenian community in Constan-tinople from its earliest times to the twentieth century. In addition to the introduc-tion by Hovannisian and Payaslian, the twenty chapters capture the community’srich heritage in literature, theater, architecture, music, education, and the church.Dating back to the fourth century, the Armenian community in Constantinopleserved as a major cultural center, as Byzantine, Arab, Seljuk, Mongol, and Mamlukinvaders battled across the historic Armenian lands for regional hegemony, forcing

Armenians in growingnumbers to migrate westto the Byzantine Empire.Armenians contributed tothe cultural and materialdevelopment of the impe-rial city, but their politicaland economic situationdeteriorated rapidly in thesecond half of the nine-teenth century, a situationwhich culminated in thegenocide during WorldWar I. In February 1915 theauthorities ordered the re-moval of all Armenianofficials from their govern-ment posts in Constanti-nople. On the night ofApril 24, more than 200Armenian intellectualsand community leaderswere arrested in the cityand exiled. In 1916 the gov-ernment also abolishedthe Armenian Apostolic

See PAYASLIAN, page 4

On October 16 graduate student Mi-chael Holm presented a paper entitled“Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.: A Journeyfrom Neutrality to Cold War” at theNew England Historical Association’sfall conference at the University of NewEngland, Biddeford, Maine.

Graduate student Aaron Hiltner re-cently had a paper accepted for the “Bi-ography, Autobiography, Memoir, andPersonal Narrative” panel at the na-tional conference of the Popular Cul-ture Association/American Culture As-sociation (meeting with the South-west/Texas regional conference). Thepaper is titled “The Cultural Mythol-ogy of World War Two in Vietnam WarMemoir: Masculinity, Violence, andCulture.” The conference will be heldApril 20-23 in San Antonio, Texas.

On October 8 Professor JamesMcCann delivered the keynote addressto the Fourth Annual Graduate Confer-ence at Michigan State University. Hisaddress was entitled “Ravens, WritingDesks, and Mosquitoes: BuildingComplexity into Research.” His audi-ence included senior graduate studentsfrom five universities, including theUniversity of Botswana....On Novem-ber 11 he will deliver a lecture at theHyde Park Campus of the Culinary In-stitute of America: “Building a Cuisine,

Page 2 NEWS

NEWSof the History Departmentat Boston Universityis published monthly Septemberthrough May at the department office,226 Bay State Road, Boston, MA02215.

Telephone: 617-353-2551E-mail: history@bu.eduWebsite: www.bu.edu/history

Editor: James T. Dutton, Depart-ment Administrator

Items of interest for publication andchanges of address should be sent tothe editor.

Lecture onArmenian poet held

Professor Simon Payaslian orga-nized a lecture by Professor James R.Russell, Mashtots Professor of Arme-nian Studies at Harvard University.Professor Russell’s talk, entitled “TheCalm before the Storm: The Arme-nian Poet Misak Medzarents on theThreshold of the Genocide,” exam-ined the contributions made byMedzarents to the development ofmodern Armenian culture in an envi-ronment of despotic rule, censorship,urbanization, and commerce.

Russell stated that “The lyric poetMisak Medzarents, who migrated toConstantinople from the interior Ar-menian heartland, is known for hislyrical idylls and elegies of nature andtraditional rural life.” Russell relatedthis to “parallel contemporary devel-opments in the Russian Empireamong the Jews: the forging of Zion-ism and the resurrection of Hebrew.”

The event was held at The Castleon October 13 and was co-sponsoredby the National Association for Arme-nian Studies and Research, Belmont,Mass.

Professor Payaslian has held theKenosian Chair in Armenian Studiesat Boston University since 2007.

Building a Nation.” Headless horse-men, a sleeping Dutchman, and bowl-ing gnomes will doubtless be in atten-dance....On November 18 McCann willdeliver Grinnell College’s annualScholars’ Convocation Lecture on thetopic: “Corn: Africa’s Story.” Duringthe week-long event he will visit localfarms and a seed production site....Pro-fessor McCann has received an invita-tion to serve on a PhD defense at theNorwegian University of Life Sciences(UMB) in Aas, Norway. He and Profes-sor David Anderson of All Saints Col-lege, Oxford University, will serve as“opponents” to examine a doctoralcandidate on the topic “The Dynamicsof the Ancient Tula Wells’ CulturalLandscape.” UMB is Norway’s majortechnological university, located justsouth of Oslo.

A paperback edition of ProfessorNina Silber’s book Daughters of the Un-ion: Northern Women Fight the Civil Waris being issued this fall by Harvard Uni-versity Press....Professor Silber traveledto Utah Valley University on Septem-ber 22 as part of her duties as a distin-guished lecturer for the Organizationof American Historians; she led a semi-nar and delivered a talk on the subjectof “Why Gender Is Important in Un-derstanding the Civil War.”

Professor Erik Goldstein delivereda paper to the British International His-tory Conference at St. Antony’s Col-lege, Oxford, on “Religion and British

James R. Russell BU Photo Services

Foreign Policy: The Case of St. Sophia,1821-1922.”

The German Studies Association,which held its annual conference inOakland, California, this year October7-10, dedicated a roundtable discussionto Professor Jonathan Zatlin’s firstbook, The Currency of Socialism: Moneyand Political Culture in East Germany.

Professor Emeritus Dietrich Orlowdelivered a paper entitled “The SEDand the Peace Movements in East andWest Germany, 1977-1989” at the annualmeeting of the German Studies Associ-ation in Oakland, California. He pre-sented the paper by proxy (that is to say,the chairman of the panel read it) be-cause his wife, Maria, was recuperatingfrom a total hip replacement operation.

Professor Eugenio Menegon pub-lished an essay entitled “Wanted: AnEighteenth-Century Chinese CatholicPriest in China, Italy, India, and South-east Asia” in the September mono-graphic issue on “Italy and China” ofthe Journal of Modern Italian Stud-ies....He also traveled to Lisbon, Portu-gal, over the Columbus Day weekend(October 9-12) to present a paper enti-tled “Courtiers and Careers: Jesuits, pa-pal envoys, and Qing imperial officialsin eighteenth-century Beijing” at theInternational Symposium “Inter-cultural Encounters Europe-China,Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries” orga-nized by the Centro Científico e Cul-tural de Macau.

Professor Barbara Diefendorfchaired two sessions at the annualmeeting of the Sixteenth CenturyStudies Conference in Montreal Octo-ber 14-16. The first session, on marriagein early modern Europe, was organizedby Sara McDougall, who graduatedfrom the BU BA/MA program in 2003,received a PhD in history from Yale in2009, and is now an assistant professorat John Jay College in New York. Thesecond session, on urban culture andsociability in religiously divided Frenchcommunities, included a paper by cur-rent PhD student Scott Marr. PhillipHaberkern, who will be joining the de-partment as an early modernist nextSeptember, was also at the conferenceand said that he looks forward to com-ing to BU in the fall of 2011. �

November 2010 Page 3

From Ángel Amy Moreno (PhD fromBoston University 1999):

I taught history and humanities atthe University of Puerto Rico for fouryears (1970-1974), then came to BostonUniversity to work on my PhD in his-tory with Tom Glick. The deal was thatafter completing the required coursework and qualifying exams, I was to re-turn to UPR. During that time, I startedworking part-time at Roxbury Commu-nity College to supplement my in-come. As the college developed andgrew, I was offered a full-time positionand decided to take it, and as they say,the rest is history. I remained at the col-lege, resigned from my teaching job atUPR, withdrew from the history pro-gram at BU, and decided to start a new

degree in education (EdD). I graduatedin 1982 from the School of Education,and that same day I reapplied to con-tinue my degree in history. Thanks toTom Glick and Reinhold Schumann, Iwas accepted to the History Depart-ment and was able to graduate in Janu-ary 1999. Throughout these years I wentthrough the ranks at Roxbury Commu-nity College, serving as chair of the So-cial Sciences Department for severalyears. In addition, I spent some yearsteaching humanities courses, includingphotography. In my professional careerI have used photography to documentmy work pertaining to oral history (mypreference has always been cultural andsocial history).

In Boston I served on the StateBoard of Affirmative Action underGovernor Mike Dukakis for four yearsand on the Boston School Committeefor eight years. In addition to my re-search and teaching career, I haveworked as a journalist and photogra-pher for several local newspapers; cur-rently I am a correspondent for ElMundo, New England’s largest and old-est Spanish newspaper. I was a founder

of Thought for Action, a journal ofhigher education published bythe National Education Associa-tion in Washington, D.C. My re-search in the field of history hasbeen supported by two grantsfrom the National Endowmentfor the Humanities. This pastMay I was named ProfessorEmeritus by the Board ofTrustees of Roxbury Commu-nity College, the institution’sfirst faculty member to receivesuch a designation.

In 2009 Amy Moreno pub-lished a book of photographs ofPuerto Rico and Santo Domin-go, Voices and Silences. In his re-view of the collection, photogra-pher and author David Updikewrites: “A student of the historyof photography as well, AmyMoreno works in the black-and-white tradition of the great nine-teenth- and twentieth-centuryphotographers: Henri CartierBresson, Brass ai , Manuel

Álvarez Bravo, whose photographs ofMexico possess some of the same senseof stillness, of history on pause. LikeBravo, Amy Moreno reveals an admira-tion and reverence for the crumblingand living past, and also captures thatelusive feeling of all great photographs:a sense of wishing we had been theretoo, if only to walk these same quietstreets, if only to see what and who isaround the next corner, and also to see,in the endless flux of history, what hap-pens next.”

Update on Spring 2011 classes

Two classes have been added to theschedule for spring 2011 since publica-tion of the previous newsletter:

CAS HI 552: Topics in Jewish History.Topic for spring 2011: The Zionist Idea.This class examines the Zionist ideology.We shall carefully examine the ideas ofthe main Zionist thinkers, and of the cri-tiques of Zionism. We shall begin withmid-late 19th century, and work our wayto contemporary formulations. Instructor:Nahshon Perez. Mondays 3-6.

GRS HI 743: Problems in Twentieth-Century History. Topic for spring 2011:modernism. This seminar examines acritical problem in late-nineteenth andtwentieth-century European and Ameri-can cultural history: the origins and de-velopment of the modern movement.The central theme is the relationship be-tween art and thought and social, politi-cal, economic, and technologicalchange. Among the issues we will dis-cuss are whether modernism was reallya unified movement or if there were fun-damental differences between its mani-festations in different societies, forms,and genres; the role of cultural capitals,including Vienna, Paris, and New York;the impact of World Wars I and II on mod-ernism; the emergence of Jews andother outsiders as significant culturalproducers and brokers; and the econom-ics of culture. We will begin with the ori-gins of modernism in Paris in the 1860sand 70s and end with post-1945 NewYork.This interdisciplinary course shouldbe of particular interest to students ofhistory, literature, the visual and perform-ing arts, and cultural studies. Instructor:Charles Dellheim. Mondays 12-3.

Page 4 NEWS

The following students received the BA in History in September:

�Michael Jonathan Alloy

�Katrina Farias

�Edward Francis Frederick, III

�Katherine E. Hayes

�Yee Shan Leung (with a bachelor’s degree from the School of Education)

�Zoe Sarah Rachel Morin (Magna cum Laude) (with a bachelor’s degree fromthe College of Communication, Magna cum Laude)

� Jillian Elizabeth Primiano (Magna cum Laude) (with a bachelor’s degree fromthe College of Communication, Summa cum Laude)

�Andreas Westgaard (Summa cum Laude) (with bachelor’s and master’s degreesin Political Science)

�William H. Wood (double major in Psychology)

Last month, PhD stu-dents Sara Georginiand Amanda Mathews,both of whom work onthe Adams Family pa-pers project at the Mas-sachusetts HistoricalSociety, led a workshopfor Boston PublicSchool teachers on Abi-gail and John Adamsand their views on edu-cation. The workshop ispart of “Meet the Histo-rians,” one element ofthe ongoing collabora-tion between the BUHistory Departmentand the Boston PublicSchools. For more information on this program, visit www.bu.edu/history/APHI/TAH.html.

Course planninginformation available

The departmental website now hastentative class schedules for fall 2011and spring 2012 (both subject tochange).

In addition, the schedule for sum-mer 2011 will be online by the middle ofNovember.

All course information is found inthe “Courses” section of the site.

Updating of the historyconcentration approvedby CAS faculty

As keen-eyed (and -eared) studentsmay already know, the department hasbeen engaged in revising (and simplify-ing) the undergraduate major, and inOctober the new rules were approvedby the CAS faculty. The Decembernewsletter will have a full explanationof the changes.

Current students need not worrysince they may continue in the versionof the concentration in which they areenrolled; new majors may select the re-vised version as of January 2011—andmust do so beginning next September.

Church and closed the Patriarchate ofConstantinople. The Allied victory ledto the re-institution of the Patriarchate,but the community has never recov-ered its cultural vitality lost between1915 and 1923. Nevertheless, the commu-nity has survived despite the decades ofdifficult circumstances since then, try-ing to maintain an identity and a con-tinuing presence. �

PAYASLIAN (cont. from page 1)

November 2010 Page 5

Articles

� Richard Reitan, “Völkerpsychologie and the Appropriation of ‘Spirit’ in MeijiJapan”

� Jens-Uwe Guettel, “From the Frontier to German South-West Africa: GermanColonialism, Indians, and American Westward Expansion before the FirstWorld War”

� Joan Shelley Rubin, “Repossessing the Cozzens-Macdonald Imbroglio: Mid-dlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority, and Autonomous Readers in PostwarAmerica”

� Edward Baring, “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre’sStruggle for Existentialism in Post-War France”

Essay

� Robert Mayhew, “Geography as the Eye of Enlightenment Historiography”

Review Articles

� Matthew Jones, “Matters of Fact: the early modern scientific revolution revis-ited”

� Alan Kors, “Mind, Body and Soul in the Early Enlightenment”

� Javed Majeed, “The Crisis of Secularism in India”

� Robert W. Rydell, “The Proximity of the Past: Eugenics in American Culture”

Cambridge University Press has an-nounced the contents of the Novem-ber 2010 issue of the journal Mod-ern Intellectual History, of whichProfessor Charles Capper is one ofthe editors.

History Department Seminar

Nahshon Perez

will present a paper to the department on Wednesday, December 8, at noon aspart of the department seminar series. The title of his talk is

“The Privatization of Jewishness in Israel,on Markets, Pork, and the Sabbath

(or, Is Israel a Jewish State?)”

Nahshon Perez is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and is teachingclasses in both History and Religion Departments this academic year.

Undergraduate HistoryAssociation to holdinformation session onattending grad school

The Undergraduate History Associa-tion is hosting a “What to Do with YourHistory Major / Grad School Informa-tion” panel with Professors CliffordBackman, Brendan McConville, andCathal Nolan.

The organization urges majors and mi-nors: “Whether you’re sure about yourfuture or absolutely lost in the wilder-ness of doubts, whether you’re a seniorready to graduate or a freshman just get-ting used to university life, join us onNovember 10 at 6 p.m. in Room 504 ofthe History Department (226 Bay StateRoad).”

Department of History226 Bay State RoadBoston, MA 02215

Charles Capper and David Hollinger’s new 6th edition of TheAmerican Intellectual Tradition, 2 vols. (Oxford UniversityPress, 2011) includes 15 new authors and selections. The edi-tors have added texts especially in the areas of American phi-losophy, theology, social theory, and conservative and envi-ronmental thought. They also revised substantially introduc-tions, headnotes, and recommended readings to take into ac-count new scholarship.

The American Intellectual Tradition has sold over 40,000 cop-ies and is now the standard American intellectual historysourcebook taught in most of the major colleges and universi-ties in the United States as well as many in the United King-dom.