Our faculty and graduate students are taking full advantage of the summer break to dive into some historical books. Here's what they're reading!
Dan Gorman, Jr., PhD candidate: “For work, I'm reading Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science by Alicia Puglionesi, The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert Gross, and Religion and the American Revolution by Katherine Carté. For fun, I have a stack of science fiction novels.”
Jean Pedersen, Professor of History: “My reading list for the summer includes a big list of big biographies: David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton, Lynn Garafola’s La Nijinska: Choreographer of the Modern, Tom Reiss’s The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, Dorothy Wickenden’s The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Women’s Rights, and Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville.”
Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor of History: “David Wilson’s new book Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century, Rose O’Keefe’s Frederick and Anna Douglass in Rochester, New York, Erik Champion’s Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage, and muddling through the Dutch West India Company’s corporate records related to the Gold Coast (in Dutch). And rereading Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin books as beach reading when not digging.”
Thomas Slaughter, Arthur R. Miller Professor of History: “I will be reading draft chapters of doctoral dissertations: revisions of Corinna Hill's on friendships between deaf and hearing Americans in the nineteenth century, for her defense in the early fall, the first chapter of Sarabeth Rambold's on female home education in nineteenth-century America, Shellie Clark's biography of Frances Miller Seward, Rhianna Gordon's on orphans in nineteenth-century America, and Lauren Davis's on the role of families in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in nineteenth-century America.”
Pablo Sierra Silva, Associate Professor of History: “I try to read as much fiction as possible during the summer, so I'm starting with Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing: A Novel. So far, it's a wonderful, immersive story set in eighteenth-century Ghana. To prep for my "World History through Soccer" course this coming Fall, I'm reading Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France by Laurent Dubois.”
Laura Ackerman Smoller, Professor of History: “for pleasure—Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a new collection of French short stories called Le crocodile blanc et autres hasards by Uli Wittmann, and on my audio book reader, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. For research: right now Robin Vose’s new book on the history of the Index of Prohibited Books, coming up Stephan Heilen’s massive work on astrological predictions based on Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions, Konjunktionsprognostik in der Frühen Neuzeit, band 1, Die Antichrist-Prognose des Johannes von Lübeck (1474) zur Saturn-Jupiter-Konjunktion von 1504 und ihre frühneuzeitliche Rezeption. There’s a mouthful!”
Joan Rubin, Dexter Perkins Professor in History: “I'm reading Love Marriage by Monica Ali for pleasure. Now that I have stepped down as Humanities Center director, I'll have more time to read!”
Jeff Baron, PhD candidate: “This summer I'm reading a lot in Spanish to try to reach fluency, from newspaper articles about Spanish-Moroccan disputes over the Sahara to archaeological reports from the Andes.”
Stewart Weaver, Professor of History, and Tanya Bakhmetyeva, Associate Professor of Instruction in History: “M. Jackson, The Secret Lives of Glaciers, Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen?, and Peter Knight, Glacier: Nature and Culture.”