Department News and Announcements

Congratulations to Patrick Bottiger, associate professor of history, recipient of a 2020 Trustee Teaching Excellence Award, which recognizes and rewards exemplary teaching informed by creative scholarship.

Nominators referred to Bottiger as "a most devoted and prized mentor" with "an ability to connect with students to help them understand a complex field." With teaching interests that include American Indian history, colonial and Revolutionary America and comparative frontiers, Bottiger is well known for a course that examines the cultural influence of corn for both Native and non-Native peoples.

Congratulations to the department academic award recipients:

  • The Rober L. Baker Memorial Prize: India Kotis '20
  • The Alan G. Goldsmith Memorial Prize: Hanna Feuer '21 and Lydia O'Donnell '20
  • The Curtis A. Seichter Award: David Han '21 and Samuel Hosmer-Quint '21
  • The Sigrid Lanzrath Memorial Prize in German: Thomas Patrick Merkle '20

The departments welcomes the following faculty for the 2020-21 academic year:

  • Hilary Buxton: Modern Britain and the British Empire
    Buxton will join the History Department in fall 2020. Buxton teaches the history of Modern Britain and the British Empire, with emphases on the history of the body, health, colonialism, race and gender in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Prior to joining Kenyon, she was a Past & Present Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London from 2018-2020. Her work on medicine, masculinity and empire has appeared in Past & Present and The British Journal for the History of Science. She is currently completing her first book manuscript. Disabled Empire: Health, Race, and Rehabilitation in the British Imperial World, 1914-1940, traces the intersecting histories of medical care and colonial soldiers during the First World War and its aftermath.  In fall 2020, she will offer a survey on the British Empire (HIST 226), as well as an upper-level course on the history of public health (HIST 342). In Spring 2020, she will offer the survey "British History, 1485-Present: Identity, Migration, and Nation" (HIST 227), and "Practice and Theory of History" (HIST 387).
  • Raja Rahim: 2020-21 Marilyn Yarbrough Dissertation Teaching Fellow
    Raja Rahim is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Florida. A native of Richmond, Virginia, she is a graduate of North Carolina Central University with Bachelor and Master’s degrees in History. As a United States historian, her research and pedagogy focuses include African American history, gender studies, sports history, oral history and digital humanities. Rahim’s current research examines the political, cultural, and social worlds of basketball at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

New fall 2020 course with Alex Novikoff, visiting assistant professor of history: 
History 291: "Jews in Christian Europe, 1000-1800" CRN # 80558; TR, 9:40 - 11 a.m.
Course Description: This class offers a survey of Jews living in Christian Europe between the persecution of the Crusades and the "Haskalah" or Jewish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The intervening centuries witnessed profound developments both in Christian attitudes towards their neighboring Jewish populations and in an evolving sense of Jewish identity brought about by important developments within Jewish communities across Europe. Students will learn about the social, economic, and intellectual nature of Christian-Jewish interactions and about the regeneration of Jewish communities in the face of mass expulsions, commercial mobility, and new challenges to traditional rabbinic authority. Primary sources in translation will include a wide range of texts from Jewish communities in Norwich, Amsterdam, Mainz, and Venice in the West to Krakow, Vilnius, and Smyrna in the East. In sum, students can expect to come away from the class with a deeper appreciation of one the most dynamic periods in Jewish and European history. No prerequisites required.

Additional Resources

Digital Paxton, a digital collection, critical edition and teaching platform. "Paxton" refers to a little-known massacre in colonial Pennsylvania. This site isn't only a digital collection dedicated to a massacre, but also a window into colonization, print culture and Pennsylvania on the eve of the American Revolution.

Founders Online where you can read and search through thousands of records from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and see first-hand the growth of democracy and the birth of the Republic.

View online resources for insightful analysis of early American history.

Adam Matthew Digital, whose primary source collections include "Global Commodities: Trade, Exploration, and Cultural Exchange and Medieval Travel Writing."

Gale-Cengage, whose many collections include British newspapers and the Economist Historical Archive.

Readex, whose collections include American historical newspapers and the World Newspaper Archive.