October 2020

'The Last Time I Saw Them': A Democracy Seminar forum curated by Marci Shore, Jeff Goldfarb (The New School), and Stephen Naron (Fortunoff Archive)

This new forum engages authors and artists—from very different places and writing in very different genres—in an ongoing conversation on “the uses and disadvantages of historical comparisons for life” (title stolen from Nietzsche). The idea initially arose in response to the American administration’s southern border policy of taking children away from their parents: might this not be a moment to revisit testimonies by Holocaust survivors describing parent-child separation?

In search of justice: Reimagining race, public safety at a watershed moment

Elizabeth Hinton and Phillip Atiba Goff have been crossing paths for a long time.

With a mutual interest in policing, racial injustice, and criminal reform, Hinton, a historian, and Goff, a social psychologist, have often collaborated professionally. But until now, they’d never held permanent faculty positions on the same campus.

Valerie Hansen interviewed on NPR's The Indicator podcast: "How Vikings Launched Globalization 1.0"

In the year 1000, the Vikings became the first Europeans to set foot in North America. A few years later, they began trading fur pelts with an Indigenous group, possibly the Ancestral Beothuk, in exchange for red cloth and other items.

This was one of the many trading networks that were being established simultaneously at that moment in history, around the year 1000. And by making it across the Atlantic and connecting East to West, the Vikings had “closed the global loop,” historian Valerie Hansen says, when they established trade with Indigenous peoples in North America.

Studying global challenges, with an eye to the past

As a scholar of international history, Arne Westad studies the past to better understand today’s most pressing global challenges. 

It’s an approach Westad imparts to his students at Yale, and one that lies at the heart of the university’s International Security Studies (ISS) program, which he was recently appointed to direct. Established in 1988, ISS focuses on training the next generation of scholars in international security. It supports cross-disciplinary research that blends theoretical rigor with historical depth to address matters of global importance. 

Justin Randolph receives the C. Vann Woodward disseration prize from the Southern Historical Association

The Southern Historical Association awarded the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize to Justin Mark Randolph, author of “Civil Rights Arrested: Black Freedom Movements and Mass Incarceration in Rural Mississippi, 1938 to 1980,” written at Yale University (2019) under the direction of Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Beverly Gage. In making their decision the committee notes that “Justin Randolph combines agriculture, civil rights, and law enforcement to disclose the political uses of region in northeastern Mississippi as a national story.

Camille Cole wins the 2020 AGAPS Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award

Camille Cole’s dissertation, “Empire on Edge: Land, Law, and Capital in Gilded Age Basra,” was selected as the 2020 winner of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award. “Empire on Edge” interrogates how a small group of capitalists in Basra appropriated specific tools of governance such as land deeds and plantation agriculture, and produced new forms of wealth stratification and conspicuous consumption in the region and beyond.