Welcome back everyone! We in the History Department are happy to be starting our teaching again and look forward to a great semester. But we also enjoyed a summer full of research and travel with students as well as accomplishments in our own scholarly and creative writing.
Dr. Fred Johnson got involved in the national conversation about race in our nation this summer. In July, he had an editorial published in the Washington Post which provides a historical perspective the relationship between African-American art thriving alongside racism.
He also worked on his book project that builds on his Civil War Research. The book will be titled: Worth to Us An Army: Lee’s War against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. When he’s not busy traveling to archives or publishing in major newspapers, Dr. Johnson takes his dog Darwin for long walks on the dunes.
Dr. Albert Bell completed a middle-grade novel, What You Wish For, which is a story about two 11-year-olds, Sandy Walker and T. J. McKenzie, who become pen pals through a school assignment. When they meet in person, they find that neither is quite what the other expected. As their friendship develops, they have to fend off a local bully and get to try their hand at solving a century-old mystery surrounding the Walker farm. He also worked on his eighth novel in his series of mysteries featuring Pliny the Younger. It has the working title Hiding from the Past, and it puts Pliny and his companion Aurora back in a small Alpine town where they investigated a murder ten years earlier but did not solve it. Their efforts to do so this time are complicated by an early spring blizzard and by a Gallic chieftain who wants revenge for the death of his son, whom Aurora killed defending herself. Hopefully, it will be out next year! This fall, he will be preparing for his sabbatical, where he will turn to his scholarly research on Pliny by examining his image of himself as a writer and his concept of friendship.
Since our faculty study all regions of the world, summertime also means time to travel to teach and do research abroad. Dr. Gloria Tseng began her year-long sabbatical, where she will be completing her book on Protestantism in 20th-century China. This summer, she presented papers with impressive titles at two conferences in Great Britain. The first was in Edinburgh at the meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity, where she gave a paper titled “Liturgical and Spontaneous Prayers in Republican China: Indigenization as Seen through the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and Wang Mingdao’s Teachings on Prayer.” She presented the second paperan in Liverpool at the Andrew F. Walls Centre for the Study of African and Asian Christianity, “From Separation to Civic Engagement: Chinese Christians and the Chinese State and Society in Contemporary China.”
Dr. Wayne Tan had the honor of being an invited faculty presenter on the topic of disability in Japan at the NEH Summer Institute on “The Global Histories of Disability” held at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. He also completed his book manuscript on the social and cultural history of blindness in Japan and submitted it to the University of Michigan Press. We look forward to the book party when it is released! Dr. Tan also served as a mentor to Aine O’Connor, a student in the Mellon Scholars Program, for her digital humanities project on a database of disability and disabled characters in young adult literature. He provided some advice about the framework while Aine did a thorough research and analysis of hundreds of books and mastered the digital tools to build this site. He got to learn about disability from a different point of view and Aine combined her passion for English literature and history for this project.
Dr. Janis Gibbs and Dr. Lauren Janes continued to lead two of the most popular May Terms at Hope College. Dr. Gibbs completed her ninteenth summer as a professor at the Hope Vienna Summer School. Her students, along with those of the Vienna Summer School’s Director, Professor Stephen Hemenway and Professor Brian Gibbs, had a great day visiting the Austrian Gymnasium (high school) in the Kundmanngasse, where the students met Viennese students, and talked about life, culture, politics, and education in Austria and the United States. She also worked on her research project, developing the story of Hermann von Wied, the Archbishop with two funerals, one Catholic and one Protestant. She also had some time for fun and saw “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on a trip to London in July. Dr. Janes co-led the third year of the Paris May Term, where she and Dr. Heidi Kraus (Art and Art History Department) lead students on an experiential exploration of the art and history of Paris. When she returned, she continued working on her book, Nourishing the World: A Global History in Three Foods and One Dish. Dr. Janes and her family have also used the summer to work on building an outdoor wood fire pizza oven in her backyard–we can’t wait to try it out!
I stayed closer to home this summer. In May, Dr. Pam Koch (Sociology and Social Work) and I worked with two Peace and Justice minors to create a web exhibit titled “Hope College and the Vietnam War. The students, Halla Maas and Olivia Brickley, spent four weeks exploring the Holland Joint Archives, examining newspaper, yearbook, letters, and other manuscript records. They also did an oral history interview with Dr. Donald Luidens, who was a Hope student from 1965-1969 and a leader in student protest. Through these sources, the students examined both anti-Vietnam War protests as well as other social movements and protests that emerged during that time, such as the Civil Rights movement and the emergence of feminism. This project was funded by the Mellon Grand Challenges Grant and the website should be up soon as part of the larger “Imagining Peace” website. I also wrote an article with another long, impressive title: “We Must Not Fail Either the Church or the Nation”: Mobilizing Laywomen in the World War I United States.” This will be appearing in early 2019 in a special issue of The U.S. Catholic Historian on the theme “War and Peace.”
Throughout this whole summer, our wonderful office manager Raquel Niles has been there to help me get out our end-of-the-year report and help all of us learn the new accounting system being put into place. And she had another great achievement–running her first 5K at the Grand Rapids Color Run!
And now we turn to our teaching (or in the case of Dr. Tseng, sabbatical research) and look forward to the challenges of the new academic year. Good luck to us all as we start again!