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Allan Lichtman and Professor Richard Breitman submitted the manuscript for their new book, Political Jeopardy: FDR and the Jews, to Harvard University Press in early October. The latest edition of Lichtman’s The Keys to the White House is scheduled for publication in 2011. In the summer 2010 edition of Foresight: The Journal of the International Association of Forecasters, Lichtman once again went out on a limb, predicting the re-election of Barack Obama. This past summer Lichtman lectured for the US State Department in Austria and Ukraine. He has been appointed American columnist for the prestigious British website thinkpolitics.com and has given numerous media interviews on current affairs. Eric Lohr is on leave this fall, having won a grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, in order to complete his new book on the history of Russian citizenship. He traveled to Moscow twice as a member of the US delegation to the prestigious “Dartmouth Dialogues,” a series of track-two diplomatic discussions on US-Russian relations. He continues to chair the Washington Russian History Seminar. In the 2011 spring semester, he will also be co-teaching a graduate seminar with Professor Mustafa Aksakal on World War I and the demise of empires (Hapsburg, Ottoman, Romanov). Ira Klein announced that he will retire in May 2011, following a long and distinguished career at American University (see accompanying article). He published “Lay Down to Die: Famine in Mysore and India” in the Journal of Indian History and has two additional essays under consideration. He served as Chair of the Senate Committee on Student Learning and as a faculty senator, where he played an active role in revising the AU Faculty Manual. He also served on the Committee of Undergraduate Fellowships and participated in meetings of the Board of Trustees Campus Life Committee and the Provost’s Round Table for Deans and University Committee Chairs. Maddalena Marinari received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Kansas. This past year she participated in panel discussions at the annual meetings of both the Social Science History Association and the OAH and has been asked to revise her presentation for publication. She presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association and coauthored an article with Donna Gabaccia on the role of Lyndon Johnson in the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. She is currently at work on an article on the role that Italian and Jewish immigration reform advocates had in the passage of the same law.
American University Department of History Newsletter
This was a banner year for Pamela Nadell. In addition to her appointment as Clendenen Chair (see accompanying article), Nadell’s wide-ranging service in Jewish history was recognized by her receipt of the Lee Max Friedman Award from the American Jewish Historical Society. The year was also marked by the publication of New Essays in American Jewish History, coedited with Jonathan D. Sarna and Lance J. Sussman. She continues to serve as the principal historical consultant for the new National Museum of American Jewish history, scheduled to open next year on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. April Shelford has been working on her current project “A Caribbean Enlightenment.” She presented a paper, “Buttons and Blood: Fusée-Aublet’s Critique of Slavery, East and West,” at the American Society for 18th-Century Studies’ annual meeting in March 2010 and presented “Caribbean Jesuits” at the Western Society for French History’s annual meeting in October. During spring break, she went to Jamaica to work on manuscripts that document the activities of Anthony Robinson, a physician and botanist in 18th-century Jamaica. This summer, she published an article in L’amitié et les sciences de Descartes à Lévi-Strauss, and her review of The Dictionary of 17thCentury Philosophers appeared on H-France. With Donna Ryan of Gallaudet University, she edited Volume 37 of the Proceedings of the Western Society of French History. Nina Spiegel completed her book manuscript, The Creation of Israeli Culture: Hebrew Dance, Sports, and Beauty in the British Mandate. She was invited to deliver two papers this past spring: “The City as a Stage: Dancing, Parading, and Masquerading in Mandate Tel Aviv” at the Yeshiva University conference entitled “Zionism on the Jewish Street: Urban Geography and Nationalism at the Turn of the 20th Century” and “The Creation of Israeli Culture: Origins and Dilemmas” at the Middle East Studies Forum at AU. Melvin Urofksy continues to garner awards for his magisterial Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon, 2009), which won the English-Speaking Union’s biography award, the Jewish Book Council’s Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year Award, and the 2010 Brandeis Medal from the University of Louisville Law School. Katharina Vester has been a Clendenen fellow and scholar-in-residence at AU since 2007 and the director of the American Studies Program since 2009. This fall she