2019–2020
SHPRS ANNUAL REPORT 2019–2020
Letter from the Director Academic year 2019–2020 will no doubt enter the annals of higher education as a year both of unprecedented challenges and of indomitable spirit — the year from which the virus takes its name, but one which will also be remembered for the enormous courage, resilience and mutual care with which faculty, staff, and students stood together to meet these historic events. As the new SHPRS director, it was my privilege to be part of a community of scholarship and teaching committed — during what were sometimes trying times — to advancing the frontiers of the human sciences in pursuit of the common good. As the largest interdisciplinary humanities unit at Arizona State University (and one of the largest in the world), the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies is home to a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs in both classic and emerging humanities disciplines and fields, including history, philosophy, the academic study of religion, Jewish studies, Asia studies and World War II studies. Although we are diverse and often disagree, we are united as an intellectual community, collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to address questions of perennial importance and contemporary urgency. During the past year, SHPRS faculty published numerous books, countless articles and dozens of op-eds in venues like the Washington Post, the New York Times and NPR. Historians Hannah Barker, Julian Lim, and Catherine O’Donnell and religion scholar Shamara Alhassan were the recipients of distinguished book prizes. Among the highlights on a stellar list of faculty accomplishments: • Alert to the historical potential of the moment, historians Mark Tebeau and O’Donnell launched A Journal of the Plague Year, a publicly sourced archive of materials relating to the pandemic. Taking its name from Daniel Defoe’s fictionalized account of the bubonic plague in 1665 London, A Journal of the Plague Year is a chronicle of the particularities of the present that might otherwise be forgotten. Since it began in February, the archive has grown to include thousands of artifacts curated by an international team of scholars and has been the subject of articles and interviews in dozens of media outlets, including ABC News, the New York Times, Forbes, The Independent and The Telegraph. • Galvanized by historic movements for racial justice this past spring and summer, SHPRS convened an Anti-Racism Committee, chaired by historian Julian Lim and comprising SHPRS faculty, staff and students. Its mission is to “transform words and solidarity into action” through pedagogy, curricular reform, and community engagement. “To be anti-racist,” the committee’s mission statement notes, “is also to reimagine antiracist futures based on justice, liberation and freedom — futures that we hope ASU students, staff and faculty, and our broader communities, will join us in imagining, creating and enacting.”
• Philosophy professor Cheshire Calhoun was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Calhoun’s work ranges across philosophical psychology, feminist philosophy and normative ethics, and she has long been one of the leading lights of American philosophy. Much of her writing is devoted to thoughtful consideration of the question of what a meaningful life consists of, which she connects to one’s having goals, both big and small, that one takes to be worth pursuing, and which allow one to live into a future one has a hand in making. As an advocate of women in the profession, a leader in her guild and head of the philosophy faculty in SHPRS, Professor Calhoun has also worked tirelessly to create the conditions necessary for new generations of scholars to lead meaningful lives of academic engagement. Students in our school continued to deepen their understanding of the past, grapple with the most urgent challenges of the present and develop the broad skillset in reasoning, problem solving, ethics and effective communication needed to shape a more just, sustainable and equitable future. During the 2019–2020 academic year, SHPRS had over 1,500 majors, more than 430 graduate students and student enrollments of over 30,500, representing 12 percent growth over the preceding year. Our graduate programs — including our recently developed online MA in World War II Studies — showed particularly strong growth of 42 percent, from 304 students in 2018–2019 to 433 in 2019–20. It was also an unusually busy year for job searches and hiring, and we look forward to welcoming five new tenure-line faculty this academic year: • Leslie Alexander, Associate Professor of History • Curtis Austin, Associate Professor of History • Katherine Bynum, Assistant Professor of History • Marcello di Bello, Assistant Professor of Philosophy • Han Hsien Liew, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies. Additionally, we are pleased to have been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices postdoctoral scholar in public history, Marissa Rhodes. As we prepare for new challenges ahead, it is heartening to recall the progress of the year in review, described in this annual report. None of this would have been possible without the dedicated support of staff and the generosity of donors. With gratitude,
Richard Amesbury irector, School of Historical, D Philosophical and Religious Studies
Mission The School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies produces innovative and distinguished research on subjects such as morality, rationality and ethics; race, citizenship and immigration; and the role of religion in public life. SHPRS faculty educate thousands of students every year and share knowledge with millions of people beyond the university through accessible media. SHPRS enables students and the public to make sense of complex issues that are of critical importance to Arizona, United States and the world.
95
1,965
total faculty
total students
Leadership
Richard Amesbury
Katherine Osburn
Director
Associate Director, Undergraduate Studies
Mark Tebeau
Victoria Thompson
Associate Director, Graduate Studies (Fall)
Associate Director, Graduate Studies (Spring)
Gaymon Bennett
Peter Van Cleave
Associate Director, Research
Director of Online Programs
1,532 undergraduate students 433 graduate students
512 total courses
$
Overall
$1,502,009 total grants and fellowship awards
30,544 total students taught
13 grants awarded totaling $1,243,487 + 10 fellowships awarded totaling $258,522 Matthew Casey Associate Director of Online Programs
SHPRS ANNUAL REPORT 2018–2019
2019–2020 SHPRS Leadership
History
Catherine O’Donnell Faculty Head
Alexander Aviña Director, Undergraduate Studies
Anna Holian
Christopher Jones
Director (Fall), Graduate Studies
Director (Spring), Graduate Studies
Philosophy
Cheshire Calhoun Faculty Head
Peter de Marneffe
Doug Portmore
Director, Undergraduate Studies
Director, Graduate Studies
Religious Studies
Leah Sarat Faculty Head
Jason Bruner Director (Fall), Undergraduate Studies
Tim Langille
Shahla Talebi
Director (Spring), Undergraduate Studies
Director, Graduate Studies
Aaron Moore Director, Graduate Studies Professor Moore passed away in September 2019. His dedication to SHPRS, his research and students will be greatly missed.
SHPRS ANNUAL REPORT 2019–2020
Faculty We say good-bye to faculty who retired. We are thankful for their many years of service!
Professor Anne Feldhaus 38 years
Professor Monica H. Green 19 years
Professor Paul Hirt 16 years
We welcome faculty who join us for the upcoming school year: Leslie Alexander Associate Professor of History
Curtis Austin Associate Professor of History
Alexander received her PhD in African American and African Diaspora history from Cornell University. Her research focuses on late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Black culture, political consciousness and resistance movements.
Austin received his PhD in American political and social history from Mississippi State University. His research focuses on race relations, civil rights and Black power movements.
Han Hsien Liew Assistant Professor in Religious Studies
Marissa Rhodes Postdoctoral Fellow
Hsien Liew received his PhD in history and Middle Eastern studies from Harvard University. His research interests include medieval Islamic intellectual history, the late Abbasid caliphate and the institutional and intellectual development of Islamic kingship and monarchy. and state power in China.
Rhodes received her PhD in history from the University of Buffalo. She is a scholar of the Atlantic world whose dissertation explores motherhood, health and inequality in the long eighteenth century.
Katherine Bynum Assistant Professor in history Bynum received her PhD in history from Texas Christian University. Her research explores how police brutality drove conversations among black and brown activists in their fight for social justice.
Marcello Di Bello Assistant Professor in Philosophy Marcello received his PhD in philosophy from Stanford University. His research interests are in philosophy of law and epistemology with a focus on legal epistemology and reasoning, evidence, probability and epistemic closure.
SHPRS ANNUAL REPORT 2019–2020
People’s Peace: Prospects for a Human Future
SHPRS Shelf Life
Douglas Portmore
Opting for the Best: Oughts and Options Edited by Chad Haines & Yasmin Saikia
From Servants of the Empire to Everyday Heroes: The British Honours System in the Twentieth Century Tobias Harper
Canadian Environmental Philosophy Edited by Tyler DesRoches
Faith and Selfhood in a Changing Society: Autobiography and Orthodoxy in Russia from the End of the 18th to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Edited by Laurie Manchester
That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves , 1260-1500
The Jews of EighteenthCentury Jamaica: A Testamentary History of a Diaspora in Transition Stanley Mirvis
Hannah Barker
Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World Adrian Brettle
Cambridge Companion to Sayyid Ahmad Khan Edited by Yasmin Saikia
SHPRS ANNUAL REPORT 2019–2020
Students in the News ASU doctoral student wins fellowship for research on free funeral service societies Religious studies doctoral candidate Mulung Hsu was awarded the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies for his dissertation titled, “Engaging Suffering: Free Funeral Service Societies and a Socially Engaged Buddhist Soteriology in Contemporary Myanmar.” The fellowship is a prestigious and competitive award given by the American Council of Learned Societies. There are only around 10 winners each year.
Read more about Hsu here.
Meet the fall Dean’s Medalist Everyone always says it is important to make the most out of your college experience and graduating senior Rebecca Ericson did just that. Not only do her professors describe her as an “extraordinary” and “stellar” student, she was very involved in the ASU community. She did extracurricular work for the Center for Asian Research and the Political History and Leadership program, co-founded Epic Movement, an Asian American student organization, and has worked with Bridges, a club for international students. Over this last summer she studied abroad in Taiwan and taught English in Hong Kong while protests were going on. Ericson graduated with bachelor’s degrees in history and English with a concentration in linguistics as well as a minor in Chinese last December.
Read more about Ericson here.
Meet the spring Dean’s Medalist The road to receiving a degree is different for everyone, and for the SHPRS spring Dean’s
Medalist, Morgan Leland, it’s been a winding one. Leland is congenitally blind and grew up in St. Petersburg, Florida. Leland has not only gone through school with a disability, but also as a mother of four. Leland graduated with her bachelor’s degree in philosophy with a concentration in morality, politics and law in May. Read more about Leland here.
History student awarded MCLEAPS internship for environmental services Leah Terry is an Arizona native who has always enjoyed her history classes. Two years into pursuing her history degree from SHPRS, Terry received a newsletter from the school informing her about an opportunity called the Maricopa County Leadership and Education Advancing Public Service (MCLEAPS) internship program. The program is a special partnership between ASU and Maricopa County that offers top students hands-on experience in county departments or divisions. Terry applied to join the environmental services department and, despite the tough competition for the program, was awarded the internship.
Read more about Terry here.
Religious studies PhD candidate explores the rituals of menstruation Menstruation may be a taboo topic to bring up in social settings, but it happens to roughly half of the population of the world. Every culture has their own way of discussing, portraying and handling it, but what can these rituals tell us? That question is exactly what religious studies PhD candidate Isobel Johnston is looking to explore. Johnston wanted to study Jewish menstrual rituals, but she struggled at first to find a university that supported her project’s concurrent topics in religion and anthropology — until she landed at ASU.
Her own encounters with these rituals are what led her to pursue the research.
Read more about Johnston here.
Religion, meet technology This summer, religious studies PhD candidate Jamie Edmonds decided to incorporate technology into the final projects of his religion and moral issues course, allowing students the opportunity to express what they had learned in a creative, unique way. The online class was divided into groups and challenged to come up with ways to represent the changing morals in religion caused by technology.
Read more about the class here.
ASU student travels abroad in pursuit of a future career, learns about family’s culture on the way ASU senior Monica Orillo has been tackling different parts of the world in her pursuit of a future career in international affairs. She is a double major in Southeast Asia studies from SHPRS and political science from the School of Politics and Global Studies. Additionally, she is pursuing a minor in German and a certificate in teaching English to speakers of other languages. Not only did she expand her education to include different histories, cultures and languages from across the globe within the classroom, she took herself across the physical world as well. Orillo studied abroad in Germany while she was in high school. She also participated in the U.S. Department of State’s Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange program.
Read more about Orillo here.
SHPRS ANNUAL REPORT 2019–2020
SHPRS in the News: The Year’s Top Stories Illuminating the history of Jews in the Caribbean
of graduate students and mobilized a global network of scholars. “A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19” is collecting contributions from individuals around the world and thousands of unique site views. Read more
Pulling the sheet back on ‘ghosting’ Like many great collaborations, the one behind the 2016 photographic essay “Jewish Treasures of the Caribbean” originated via serendipitous circumstances. Stanley Mirvis, an assistant professor of history at ASU and a scholar of the Sephardic diaspora, was doing archival research in Jamaica when he ran into Wyatt Gallery, a well-known photographer whose book “Tent Life: Haiti” had chronicled the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake that devastated the region. In “Jewish Treasures of the Caribbean,” Gallery’s arresting photos are supplemented by Mirvis’ contextual essays. Now through March 26, those images and stories are on display as part of a free, public exhibit by the same name at the Arizona Jewish Historical Society in Phoenix. Read more.
Curating a pandemic
Your grandparents would just call it being rude, but millennials and Generation Z call a troubling new trend in courtship “ghosting.” It works like this: This phenomenon has been captured by MTV in a new docuseries called “Ghosted: Love Gone Missing.” “Ghosted” debuted last year and helps jilted lovers and those who have been emotionally stiff-armed by friends or family by confronting their “ghost” in a one-on-one sit down. Sounds intriguing, but the reality show has received criticism for romanticizing stalking and for its potential for invasion of privacy. ASU Now consulted Maura Priest, an associate professor and bioethicist in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies and the author of the forthcoming book, “The Ethics of Dating,” to explain the how and the why of this phenomenon. Read more.
From ancient cave paintings depicting epic hunts to modern-day Instagram posts boasting avocado toast brunches, it’s a natural human inclination to document our lives — one that becomes even stronger when we are faced with a shared global crisis. Perhaps no one knows that better than historians. In March, after President Trump declared a national emergency amid the swift spread of the novel coronavirus, ASU Associate Professor Catherine O’Donnell emailed colleagues in the public history program at SHPRS asking if there was something they could do to connect their students as historians to this moment. Tebeau assembled a website, enlisted the aid
Survival, resilience and rediscovery
Naruro Hassan took a seat among 10 other undergraduate research fellows in John Carlson’s “Inquiry into Religion and Conflict” course one sweltering morning in August 2017.
Hassan is a refugee with an extraordinary story of survival, resilience and rediscovery that began in war-torn Somalia and, after long, trying chapters in a remote refugee camp in Kenya, is unfolding at ASU, where her academic pursuits are as ambitious as the goal she has set for herself. She is majoring in history, minoring in philosophy and African studies, and has pursued certificates in religion and conflict and in political thought and leadership, with eyes on becoming a human rights lawyer. As a student researcher, she assisted Carlson with his justice book project and is working with ASU Professor Keon McGuire on his research project, “The Lived Experiences of Black Muslim Students Attending Predominantly White Institutions.” Read more.
Indigenous Act helped complete the work of the 19th Amendment
The 19th Amendment of the American Constitution officially gave women the right to vote in 1920, putting to rest decades of contention, civil disobedience and suffrage efforts.However, many people don’t realize that not all women (and men) were on equal footing after its passage. The Indian Citizen Act of 1924 gave Native American men and women full citizenship (and the right to vote). And nearly a century later, it’s still a struggle. To commemorate the lead-up to the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day on Oct. 14, ASU Now turned to Katherine Osburn for elucidation. Her current book project, “Sovereignty, Services, and Citizenship,” focuses on the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state of Arizona. She said despite the good intentions behind the 1924 act, the legislation remains a work in progress. Read more.
Humanities made possible by you Because of your support, students like Naruro Hassan are able to succeed and follow their dreams.
SHPRS ANNUAL REPORT 2019–2020
Thank you to donors who supported SHPRS during the 2019–2020 academic year. $185,648
Together, we were able to raise more to fund student scholarships, research and academic programming. We appreciate the support of: Angela Alevizos and Anthony Weitzer
Chouki El Hamel
Carrie Montana
Richard Amesbury
Karin Enloe
Steve Moore
Mary Anderson
J.R. and Ruth Fawley
Linda Neal
Brad and Frances Armendt
Anne Feldhaus and Stephen MacKinnon
Erika and Steven Neuberg
Gwen Arner
Tracy Fessenden
Kenneth and Gayle Nicolay
Donald and Yumi Baker
Thomas Fournier
Sabra Nuel
Roxane Barwick
Fountain Hills Republican Club
Sharman Ober-Reynolds and Steven Reynolds
Asuncion Benitez-Rush and James Rush
John Gilkeson and Susan Gray
Katherine and Michael O’Malley
Volker Benkert and Anne Jones
Brian Gratton and Catherine O’Donnell
Katherine and Charles Osburn
Evan Berry
Daren Harris and
Douglas Portmore
Cynthia Bolton and Frank Curtis
Lauren McArthur Harris
RMS Family, LLC
Linda Brady
John and Tamara Hoehn
Margaret and Ray Rodriguez
Carleen and Daniel Brophy
Barbara and William Horrigan
Richard and Mary Beth Rogers
William Brost
James Hrdlicka
William Sage
Brad Brown
Christopher Jones
Alan and Jill Sandler
Diana and Kevin Burns
Amy and Matthew Kaiman
Leah Sarat
Vicki Cable and Julie Schmidt
Ivan Kasser
William and Debra Schaefer
Jamise Caesar
David and Eliza Katzin
Susan Kay Schultz
Cheshire Calhoun
Geummi Kim and Young Oh
Terry Shoemaker
Matthew Casey
Yong Kim
Jeffrey and Margaret Singer
Huaiyu Chen
Berry and Elaine Lane
Abigail Smith
Anna Cichopek-Gajraj and Arivalagan Gajraj
Tim Langille
Ingrid Sorensen
John and Anne Cook
Theodore and Carolyn Lesnett
Joy and Gaylord Staveley
Michael Currey
Julian Lim and Peter Schmelz
Franklyn and Naomi Story
Ellen Davis
Zona and Thomas Lorig
Shahla Talebi
George Delaney
Laurie Manchester
Mark Tebeau
Matt Delmont
Tsimchi Manoach and Hava Samuelson
Mary Trengove
Peter and Katrin de Marneffe
Erica and Garrett May
Becky Tsang
Richard and Karen Dickie
Archie and Jeanne McGill
Linh Vu
Chris and Nicole Dizon
Joan McGregor
Timothy and Elizabeth Wong
Lei Duan
John McQuilllan
Howard Dym
Stanley Mirvis
Whether you’re donating a couple dollars or a large sum, your gift is greatly appreciated. Any amount makes a difference for our students, faculty, staff, research and programs. Your charitable contributions enable our school to fuel our commitment to providing relevant education; to developing new knowledge, better ideas and workable solutions to a range of challenges; to transforming individuals, environments and communities; and to putting limitless dreams within reach. shprs.asu.edu/give
Stay in touch! School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies 975 S. Myrtle Ave P.O. Box 874302 Tempe, AZ 85287-4302 Phone: 480-965-5778 Email: shprs@asu.edu
YOUTUBE