Our faculty and graduate students had another banner year for publications in 2022-23. Here we would like to celebrate our faculty’s book publications:
Associate Professor Seth Bernstein published Return to the Motherland: Displaced Soviets in World War II and the Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023). During World War II, millions of people from Eastern Europe were taken to Nazi Germany as forced laborers. When they returned to the USSR in 1945, Stalin’s regime was unsure whether they were victims to be pitied or traitors to be imprisoned. Bernstein used declassified KGB records from Ukraine and Russia to reveal this formerly secret history.
Assistant Professor Max Deardorff released his monograph A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In the New Kingdom of Granada (today’s Colombia), a new generation of half-Spanish, half-indigenous men (mestizos) sought positions of increasing power. Deardorff examines the trans-Atlantic transformation of ideas about subjecthood that allowed some colonial mestizos and indios ladinos (acculturated natives) to establish urban citizenship alongside Spaniards.
Professor Lillian Guerra published her book Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). In this book, Guerra explores how postrevolutionary Cuba worked to establish a binary society in which citizens were either patriots or traitors. Yet the lives of many Cubans were somewhere in between. The book examines the duality of an existence that contains elements of both support and betrayal of a nation and of an ideology.
Professor Jon Sensbach was associate editor of the volume A New History of the American South (edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, associate editor Laura F. Edwards, 2023). The volume brings together fifteen leading historians to cover the breadth of experiences and chronological periods in the American South from before Europeans arrived on the continent to the present.