The Department regularly hosts a Workshop where faculty members (and sometimes graduate students) share work-in-progress papers, articles, book projects and chapters. Each session centers the remarks of two or three discussants, based at UF History or elsewhere at UF, and almost always including a distinguished scholar from another university in North America or beyond. The author engages their crtical remarks as well as those of all participants present, and usually a spirited dialogue ensues. Some sessions may have a roundtable or other format focusing on a theme or problem.
Since the format is a discussion of a pre-circulated paper, it is important for participants to read in advance and consider offering critical comments during the session. Indeed, a history workshop can be a splendid occasion for all partipants to learn more about what other historians do: how they write, critique, engage in forms of debate, rethink, and revise. A workshop is a form of intellectual exchange and collegiality for all. The UF History Workshop was borne during unsettling pandemic days in 2020, and it took form through the creative use of the Zoom format, while invigorating History’s intellectual life at a time when Covid kept us otherwise largely isolated from each other. Zoom technology enables the presence of external discussants, encourages attendance from all kinds of locations, and helps make each workshop a warm place of sociality, where participants get to know each other across the ranks, within one academic department though also much farther afield.
Thus far, prominent external discussants have included: Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Manchester; Geoff Eley, Michigan at Ann Arbor; Tamara Loos, Cornell; Kenneth Mills, Michigan at Ann Arbor; Lisa Onaga, Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin; Stephan Palmié, University of Chicago; Simon Balto, Iowa; Frederic Nolan Clark, Southern California; and José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Texas State
Conveners:
Nancy Hunt, 2020-22
Recent Programs:
Spring 2022
14 January
Sandy Chang, UF History
“Colonial Love Scandals: Intra-Asian Intimacies in British Malaya, 1900-1930s”
Discussants:
Tamara Loos, History, Cornell
Louise Newman, UF History
11 February
Phil Janzen, UF History
“Islands Unformed: Race and Geography between Africa and the Caribbean”
Discussants:
Leah Rosenberg, UF English and Latin American Studies
Stephan Palmié, Anthropology, University of Chicago
25 March
Alice Freifeld, UF History
An intellectual celebration of a retiring UF historian with a critical discussion of her pre-circulated, work-in progress paper “Forced labor: a tour of Europe”
Discussants:
Norman JW Goda, UF History and director of UF Jewish Studies
Jean-Marc Dreyfus Holocaust Studies, University of Manchester
Natalia Aleksiun, UF, Chair in Jewish Studies and History
8 April
Roundtable: Historical Writing (& Practice) Since Black Lives Matters
Bill Link | David Canton | Lillian Guerra | James Gerien-Chen
Fall 2021
10 September
Ben Wise, UF History
“Folk Devils, A History of Drinkers, Dancers, Lovers and Queers in God’s Country: A Book Project in Quandary Mode”
Discussants:
David Sehat, Professor of History, Georgia State University
Trysh Travis, UF Professor, Women’s Studies, CLAS Associate Dean for the Humanities
1 October
Sean Adams, Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of History
“Making Death and Destruction Pay: Spotsylvania’s Memory Landscape Emerges, 1865-1920”
Discussants:
Erin Mauldin, a professor of history at the University of South Florida
Bill Link, Richard J. Milbauer Professor in Southern History at UF
29 October
Nina Caputo, UF History
“The Trouble with Conversion: Jewish Converts and Christian Responses”
Discussants:
Deanna Klepper, Religion and History, Boston University
Benjamin Soares, UF Religion
Kenneth Mills, Anthropology and History, University of Michian
3 December,
Anton Matytsin, UF History
“Comparative Chronology and the Problem of Universal History at the Académie des Inscriptions.”
Discussants:
Frederic Nolan Clark, University of Southern California
Neil Weijer, curator of UF’s Rare Book Collection.
2020-2021
Spring 2021
15 January 2021
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, Professor of Biology and History
“Devil’s Heritage: Masuo Kodani, the ‘Nisei Problem,’ and Social Stratification in the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan (1948-1954)”
Discussants:
James Gerien-Chen, UF History
Lisa Onaga, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
5 February
Max Deardorff, UF History
“Urban Indians in Santafé and Tunja, 1568-1668”
Discussants:
José Carlos de la Puente Luna, History, Texas State University
Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Art History & Latin American Studies, UF
26 February
Heather Vrana, UF History
“Todo el Amor: Disability Internationalism in the FMLN”
Discussants:
Richard Kernaghan, Anthropology, UF
Daniel J. Fernández-Guevara, History, UF, PhD candidate in Latin American history
19 March
Seth Bernstein, UF History
“Liberated in a Foreign Land: Wild Re-Sovietization and Non-Return among Soviet Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Europe”
Discussants:
Geoff Eley, History, University of Michigan
Alice Freifeld, UF History
Fall 2020
2 October
Fernanda Bretones Lane, UF History
“Free to Bury Their Dead: Religious Conversion and the Meanings of Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean”
Discussants:
Elena Schneider, History, University of California, Berkeley
Charles Davidson, PhD student in Latin American & Caribbean History
Phil Janzen, UF History
October 23
Joseph Spillane, Professor of History, CLAS Associate Dean for Student Affairs
“Prisoners of the Archives: Privacy, Identity, and the History of Incarceration”
Discussants:
Bonnie Ernst, UF assistant professor in Sociology and Criminology & Law
Mara Keire, Oxford University
4 December
Jeff Adler, Professor of History
“Bluecoated Terror: Police Brutality in the Jim Crow South”
Discussants:
Simon Balto, History, University of Iowa
Juliana Sanin, UF Political Science