The Department of History had a great year of placing research in the world. Collectively, the faculty published a book and several edited collections, had works translated into other languages, and produced 29 articles and book chapters. Here are a few highlights:
Professor Jeffrey Adler published his latest book, Bluecoated Terror: Jim Crow and the Roots of Modern Police Brutality (University of California Press, 2024). It examines police violence in the 1930s and 1940s in New Orleans, Louisiana, showing how law enforcement pursued the goals of crime control and the enforcement of racial hierarchies simultaneously with the same coercive methods.
Two volumes appeared under the editorship of Professor Natalia Aleksiun in the 2023-24 academic year.
The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (with co-editors Zofia Wóycicka and Raphael Utz, Wayne State University Press, 2023) explores how historians and societies have grappled with fraught questions about the memory of help that non-Jews gave to Jews during the Holocaust.
The second volume, co-edited with Eliyana Adler of Pennsylvania State University, is Entanglements of War: Social Networks During the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2024). This collection of articles explores how the Holocaust disrupted social ties and created new connections amid genocide.
Professor Florin Curta edited the collection Medieval Eastern Europe, 500–1300: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2024). The volume presents an assortment of essential documents on the medieval period in Eastern Europe. In addition to selecting and translating these documents, Professor Curta provides short introductions to help students navigate the sources.
