The History Department invites applicants for a three-year visiting assistant professorship in early modern European history with a focus on science, medicine, or technology, to begin fall 2025. The successful candidate will be normally expected to: teach five courses per year including a survey course on early modern European history and a variety of introductory and seminar courses in this field and in the history of science, medicine, or technology; supervise independent senior thesis projects; and contribute regularly to the college-wide curriculum, including the winter term curriculum(which would count as one of the five required courses to be taught over each academic year). Candidates are expected to have a PhD by June 30, 2025 and should provide evidence of commitment to excellent teaching and scholarly potential.
Middlebury College is a top-tier liberal arts college with a demonstrated commitment to excellence in faculty teaching and research and where diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values. The College is committed to hiring a diverse faculty as we work to foster innovation in our curriculum and to provide a rich and varied educational experience to our increasingly diverse student body. To this end, the College recruits talented and diverse faculty, staff, and students from across the United States and around the world. Middlebury College encourages applications from women, people of color, people with disabilities, and members of other protected classes and historically underrepresented communities. The College also invites applications from individuals who demonstrate an ongoing commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.
Middlebury College uses Interfolio to collect all faculty job applications electronically. Email and paper applications will not be accepted. At Middlebury, we strive to make our campus a respectful, engaged community that embraces difference, with the all the complexity and individuality each person brings. With your application materials, provide a separate, one-page statement on inclusion that addresses how your teaching, scholarship, mentorship, and/or community service demonstrate a commitment to and/or evidence of engaging with issues of diversity and inclusion. Through Interfolio submit: a letter of application addressed to the Chair of the History Department, Rebecca Bennette; a curriculum vitae; undergraduate and graduate transcripts; a statement of teaching and research plans; and three current letters of recommendation, at least two of which must speak to teaching ability/promise. More information is available at [http://apply.interfolio.com/147989]. The application deadline is October 15, 2024.
Offers of employment are contingent on completion of a background check. Information on our background check policy can be found here: http://go.middlebury.edu/backgroundchecks.
This lecture will evaluate the experience of big dams across the Middle East and Africa in the decades following World War II. Situated at the nexus of intellectual, political, and environmental history, the talk will consider the comparative and global dimensions of dam building between 1950-1970 as well as the impact of these major works both locally and globally. Unlike many environmental or dam histories that often focus exclusively on the experience of one nation or project, this lecture will assess the shared rhetoric of progress and modernity, of industrialization and centralization, and the specific administrative ordering of nature and society that lies at the center of big dam building. Furthermore, it highlights how the quest for an electrified future and modernity resulted in large populations becoming displaced and historical sites and local cultures decimated and submerged.
Magnús T. Bernhardsson is Brown Professor of History and Chair of the Global Studies Program and Director of the Global Scholars Initiative at Williams College. An author of several books on Middle Eastern history in both English and Icelandic, he is currently invovled in two major research projects: a) a comparative study of big dams in the MIddle East and Africa in the 1950s-1970 and b) as the co-prinicipal investigator in a large research project on the integration of Iraqi and Syrian refugee children in Iceland (2011-present).
Sponsored by the History Department’s Track in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology, Axinn Center for the Humanities, Department of Arabic, Middle East and African Studies (IGS), and Fund for Innovation
HISTORY BE DAMMED
The Promise and Peril of Big Dams in
Africa and the Middle East, 1955-1970
October 24, 2024 * 4:30 PM * Axinn 229
Professor Magnús T. Bernhardsson, Ph.D.
Williams College
Axinn Center 229
Open to the Public
Axinn Center 219
Open to the Public
McCardell Bicentennial Hall 220
Open to the Public
Dr. Jeremy A. Greene gave two guest lectures on April 3, 2023. He is a physician at a community health center in Baltimore as well as William H. Welch Professor of the History of Medicine, Director of the Department of the History of Medicine and the Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His background in both medical practice and the academic discipline of History provides him with an unusual and particularly insightful lens to investigate past and present developments in medical practice. His award-winning books include “The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth” (2022) and “The Definition of Disease and Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine” (2014). Dr. Greene spoke about the history, pitfalls and advantages of remote medical practice and the importance of the humanities in the study of medicine.
Both events were sponsored by the History Department, The Fund for Innovation, and the Axinn Center for the Humanities.
“Millie Gone to Brazil: Gender, Capitalism, and Caribbean migrants to Brazil in the early twentieth century” is about the movement of Caribbean laborers to Brazil in the twentieth century. Most of the first group of laborers were male, and thus a mythology about the male migrant and migration emerged about Brazil in the Caribbean. Images of women migrants also emerged in Caribbean popular culture. These images and the accompanying mythology were steeped in stereotypical versions of masculinity. There are also examples of misogyny and outright violence against women. Dr. Rocha will tell us the story of this migration stream using the popular calypso song “Millie Gone to Brazil” and a point of departure. She will bring together Caribbean, and Latin American and feminist perspectives on south-south migration.
Sponsored by the History Department, Black Studies Program, Latin American Studies Program, Global Migration & Diaspora Studies, International Global Studies, Luso-Hispanic Studies and Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Departments.
You can find it here or on most major podcast platforms.
“Asia First was an insistence that Pacific affairs receive as much if not more attention than European Atlantic relations in the Cold War. Its proponents, its supporters, many of whom were very powerful, conservative voices in the Senate and in Congress, felt like U.S. foreign policy after World War II was neglecting mainland Asia and therefore imperiling the whole Cold War.” —Joyce Mao
In this episode, Mark Williams talks with Joyce Mao, Middlebury College associate professor of history, about the Asia First initiative and, in particular, the effects that U.S.-China-Taiwan relations had on American domestic politics. Why were American conservatives so interested in Asia after WWII and in China particularly? In what ways, if any, did conservative concerns over China influence U.S. foreign policy, and how did conservatives’ interest in China help shape the development of the political right in the United States?
Joyce Mao’s book, Asia First: China and the Making of Modern American Conservatism, was published in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press.
A lecture and conversation with Liz Kinnamon (University of Arizona)
Thursday, April 7, 4:30pm
Robert A. Jones ’59 House (RAJ) Conference Room
This event will be livestreamed at the link below.
https://www.middlebury.edu/stream
This talk examines 1960s and 70s feminist Consciousness Raising as an example of creating positive freedom—the “freedom to,” rather than the negative “freedom from.” Riffing off a tweet that went viral in 2019, Liz Kinnamon juxtaposes the model of the liberal subject created by pop therapeutic discourse with the work done by Second Wave feminists to forge liberation as a relational project. Kinnamon paints a picture of what radical feminist Consciousness Raising was; how it developed out of Third World liberation movements, such as in Vietnam and China, and Civil Rights; how it spread across the US and transnationally; and what kinds of effects these group practices had. If the tweet’s virality suggests a kind of tapping into the cultural zeitgeist, the talk asks what vision of social relations predominates today, and whether another form of relationship is possible. The talk draws from the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, an Italian feminist group; Indigenous critiques of European relationality; Marx; Freud; and primary Women’s Liberation documents from the US.
Liz Kinnamon is a writer, teacher, and feminist historian, currently completing a PhD in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Their book manuscript explores “attention” from a Marxist feminist perspective, following the importance placed on attentive capacity from plantations, through scientific management and contemporary tech cultures, to social movements. They are currently working to publish, with Carol Giardina, The Consciousness-Raising Correspondence, 1968-69, a collection of letters written between founding members of Women’s Liberation when the movement was first cohering in the United States. The letters show the effervescent thinking, connection, and effort involved in developing some of the movement’s basic theories — from “the personal is political” to the practice of Consciousness Raising. Kinnamon has published in such venues as Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Cosponsored by the History Department, Academic Enrichment Funds, American Studies Program, The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and The Feminist Resource Center at Chellis House, The Rohatyn Center and the Sociology Department
Elsa Mendoza, assistant professor of history, earned her MA and PhD in history at Georgetown University. She is a historian of slavery and interested in digital humanities. She is the associate curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive and recently coedited Facing Georgetown’s History: A Reader on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation.
Read the full article: Middlebury Welcomes 44 New Faculty for Fall Semester
Professor Joyce Mao, PhD, will be giving the Stanton Sharp Lecture Webinar at Southern Methodist University on Thursday, October 28, 2021, at 7:00 PM EST.
