University of Washington

Jordanna Bailkin Ileana Rodriguez-Silva, an historian of Latin America and the Caribbean, has been promoted to Associate Professor. Her recently published book, Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and Nation with Palgrave Macmillan explores the mutual constitution of class and race in Latin America and the Caribbean by analyzing post-abolition Puerto Rico during the transition from Spanish to U.S. colonial rule (1850 to the 1920s). Benjamin Schmidt is the current holder of the Joff Hanauer Endowed Faculty Fellow in History and the author of a forthcoming book on the central role played by the Dutch in the invention of "exoticism" across early modern Europe. An historian of Early Modern Europe, he concluded a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship in Fall 2012 and is currently a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. He recently received a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which will fund a long-term study on the topic: "Forms of Conversion: Religion, Culture, and Cognitive Ecologies in Early Modern Europe and its Worlds." Laurie Sears published Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive, which explores how Freudian psychoanalysis and its French interpreters were part of a transnational discourse that circulated through and became intertwined with imperial technologies, ways of remembering, and ways of forgetting. She shows that the European axis of the Indies was Holland, not France and shifts this axis to look at the transnational links that Austro-German theory and French translation wrought in this Dutch colony. The book reveals how this discourse, wielded across cultures and time periods, bridged colonial and post-colonial rule. Stephanie Smallwood is the current holder of the Dio Richardson Endowed Professorship in History in recognition of her scholarship on slavery, race relations, emancipation, and gender relations. An historian of the African diaspora, she is the author of Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to America, which won the Frederick Douglas Book Prize in 2008. In this work she explored the qualitative experience of those who were captured in Africa and forcibly brought to the Americas. She is currently working on a study which critiques historians' conceptions of the "Atlantic world" as a naturalized entity in order to place Africans and their experiences at the center of the making of modern relations that stretched across this ocean. Phillip Thurtle, an historian of the philosophy and history of science and technology, was awarded a 2013 University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award. Joel Walker is the current holder of Jon Bridgman Endowed Professorship in History. His research and teaching interests include the history and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world, the early history of Christianity and related religious traditions, and the history of the Middle East and the Islamic World. The Bridgman Endowed Professorship supports faculty members who have demonstrated a distinguished record in the teaching of lower-division and other large undergraduate lecture courses. history matters Illeana Rodriguez-Silva The Afterlife of Empire (University of California Press, 2012). Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Laurie Sears Richard Kirkendall Situated Testimonies: Dread and Enchantment in an Indonesian Literary Archive (University of Hawaii Press, 2013). Carlos Gil We Became Mexican American: How Our Immigrant Family Survived to Pursue the American Dream (Xlibris, 2012). ed., Civil Liberties and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman (Truman State University Press, 2013). Ray Jonas The Battle of Adwa: African Victory in the Age of Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012). Faculty Bookshelf Sephardic Studies Initiative AS HOME TO ONE OF THE LARGEST and most vibrant Sephardic communities in the United States, Seattle offers an ideal environment in which to preserve the legacy of the Sephardic Jewish experience. Led by Devin Naar, Professor of History and Jewish Studies, the Sephardic Studies Initiative seeks to establish a world-renowned program for the study, teaching, and perpetuation of Sephardic culture and the Ladino language though a multifaceted resource center focusing on Sephardic Jews in the Seattle area and worldwide. The Initiative, launched in 2012 and housed within the Jewish Studies Program, includes an ongoing project, Seattle Sephardic Treasures, which aims to create the first online Ladino Library and has already collected over 500 original Ladino books, some dating to the sixteenth-century — from local community members. Department of History PAGE 7

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