Faculty Research
Ongoing Research
Recently Published Research
Ongoing Research
October 12, 2009
Bridie Andrews Minehan
Medicine, Culture, and Modernity in China (under manuscript review)
This book addresses contemporary debates over the meanings of colonial and postcolonial knowledge by studying bidirectional flows of translation and adaptation in medicine since the 19th century. It reveals how relations of power within medicine were constantly shifting, shaped by the competing forces of international relations, cultural nationalism, and belief in the universality of science. The outcome was a new definition of Chinese cultural identity.
September 10, 2009
Angma Dey Jhala
Royal Patronage, Power and Aesthetics in Princely India
Forthcoming with Pickering and Chatto (Empires in Perspective Series), 2011
This book is a cultural history of the artifacts produced within and for the Zenana (the women’s courts or female quarters of the palace) in late nineteenth and twentieth century India. It discusses the history of architecture, fashion, jewelry and cuisine in colonial princely India, as well as the influence of courtly Indian aesthetics on postcolonial film, both Bollywood and Anglo-American cinema, and popular literature. The women who lived within these kingdoms were part of an engaged, lively culture of imperial patronage, which reflected hybrid, colonial identities. The ateliers of the zenana courts created many objets d’art and new cultural trends, which reflected the cosmopolitanism of princely India, juxtaposing pre-colonial, 'indigenous' traditions and colonial European design styles and techniques in an unusual, transnational concept of courtly culture and ornamentation.
These findings suggest that the colonial encounter was far
from a relationship of unilateral domination but rather one of reciprocity and cultural amalgamation between colonial and colonized peoples.
August 14, 2009
Cyrus Veeser, By Force to the Future: Compulsory Labor as a Modernizing Strategy
An international, multiarchival study of the ways that European powers used forced labor to develop their colonies in Africa and Asia. While less infamous than chattel slavery, forced labor regimented the lives of millions of people worldwide well into the 20th century. Antithetical to liberal values, forced labor nevertheless supplied what the free market did not, requiring subsistence-level peasants to grow cash crops and commandeering men and women to build the transport system needed to incorporate tropical regions into the world market.
The book-length project focuses first on how the empires in the interwar period understood their labor systems, including the need for forced labor, and then examines the panicked response of the colonial powers as humanitarian efforts to abolish forced labor moved took practical shape in an international convention supported by the International Labour Organization, an affiliate of the League of Nations, in the late 1920s.
May 2, 2009
Marc Stern, The Fitness Movement and Fitness Center Industry, 1960-2000
Paper given at the April 2008 Business History Conference
Since the 1960s, there have been considerable changes in the nature of recreational physical fitness activity in the United States. Although rare in 1960, by 2000, private fitness centers were ubiquitous features on the American landscape. Increasingly centralized of ownership characterized the field from 1970 onward. Men and, more significantly, women, joined, left, and rejoined these ever-more mechanized establishments. Images of health, beauty, professional success, and sexuality emphasized athleticism and muscle tone. Fitness took on an especially powerful meaning to women affected by the burgeoning feminist movement, their new economic roles, the rise of women’s sports, and the volatile marital and social environment. Fitness centers also emerged as social centers, as “sites of the body,” where people went to see and meet members of the opposite or same sex. Paradoxically, this focus on the body and formalized exercise occurred for one portion of the population even as another, larger, portion of the population grew increasingly unhealthy and obesity became a problem among all age cohorts.
April 17, 2007
Clifford Putney, Missionaries in Hawaii: The Saga of Peter and Fanny Gulick, 1797-1883
Forthcoming with the University of Massachusetts Press
This manuscript provides a history of Peter and Fanny Gulick. As early American missionaries in Hawaii, the Gulicks significantly influenced the Hawaiian islanders, converting them to Protestant Christianity and teaching them skills such as writing and plowing. Based primarily on handwritten archival sources, the manuscript throws new light on Hawaiian history, and on the Gulick family, a remarkably active group of reformers. For a century and a half, the descendants of Peter and Fanny Gulick did missionary work all over the world, and one descendant (Luther Gulick II) helped to invent basketball and founded the Camp Fire Girls. The manuscript is volume one in a projected trilogy about the Gulick family.
April 13, 2007
Richard Geehr, “Karl Lueger (1844-1910), Austrian Politician” Published in the Encyclopedia of the Age of Industry and Empire, Vol. 3 (Scribner Library of Modern Europe, 2006).
This article aims to present a succinct, balanced appraisal of the career of Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. One of the important founders of the Austrian Christian Social Party, Lueger improved Vienna’s munical services, expanded Vienna’s parks and gardens and built many new public schools. But he
also used and legitimized anti-Semitism in municipal and national politics, fired and discriminated against Jewish city employees
and sponsored an anti-Semitic theater, the first of its kind in the world. An idol of the young Adolf Hitler, Lueger remains a controversial figure.
Recently Published Research
JHALA, A.D. "The Malabar Hill murder trial of 1925: Sovereignty, law and sexual politics in colonial princely India," Indian Economic & Social History Review 2009 Volume 46, No. 3: 373-400.
ANDREWS-MINEHAN, B. "Medical lives in modern China: There's more to building a medical profession than just training doctors (in Korean translation)," in The First Generation of Western Medical Doctors in East Asia (in Korean), pages not yet known, Thaehaksa, Seoul, 2009.
ANDREWS-MINEHAN, B. "Blood in Chinese medical history (in Chinese translation)," in Disease, medicine and hygiene since the Qing dynasty, from the perspectives of social and cultural history (in Chinese), pages 159-188, Sanlian, Beijing, 2009.
JHALA A. D., Courtly Indian Women In Late Imperial India; Pickering and Chatto, 2008.
VEESER, C. Great Leaps Forward: Modernizers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2009.
BENEKE, C. “The Critical Turn: Jonathan Mayhew, the British Empire and the Idea of Resistance in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Boston," Massachusetts Historical Review; vol. 10, 23-56, 2008.
BENEKE, C. Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism; Oxford University Press: New York, 2006.
BENEKE, C. “‘Mingle with Us’: Religious Integration in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century American Education,” American Educational History Journal; vol. 33, no. 1, 29-37, 2006.
TOLPIN, M., and B. Lazarus. “Engaging Junior Faculty in Career Planning: Alternatives to the Exit Interview,” Current Issues in Higher Education; vol. 2, no. 1979, 2006.
