Stories

In celebration of International Women's Month, Professor Nancy C. Unger presented “Winning Women’s Suffrage: Celebrating Victories, Learning From Mistakes,” to the law firm Beveridge & Diamond PC. She spoke in their San Francisco office, and her talk was livecast to member offices nationally. She also presented "La Follette's 1923 European Tour: Laying Groundwork for the Presidential Campaign," at a celebration commemorating the 100th anniversary of the progressive third party campaign of Robert La Follette for the presidency, held at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. Her third presentation, "Learning from Past Moral Panics: The 'White Slave' Case that Changed America," an overview of her book in progress, was delivered to the San Luis Bar Association.

Dr. Unger’s article, "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Betty Smith’s Bestselling Introduction to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," appears in the special issue on literature co-edited by Nancy for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (she also chaired the roundtable "Walter Nugent and the Broadening of American History" that appears in that issue).

Photos of Historical debris found at Topaz Incarceration Camp, Utah.

Dr. Sonia C. Gomez took part in the second International Remembering Spaces of Internment (ReSI) Symposium in March at the University of Arizona College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, Tucson, Arizona. Over thirty participants from across the social sciences and humanities presented research on incarceration. The group also engaged in field work visiting ICE detention centers in the Sonoran desert. Gomez presented on her emerging second project about Japanese incarceration, girlhood, friendship, and resistance.

In April, Dr. Gomez visited the location of the World War II Japanese American Incarceration Camp at Topaz, Utah with the Wakasa Memorial Committee and a group of Topaz survivors, descendants of survivors, public historians, and archaeologists. The pilgrimage was on the 81st anniversary of James Wakasa’s murder by military police. Unlike most of the other WWII-era incarceration camps, Topaz has been left largely untouched. As the group retraced Mr. Wakasa’s footsteps, they came across historical debris–rusted nails, a mattress spring, sunbleached wood slabs, a doorstep, and parts of a pot belly stove.

Left to right: Michelle Burnham (English), Darrien Mitri '26 (Communication), Sonia Gomez (History), Hsin-I Cheng (Communication), Jose Kabeer (AIMS College Prep High School, Oakland), and Hsin-hung (Sean) Yeh (Modern Languages and Literatures)

Dr. Gomez took part in two public forums organized by the Asian-Black Alliance project led by Dr. Hsin-I Cheng (Communication). The first event was a presentation given to high school students at AIMS High School, a public charter school that serves 50% Asian Americans and 40% Black American students in Oakland, CA; the second event titled “Black/Asian Encounters: Past, Present & Future,” presented lesson plans curated by educators at SCU and AIMS.

Dr. Amy E. Randall participated in a book incubator workshop sponsored by the Petrach Program in Ukraine at George Washington University in mid-February. Here she joined other experts on Ukrainian and Soviet history, Eastern European politics, and women’s and gender studies to support a young Ukrainian scholar.

Dr. Matthew Specter presented at two conferences. The first was held at St. John’s College, Oxford University, on “Geopolitics and the Critique of Liberal Order”; the second presentation was held at the annual International Studies Association (ISA) meeting in San Francisco. At the ISA meeting, Professor Specter served as a discussant on two panels sponsored by the “Historical International Relations” section; a conference panel on “War, History and Law,” with scholars from Turkey, Germany and the UK; and a roundtable co-organized with Patrick Porter, the Chair in International Security at Birmingham, on “IR Realism: Universal or Provincially Western?.”

Stanford University Press sold the rights to Professor Specter’s 2022 book, The Atlantic Realists, to Peking University Press; it will appear in Mandarin in their “Empire and International Law” series, alongside other prominent Western scholars in translation.