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Department ofHistory

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Faculty News Winter 2024

Updates from Mateo Carrillo, Sonia Gomez, Marwan Hanania, Harry Odamtten, Amy Randall, Nancy Unger, and Gregory Wigmore

Mateo Carrillo presenting at the American Historical Association

Mateo Carrillo also traveled to the University of Ghana to participate in the Latin American Studies Association’s first-ever Continental Congress in Africa: “África y Ámerica Latina: Diálogos y Conexiones.” The Congress focused on the diverse experiences and cultures of African and Afro-descendant peoples throughout Latin America. While in Ghana Mateo visited El Mina and Cape Coast castles, major embarkation points in the Atlantic slave trade with primary destinations in Brazil and the Caribbean.


Black Transnationalism and Japan

Sonia Gomez published "Interracial Friendship across Barbed Wire: Mollie Wilson and Lillian Igasaki." This essay explores the subversive nature of interracial female friendship during the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans. It appears in Black Transnationalism and Japan, edited by Natalia Doan and Sho Konishi published by Leidan University Press (LUP). "Interracial Friendship Across Barbed Wire" is part of Gomez's second book project, which examines Black-Japanese solidarity in the first half of the 20th century.


Marwan Hanania gave a guest lecture on Israeli-Palestinian History as part of Santiago Canyon College’s "Perspectives Series," and spoke on "The Palestinian Refugees: Their Roots, Identities and Current Circumstances," for the “Hot Topic” lecture series of SCU OLLI program.


Harry Odamtten with students at the University of Ghana

Harry Odamtten has been elected to the executive board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. He also served on the 2023 African Studies Association Local Organizing Committee for the Conference held in San Francisco 2023. As the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellow at the University of Ghana's Institute of African Studies, Harry delivered the lecture “Theory and History: How to use Theory as a Historian.”/p>


Amy Randall

Department Chair Amy Randall is quoted in "Oskar Schindler’s Heroic (and Complicated) Holocaust Legacy," an article on the A&E Channel's History website. Her podcast "Defining Genocide: a Gender Lens" with Genocide Watch (the coordinating organization of The Alliance Against Genocide, an international coalition of organizations) was released for their new podcast series. Amy also presented her paper, “Gender and Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ukraine,” at the annual Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies National Convention in Philadelphia in November 2023.


History Extra, Gilded Age

Nancy C. Unger continues to enjoy the interest the HBO series The Gilded Age is bringing to her favorite period of American History. She was featured in an hour-long interview on HistoryExtra, the podcast of the BBC's History Magazine, speaking on “The American Gilded Age: Everything You Wanted to Know.” She was also quoted in HistoryExtra’s “Dollar Princesses: The American Heiresses who Changed the face of British Aristocracy,” and in “Historians Vibe-Check The Gilded Age,” by Erin Schwartz, in Vulture (the American entertainment news website of New York magazine).


Cadaian Studies Program logo

Gregory Wigmore presented on "Slavery & Self-Emancipation in Colonial Canada" at the Canadian Studies colloquium series at the University of California, Berkeley. His talk explored how Black and Indigenous people enslaved in post-revolutionary British North America exploited the hardening of the border to escape to freedom on American soil. He was also recently appointed as an external academic affiliate of Berkeley's Canadian Studies program, which serves as the intellectual hub for the study of Canada in California.