Graduate student good newsletter
Fall 2019
I wanted to take a moment of your time to recognize the excellent work our graduate students have been doing over the past summer and fall semesters.
All the best,
Ray Craib
Professor, Director of Graduate Studies
Manuel Berduc was awarded this past year a Michele Sicca Research Grant from the Cornell Institute for European Studies and an Einaudi Center International Research Travel Grant for archival work in Berlin (Iberoamerikanisches Institut), Zurich (University of Zurich (UZH) archives), Bern (Swiss Federal Archives), Paris (Archives Nationales) and Amsterdam (IISH).
Spencer Beswick received a Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship this past year. He is also the recipient of two fellowships for research next fall semester: the William P. Heidrich Research Fellowship for research at U of Michigan collections and an American Studies Research Grant.
Nicholas Bujalski was awarded a Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Completion Fellowship through the Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Benedetta Carnaghi this past summer was awarded a short-term research grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) to conduct research in Germany. This fall semester she submitted the article “Betraying Your Own: Jewish Spies and the Deportation of the Jews in WWII,” forthcoming in the next issue of the journal of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. Journal URL: https://simon.vwi.ac.at/index.php/simon . Recent conference activities include organizing a panel at AHA 2020 titled “State and Nation under Totalitarianism: Nazi and Fascist Comparisons from Above and Below” (scheduled on Sunday, January 5, 2020), which will include her presentation “Totalitarianism from Below: Spies’ Court Trials in Nazi-Occupied Europe.” She has also been invited to present at the biennial meeting of the fellows of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris (scheduled on January 14-15, 2020), with a presentation titled De l’Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives à la déportation : l’espionnage des juifs au service de la Solution Finale (“From the Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions to deportation: Spying on Jews to serve the ‘Final Solution’”).
Rukmini Chakraborty presented a paper at the Law and the Anthropocene workshop at Drexel University.
Lewis D’Avigdor received an American Studies Research Grant.
Daniel Dawson received an Einaudi Center International Research Travel Grant this past summer and is a Latin American Studies Program Graduate Fellow this academic year.
Sebastián Díaz Angel will begin an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, for research in Colombia, Panama and Brazil, in January 2020. He recently presented a paper (“Tropical and Insurgent Landscapes: Mapping a Transnational Network of Modernizers in Latin America’s Cold War (1960-1973)”) for the Mapping Latin America Works-in-Progress workshop at Tulane University where he is a Visiting Scholar at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies for the academic years 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.
Megan Jeffries has two forthcoming publications: "Freedom in Fiction: Trickster Tales and American Slavery." In Atrocity in Children's Literature, Victory Nesfield and Philip Smith, editors. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, forthcoming) and "Freedom on the Move by Sea: Evidence of Maritime Escape Strategies in American Newspaper Runaway Slave Advertisements." In Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad, Timothy Walker, editor. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming). She also recently presented "Freedom on the Move: Understanding the Developing Database" at an AHRC-funded workshop "Connecting Digital Humanities of Fugitive Slaves" in New Haven, CT (October 2019).
Jonathan Lohnes received a Stanford Hoover Institute Library and Archive Silas Palmer Fellowship for a research trip to the Institute’s library. In addition he will be presenting a paper titled "From Ottoman Penal Colony to Migrant Crossroads: Historicizing Fezzan’s Transformation into 'Europe’s Southern Border'" at the forthcoming Council for European Studies conference in Reykjavik.
Craig Lyons received an Adam Smith Fellowship in political economy from the Mercatus Center, George Mason University for the current academic year as well as a Civitas Dei Fellowship, on the Catholic intellectual tradition, sponsored by the Dominican House of Studies and the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. This past summer he organized and presented at the 14th Fiske Conference on Medieval Icelandic Studies (also called "Norsestock") here at Cornell, and presented a paper ("Ships of State: The Impact of Norse Warships on Medieval Irish Political Culture") at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK. In addition Craig received a research travel grant from the Graduate School to examine a recently acquired manuscript at Trinity College Dublin. This semester he is participating in a graduate student colloquium at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship, Catholic University of America. In the spring semester he will be based at Trinity College Dublin and the University of Glasgow. While at Dublin he will present at the conference Space and Settlement in the Middle Ages XI, with a paper titled "'Where foreigners are assured of trading in peace': An Institutional Approach to the Growth of Medieval Dublin."
Aparajita Majumdar will be a visiting scholar at Yale University's Anthropology Department in Spring 2020 and will be presenting her paper "Recalcitrant Lifeworlds of a Tree" at the South Asia Brown Bag at Yale, an interdisciplinary colloquium for graduate students and early-career scholars.
John McTavish presented “A New Chronology for Seleucus Nicator’s Wars from 311–308 BCE” at The Many Faces of War V conference at South Dakota State University in October. The paper has now been published in Phoenix, the journal of the Canadian Classical Association.
Nathan Norris received a Graduate Student Research Fellowship from the Latin American Studies Program for research in Peru and Chile.
Yiyun Peng presented a paper titled "Planting blue: indigo production and human migration in upland Southeast China, 1550-1900" in Workshop on the Studies of Daiyun Highland Region in Xiamen University, China, earlier this year.
Aimee Plukker had a number of pieces published or accepted for publication this past semester including "Spuithol in de Spuitstraat. Het HUK: een thuis voor heroinegebruikers", Ons Amterdam (December 2019) and “Reframing Rome, creating ‘the West’. Post-war American tourism in Rome and Italian tourism promotion (1947-1957)”, in Martin Knoll and Robert Groß (ed.), Transformative Recovery? The European Recovery Program (ERP)/Marshall Plan in European Tourism [Innsbruck University Press, 2019; forthcoming]. She has also been awarded two Dutch research grants for her future dissertation fieldwork: the Hendrik Mullerfonds Scholarship and the Stichting VSBfonds scholarship.
Molly Reed’s biggest piece of good news is the arrival of her daughter Marian, born September 24, 2019! Her article "Morbidly Excited Soil: Sylvester Graham and the Environmental Ethos of Antebellum Reform" is forthcoming in Environmental History.
Chris Szabla has a number of forthcoming publications, including “Contingent Movements? Differential Decolonizations of Refugee and Migration Law and Governance,” in Situating Contingency: How International Law Could Have Been, ed. Kevin Jon Heller and Ingo Venzke (Oxford University Press); “Peace (Re)settlement: The Treaty of Versailles and the Reshaping of Global Migration Governance,” in volume edited by Stephen Sawyer and Albert Wu; and “Entrenching Hierarchy in the Interwar Periphery: ‘Native Labor’ in the ILO’s Legal Reform Programs,” Melbourne Journal of International Law (2020).
Kwelina Thompson has been recognized as a Graduate School Dean’s Scholar and is the recipient of a Provost Diversity Fellowship for the Fall 2020 semester.
