History

Our induction speaker will be Dr. Jennifer Lemak, a graduate of the doctoral program at the University at Albany’s History Department. Dr. Lemak is the chief curator of history at the New York State Museum. Prior to her elevation to this position, she served the Museum as senior historian/curator of social history. She has mounted major exhibitions often with publication projects including Votes for Women: Celebrating New York’s Suffrage Centennial (2017) and An Irrepressible Conflict: The Empire State in the Civil War (2012). Lemak is the author of Southern Life, Northern City: The History of Albany’s Rapp Road (SUNY Press, 2008). She is a a member of the New York State Preservation Board, a co-editor of the New York History journal and a fellow of the New York Academy of Historians. Her talk is titled, “Public History: From Mississippi to the Mothership” The talk and ceremony will be held on Friday, April 21st at 3 PM in Lecture Center 3B. A reception and chapter meeting will follow.

Our speaker, Dr. Mikhal Dekel, will present on The Tehran Children: To Whom Does History Belong? Mikhal Dekel is Professor of English and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts at the CUNY Graduate Center and the City College of New York. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation, among others. She is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugees Odyssey (W. W. Norton, 2019); Oedipus in Kishinev (Bialik Institute, 2014); and The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Her articles, translations, and blogs have appeared in Foreign Policy, Journal of Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, and Cambridge Literary Review among others. In her lecture, Dr. Dekel will tell the story of her father and the odyssey from Poland to Iran at the core of his childhood—an experience which he never talked about, though it informed every aspect of his being. His wartime odyssey was also part of a larger chapter in the history of World War II, that of a quarter million Polish-Jewish refugees in Central Asia and the Middle East. The fact that most Polish Jews who survived the war had followed this path has been until now virtually unknown. Refreshments will be served. Parking will be available in the Dutch Student Lot: please advise us of any special mobility issues. For an interactive map with directions, go to www.albany.edu/map Contacts: 518-442-5300 and [email protected] The lecture is sponsored through the generosity and support of Malka and Eitan Evan.

Save the Date (Monday, April 10, 3-4:20 p.m.) for the History Department’s annual Fossieck Lecture. We welcome Prof. Chris Parsons from Northeastern University, who will be discussing his current research, which traces the spread of smallpox and other European illnesses in the northeast (New France, New England, and New Netherland) in the 17th and 18th centuries in order to understand how epidemic disease shaped colonial encounters and imperial rivalries. Specifically, he’ll be talking about the small pox epidemic of 1721. (See the attached flier.) If you’re interested in how people navigated past epidemics to understand our present predicament, this is the lecture for you. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Dr. Hasia Diner and Dr. Carl Bon Tempo are guest star on The Rational Middle podcast! Dr. Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at NYU and Dr. Bon Tempo is an associate professor at the University at Albany. Their new book, Immigration: An American History, came out last year via Yale Press. The book covers stories of immigrants throughout American history. The pair join host Carter Carroll to discuss the book.

April 3 at 11:30am in Science Library Standish Room: MIT's Megan Black will be here as part of the Humanities Lab project. Megan is a brilliant scholar whose Global Interior won book prizes from four separate scholarly fields, including foreign relations history, environmental history, and the American West.