Chris Agee
Dr. Agee presented a panel Paper titled “Police Survival and Police Union Organizing in Philadelphia and Houston, 1970-1988” at the Urban History Association Conference. His paper discussed how a union leaders during the 1970s and 1980s began promoting a “survival ideology”: the notion that police officers should always prepare themselves for a mortal threat when interacting with members of the community. His paper argued that union leaders used this ideology to organize and politicize rank-and-file officers.
Ryan Crewe
Dr. Crewe published a peer-reviewed article in the Chilean journal Intus-Legere Historia, for a special edition on the entanglements of colonial Latin America in the Pacific World. Titled “Islas de fábula y guerra: Cómo las Molucas demarcaron el Nuevo Mundo [Islands of Fable and War: How the Moluccas Demarcated the New World],” the article shows how Indigenous resistance to early colonial expeditions from post-conquest Mexico to the ‘Spice Islands’ [Moluccas, present-day Eastern Indonesia] delimited transpacific colonization projects, providing geopolitical heft to the emerging notion of “America” as a separate sphere of the planet from “Asia” or a vast “Indies.” Dr. Crewe also presented on immigration and early global commerce in Manila at a conference on port cities and early modern commercial Capitalism at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His paper, now submitted for publication, is titled “Below the Four Winds: Immigrant Capital and Labor in the Making of a Transpacific Metropolis, 1570-1700.”
Gabriel Finkelstein
Dr. Finkelstein presented a paper in Tours, France, at a conference on the use of animal models to study medical diagnosis and therapy. His paper was titled: “La médecine épicurienne: les grenouilles comme organismes modèles chez Emil du Bois-Reymond.” He gave two invited lectures: A keynote address titled “Emil du Bois-Reymond as Educator: How a Neurophysiologist Sparked Innovations in Research, Teaching, History, and Philosophy” at the History of Medicine Days at the The University of Calgary, and he talked about his book as a guest lecturer to our Electrical Engineering Department at CU Denver.
Rachel Gross
Dr. Gross published her book, Shopping All the Way to the Woods: How the Outdoor Industry Sold Nature to America, with Yale University Press: a fascinating history of the profitable paradox of the American outdoor experience: visiting nature first requires shopping. She also published a co-edited volume titled Big Box USA: The Environmental Impact of America’s Biggest Retail Stores (University of Wyoming Press), which presents a new look at how the big box retail store has dramatically reshaped the US economy and its ecosystems in the last half century.
Peter Kopp
Dr. Kopp has presented parts of his book-in-progress, called “Chile Pepper King: Fabián García and the Botanical Transformation of the Borderlands,” at the American Society for Environmental History conference and as part of History Colorado’s Rosenberry Lecture Series. He also continues to collaborate on the East High Museum Project and a PBS-style documentary on the American hop industry.
Steven Vose
Dr. Vose attended six conferences this year, including the Association for Asian Studies “AAS-in-Asia” conference in Daegu, South Korea, and the Jaina Studies Workshop at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. Vose presented his current research on the effects of globalization, social media, and the ascendency of the Hindu Right on American Jain communities. He showed how a popular Jain organization in India markets itself to diaspora youth by appealing to their desire to connect with their Indian roots, infused with strong support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP. Vose demonstrated how this organization’s support for the Hindu nationalist agenda exists in a wider social media discourse among Jains that tie Jain pasts to the Hindutva narrative of victimization at the hands of Muslims and to Jain futures guaranteed and protected by the BJP agenda. Vose received a TIPS Teaching Innovation Grant, which he used to invite Dr. Moyukh Chatterjee (University of Edinburgh) to campus to give a lecture on the social and legal consequences of “communal riots” in India that are making Muslims into second-class citizens in the country. Vose also won an ORS Seed Grant, which he will use this summer to begin translating a fifteenth-century collection of Jain stories on women’s virtue.