Spring 2017 has been a busy one for both the students and faculty in the History Program at Texas Wesleyan University! The following represents the highlights of both student and faculty efforts for the semester. 

Student Accolades

On April 24, three of our best history students were inducted into the Wesleyan Omega Zeta Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta: Kaley Batchlear, McKayla Harwell and Clark Williams. This honor society for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professors of history, has over 400,000 members, with some 9,000 new members joining each year through 970 chapters nationwide. 

‌Over the April 1 weekend, program faculty traveled with six top History Program undergraduates who read papers at the Northeast Texas Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference held at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.  Drs. Brenda Matthews, Alistair Maeer and Christopher Ohan each chaired panel sessions at the meeting. The following students presented their research:

• Isaac Olson, “Carthaginian Infant Sacrifice”
• McKayla Harwell, “One-Child Policy: History and Social Impacts”
• Joanne Barron, “1981 Hunger Strikes”
• Bailey Dozier, “Napoleonic Wars and the Creation of a Unified Germany”
• Clark Williams, Hindenburg’s Hitler: The Weimar Republic and the rise of the NSDAP 1918-1933”
• Russell Leahy, “The Navajo and the Indecipherable Code”

‌On March 4, eight Wesleyan students and one History alumna attended the keynote address delivered by author Adam Hochschild for the symposium, “Political and Social Consequences of World War I.”  The symposium was part of ongoing commemorations for the centenary of the Great War and was sponsored by TCU’s History Department.

Both students and faculty represented the History Program at the first Medievalists and Early Modernists of North Texas and Oklahoma (MEMNTO) conference on Feb. 25, held at SMU. History major Joanne Barron presented a paper entitled “Insulae of Ostia. Also in attendance were two other History majors, Lane Kelly and Mackenzie Redmon as well as program faculty Dr. Ohan and Dr. Maeer, the latter of whom serves on the MEMNTO organizing committee. Texas Wesleyan will be hosting the 2018 MEMNTO conference.

Faculty News

This academic year Dr. Alistair Maeer submitted a chapter entitled, “Cartography and the Sea,” in the forthcoming The Ashgate Research Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400-1800: Oceans in Global History and Culture and attended and presented at numerous conferences.  He presented a paper, “An Empire’s Worth of Curiosity: Envisioning Edward Barlow’s Maritime World, 1659-1703,” at the University of Tennessee’s annual Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Manuscript Workshop in February. In March, he presented papers at the 10^th Biennial Conference of the Society of Early Americanist and at 10^th annual Britain and the World Conference.  All of these efforts feed into his forthcoming research trip to London and his ongoing book project, An Empire’s Worth of Curiosity: Edward Barlow and the English Maritime World, 1650-1715 as a result of winning a Sam Taylor Fellowship grant for the 2016-2017 academic year. 

Dr. Christopher Ohan has a forthcoming article, “Ambiguous Identities: Memories of the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait” in the 2017 edition of Sound Historian and a chapter, “Reconsidering Francis’ Encounter with the Sultan during the Fifth Crusade,” in the edited volume, The World of St. Francis of Assisi (Siena: Betti Editrice, 2017). Dr. Ohan attended the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) meeting in Boston in November 2016, participating as panel chair for “Water and Power Politics: Palestine and Lebanon,” and as a speaker in the session “A Tribute to the Work of Mary Ann Tétreault (1942-2015).” Dr. Ohan also attending the Third Gulf Studies Symposium at the American University of Kuwait in March 2017 where he delivered a paper entitled “Mobility and Reconfiguration Resulting from the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait.” 

Dr. Brenda Matthews continued at the Pate Professor of Modern American History and Chair of the Social Science Department. She has been selected to participate in the seminar on “The 20^th Century Presidency” at Stanford University’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center in Washington, D.C. in July.  She also participated in the panel discussion, “Reviving New Deal Scholarship Through the Texas New Deal Symposium,” at the Texas State Historical Association meeting in March. Dr. Matthews has two forthcoming articles in the University of New Mexico Press’ compendium of Texas New Deal Symposium presentations: “Whether to Call a Yankee and Yankee,” and “‘Eating the Tuition’: Texas Wesleyan University in the 1930s,” co-written with Dr. Elizabeth Alexander. 

For more information about majoring or minoring in History, the program, its students and faculty please contact the history department.