The Arch Dalrymple III Department of History is delighted to welcome Eva Payne to Oxford. Professor Payne was hired as an Assistant Professor of History with a focus on Gender and Sexuality in the Spring of 2017 and joins us this fall after completing her term as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University during the 2017-2018 academic year.

Professor Payne holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and graduate degrees from Harvard University. Her work examines women, gender, and sexuality and the U.S. in transnational perspective.

Her current book project, To Purify the World: Americans and International Sexual Reform, 1865-1933, asks how and why many American reformers came to see sexual issues as the central humanitarian and political problems of their day. It tracks the movement for sexual reform from its origins, among American abolitionists and missionaries who became concerned with state-regulated prostitution in the British Empire, through to the movement’s denouement in the activities of Americans who traveled the globe after the First World War to investigate sex trafficking for the League of Nations. As American social reformers participated in debates over prostitution, the legal age of consent, venereal disease, and sex trafficking, they wove together religious, medical, racial, and legal discourses in ways that placed sexual matters at the heart of international politics.

Professor Payne is also engaged in a number of public history projects. She has worked on exhibitions of art and historical objects at museums and galleries, including the Harvard Art Museum and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

During the fall semester, Professor Payne is teaching one graduate course, HST 614: Readings in U.S. Women’s and Gender History.

The Arch Dalrymple III Department of History is thrilled to announce that Peter Thilly has joined our faculty as an Assistant Professor specializing in modern Asia.

Professor Thilly holds a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University, a Master’s in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a doctorate in history from Northwestern University. His work focuses on Late Imperial and Republican China, with a particular focus on maritime and transnational history, as well as crime and legal culture.

His book manuscript, provisionally entitled Treacherous Waters: Drug Smugglers in the Making of Modern China, is a social history of the “opium century” – the one hundred years during which opiate narcotics dominated the Chinese economy and became normalized within Chinese society. By focusing on the criminal brokers who operated the drug trade, Treacherous Waters tells overlapping stories about the local experiences of global imperialism, nationalism, statebuilding and corruption. The people who dealt in drugs, over the course of the opium century, carved out a particular capitalist version of local power in the face of encroaching, modernizing states. In so doing, drug traders transformed the processes of nation-building and imperialism in China.

Professor Thilly’s June 2017 article in Late Imperial China, entitled “Opium and the Origins of Treason in Modern China: The View from Fujian,” explains how opium traders came to personify treason during the most critical moment in the crystallization of modern Chinese nationalism – the Opium War of 1839-41. His second article, “The Fujisturu Mystery: Translocal Xiamen, Japanese Expansionism, and the Asian Cocaine Trade, 1900-1937,” highlights the role of opportunism and entrepreneurialism within the wider history of state efforts to control trade in maritime Asia. It appaeared in Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, in a special December 2017 issue on “Binding Maritime China.”

During the fall semester, Professor Thilly is teaching two undergraduate courses, the survey course HST 130: Intro to East Asian History and HST 387: Modern Japanese History.

History majors and minors are invited to join the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History for a visit to the University of Mississippi Law School, where they’ll enjoy a free pizza lunch and learn about the process of applying to law school and the nature of legal education at an event specially planned for them.

This event will take place Thursday, February 22 at 12:30 PM in Room 1115 at the University of Mississippi Law School. Reserve your spot–and your pizza!–by RSVPing to Professor Anne Twitty at atwitty@olemiss.edu

A Kingdom Divided: Evangelicals, Loyalty, and Sectionalism in the Civil War Era

Louisiana State University Press, 2017

Arch Dalrymple III Department of History Ph.D. candidate Phil Baltuskonis has won two external grants that will fund research on his dissertation, which explores the role of ideas in shaping the social movements that led individuals in Spanish America to reject the Spanish crown and explore ideas of independence.

In January 2018, Baltuskonis will travel to the Lily Library in Bloomington, Indiana on a Mendel Fellowship, which is designed to support research by scholars from around the world in areas of particular interest to the Mendel family, including the history of the Spanish Colonial Empire, Latin American independence movements, European expansion in the Americas, and voyages, travels and exploration. Baltuskonis’s research in Bloomington will center on the correspondence among members of the eighteenth century Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada.

After completing this trip, Baltuskonis will travel to Seville and Madrid with support from the University of Mississippi graduate school and the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History. There he will undertake research in the colonial archives. Finally, a visiting Ph.D. fellowship from the Universidad del Rosario will bring Baltuskonis to Bogotá, Colombia. The archives in Bogotá will allow him to explore the impact that people connected to the leaders in and around the city had on the creation of a new Latin American state.

Baltuskonis’s dissertation, “Hesitant Independence in Spanish America: Science, Patronage, and the Power of Community,” examines the social networks created by the alumni of the Colegio del Rosario, a private university founded in Bogotá in 1653, and the members of the Botanical Expedition to New Granada (present-day Colombia), as well as their connection to the revolutions in Spanish America during the late colonial period. His work is being supervised by Douglass Sullivan-González.

At the 2017 meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Professor Elizabeth Payne was recognized with an award for “extraordinary service” to the Southern Association for Women Historians (SAWH). Organized in 1970, the SAWH meets annually and has over 700 members. It strives to stimulate interest in the study of Southern and women’s history as well to advance the status of women historians.

Payne first joined the SAWH in 1985 when she moved to the University of Arkansas history department. She has continued to be an active member ever since. In particular, the award highlighted her leadership in organizing a mentoring program for graduate students and service on multiple committees. Two other historians, Professor Jacqueline Dowd Hall of the University of North Carolina and Professor Darlene Clark Hine of Northwestern University, also received the lifetime merit awards.