On Monday, November, 12th at 5:30PM in 107 Croft Hall, Richard Wittman, Associate Director of the Orient-Institut Istanbul, will give a lecture titled, “On the Road with an Axe and a Pen: Temporary Migration to 19th century Turkey in the Life Narratives of Central European Journeymen.” Traditional guild regulations dating back to the Middle Ages required that, after completing an apprenticeship, journeymen take to the road and practice their new skills elsewhere before coming home and taking the examination for master of their craft. Originally very short, these journeys expanded to far-flung destinations in the 19th century. In this lecture, Dr. Wittmann will explore the self narratives of a few of these craftsmen who traveled to the Ottoman Empire.

Dr. Jeff Forret will deliver the third annual Dalrymple Lecture, “Beyond the Master’s Gaze: Violence, Life, and Community in Antebellum Southern Slave Quarters,” on Thursday, August 29th at 5:30PM in the Overby Center Auditorium. This event is free and open to the public.

Forret is the Leland Best Distinguished Faculty Fellow in the History Department at Lamar University, where he was also the 2016 University Scholar Award winner. A social historian specializing in slavery and southern history, his recent book Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (2015) won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. His next book, titled Williams’ Gang: An Old South Slave Trader and His Cargo of Convict Slaves, is a legal history of the domestic slave trade, slated for publication with Cambridge University Press.

This event will help inaugurate a series of speakers and events across campus during the 2018-2019 academic year to commemorate the August 1619 arrival to British North America of the first recorded persons of African descent. Additional events with Dr. Forret are scheduled with undergraduate and graduate students in the department of history and the University of Mississippi Slavery Research Group.

University of Mississippi student Eric Rexroat, a Ph.D. candidate in the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History, will study in Belgium this fall, thanks to the 2018 Fulbright U.S. Student Program.

A St. Charles, Missouri, native, Rexroat will be at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, from this September until March 2019. He will conduct research at the Royal Library of Belgium and National Archives of Belgium, both in Brussels, as well as work under the direction of professor Hilde Greefs and some of her colleagues.

Rexroat, who earned his bachelor’s degree at Southeast Missouri State University in 2012, vividly recalls how he received notification of his award.

“I learned while in Paris doing research that I had been chosen as an alternative (which he said he viewed as an achievement in itself), but my understanding was that there would be little chance of my being promoted to a finalist,” he said. “Obviously something changed, and it was a very pleasant surprise.”

For the past three springs, Rexroat has been recognized for his achievements. He received the Tenin-Alexander Prize from the history department for Best Graduate Student Paper in 2015, the Graduate Achievement Award from the College of Liberal Arts in 2016 and officially passed his comprehensive exams with distinction in 2017.

“My career goals include teaching European history at a college or university, as well as continuing my research and eventually publishing on 19th-century Europe,” Rexroat said. “Receiving this Fulbright award will enable me to work closely with and benefit from the feedback of my adviser at the University of Antwerp, as well as to expand my research by providing the opportunity to spend further time in Europe. The experiences I have during this stint abroad will be invaluable to my development as a scholar and a person.”

UM faculty have praised Rexroat’s work.

“Eric came as an M.A. student and has excelled ever since he stepped foot on campus, impressing faculty and colleagues alike with his seriousness of purpose and focus,” said Marc Lerner, associate professor of history and director of Rexroat’s dissertation.

“His dissertation research on free trade as ideology and political controversy in the mid-19th century is fascinating and important work. The comparative and international perspective is what makes this a particularly challenging and powerful dissertation topic. I am excited to see the results of his research.”

Established in 1946, the Fulbright program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.

The primary source of funding for the Fulbright program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected based on academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields.

Fulbright awards allow the Croft Institute and the other participating units on the Oxford campus to deliver on the university’s commitment to educating and engaging global citizens and supporting experiential learning, two cores established in the university’s new strategic plan, Flagship Forward.

Students interested in applying for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program award are encouraged to contact the Office of National Scholarship Advisement at onsa@olemiss.edu.

Story adapted from Edwin Smith.

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