A Message from the Chair, Florence Eliza Glaze
The Department of History at Coastal Carolina University is dedicated to the study and exploration of the human experience across millenia and around the globe. Our interests range from the Americas and Asia to Europe, Africa and beyond. And our nationally and internationally respected faculty publish in various fields, from African pre-history to modern Korean social history, from the ancient Mediterranean to the history of modern Berlin, and from Native American history to the Progressive Era. We bring our expertise directly into the classroom, contributing to the innovative and experiential learning of our History majors. The Department's faculty pursue the study of these fields through many different historical lenses and methodologies, including political, intellectual, cultural, social, military, and anthropological. Our courses range from well-developed survey courses examining major historical events and patterns of change-over-time to closely analyzed explorations of major historical debates and pivotal events.
The History Department's primary goal is to support the discovery and communication of historical knowledge. To this end, we offer a B.A. in History, a History Minor, and an Anthropology Minor. Our ambition is to inculcate all Coastal students in the fundaments of historical knowledge through the teaching of Core Curriculum courses that include dual sequences in American History, European History, World History, and Anthropology. We train our Majors in the methods and processes of historical research, creative inquiry, and articulate writing, and we prepare advanced students for graduate studies in various areas. As a group, we support collaborative learning among faculty, students, colleagues and the educated public across the state, country and world. The History Department is home to three academic support Centers: the Waccamaw Center for Historical and Cultural Studies, the Center for Archaeology and Anthropology, and the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies. Through these and other collaborative interdisciplinary arrangements, we pursue greater learning through community outreach programs, public lectures, and continuing education.
Please visit our Departmental offices in Sands Hall to find out more about our faculty, students and educational offerings.
News and Events
Visiting Speakers
 The History Department’s Center for Archaeology and Anthropology, the Waccamaw Center, and the College of Humanities and Fine Arts are co-hosting a series of visiting speakers during Spring 2012. All events are free and open to the public.
On January 17, 2012 at 7 p.m., PBS Emmy Award Nominated film maker Francis O’Donnell will present and discuss his production “In the Footsteps of Marco Polo”. For more on this film, see http://www.wliw.org/marcopolo/. The event will take place in Room 100 of the Burroughs & Chapin Center for Marine and Wetland Studies.
On January 27, 2012 at 3 p.m., Professor Francisco Marcos-Marín will deliver a lecture “Rock Art, Indian Languages and the Origins of the USA.” The event will take place in the Edwards Recital Hall, Room 152, with a reception to follow in the Edwards Lobby.
On January 30, 2012 Professor Marcos-Marín will present “The Last King of Texas and the Southest: Charles IV of Spain and His Time”. The event will take place at 2 pm in Wall Auditorium.
On March 21, 2012 Professor Eldred “Wink” Prince (History) and Associate Professor Becky Childs (English) will present together a public lecture, “Ten Events That Have Shaped Horry County.” This presentation is part of the 10th Annual Board of Visitors Community Dialogue Series. The first presentation will take place at the University’s 79th Avenue Myrtle Beach Education Center at 7 p.m.; the lecture will be repeated at 7 p.m. on March 28th a the University’s Waccamaw Center in Litchfield.
On March 28, 2012, the Departments of History and Art will co-host a public lecture by Dr. James Horn, Executive Vice President of Research and Director of the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg. Dr. Horn’s lecture will examine “A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke.” The lecture will take place in Wall Auditorium at 5 p.m., with a reception to follow in the anteroom.
Further public lectures to be announced.
Job searches underway
The History Department is hiring four new faculty this year, including
- an Assistant Professor of the Modern Middle East
- an Assistant Professor of Digital History
- a Lecturer, and
- an Associate Professor of the American South.
The Department looks forward to welcoming their new colleagues in August 2012.
Professor Ken Townsend publishes textbook on Native Americans.
Ken Townsend’s co-authored university-level textbook, First Americans: A History of Native Peoples, has been published by Pearson/Prentice Hall in January 2012. The publisher is now also producing a 500-minute DVD version of the textbook --a set of 10 DVD, each DVD at 50 minutes-- that examines the history of Native Americans on video. The filming project begins January 2012 and is expected for release in January 2013.
Professor Emeritus Charles Joyner Honored
The Department of History marked its Decade Project event on December 1, 2011, with the dedication of the Charles Joyner Reading Room, Room 202 in the Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts. This dedication celebrates the career of Professor Emeritus Charles Joyner, who served as Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture, and Director of the Waccamaw Center, from 1988 to 2007.
Brandon Palmer receives two ASIANetwork Grants.
 In May 2011 Dr. Brandon Palmer received $30,400 from ASIANetwork and the Freeman Foundation to take five Coastal Students --Amanda Kraft, Jeff Robinson, Rebekah Thomas, Laura Whitefleet-Smith, and Hans Sapochek-- to South Korea. This student-faculty mentoring project examined the many ways that remembrance of Japanese imperialism is manipulated and transmitted within the South Korean sphere. The five students examined how history is received, transmitted and interpreted by the South Korean populace. Over a three-week period, students conducted research by visiting numerous public and private museums, cemeteries, monuments, and palaces; interviewing dozens of Korean nationals; and analyzing guide books and academic works.
Palmer's second ASIANetwork award, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, will allow him to lead a three-week faculty enhancement program in South Korea in Summer 2012. This program, “Understanding Global Trends through Korean History,” highlights the diffusion of ideologies, cultural practices, and technology to Korea, as well as how Koreans synthesized foreign structures to suit local practices. This program takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Korean and East Asian history in order to introduce attendees to Northeast Asian philosophy, religion, politics, history, and sociology, all of which have distinct local Korean interpretations. Program participants include faculty at Colorado College, Ohio Wesleyan University, Kenyon College, Wellesley College, Drury College, Vassar College, Union College, and Bard College. For more information, please see
http://www.asianetwork.org/programs/mellon/mellon_korea2012.html
Professors Glaze and Nance publish book on the History of Medicine.
 Drs. Brian Nance and Eliza Glaze have published Between Text and Patient: the Medical Enterprise in Medieval & Early Modern Europe, a book of 21 scholarly essays examining various problems in the history of health, medicine and disease during the medieval and early modern periods.
The volume, printed in Florence, Italy by SISMEL -- the International Society for the Study of Medieval Latin Culture -- is offered in honor of Michael R. McVaugh, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Professor McVaugh taught at UNC from 1964 to 2007, focusing on the history of western medicine and science from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. During that time he served as dissertation director to CCU’s Professor Brian Nance (Ph.D. UNC, 1991), and dissertation committee member to Associate Professor Eliza Glaze (Ph.D. Duke, 2000). A bibliography of McVaugh’s more than 15 books and 65 scholarly articles, several of them published in collaboration with contributors to Between Text & Patient, is printed in the book, and is used as the device by which Glaze and Nance frame the major problems in the discipline examined by the essays that follow their Introduction.
The authors contributing to the book edited by Glaze and Nance, and including an essay by each of them, employ a rich variety of methodological approaches to medical history, exploring important issues from the fifth through seventeenth centuries, and with a geographical range stretching from Jerusalem to England. These approaches include close philological studies of unexamined texts, paleo-pathological examinations of the spread of disease, social-historical analyses of the changing usage of medical texts, considerations of physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and empirics, and the way in which many types of healers functioned in a variety of settings, including towns, universities, monasteries, elite courts, and printing houses. The linguistic range of medieval and early modern texts the contributors examine include Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Middle English; several essays employ also visual and archeological data as evidence to support their arguments. Collectively, the essays in Between Text & Patient reveal how careful archival research permits the modern scholar to craft and answer important questions from new perspectives.
A list of the book’s contents and contributors can be found online at
http://www.sismel.it/tidetails.asp?hdntiid=1212.
CCU celebrates work of Southern historian
Coastal Carolina University hosts "An Afternoon Celebration with Charles Joyner," at noon on Friday, Feb. 11, 2011 at the Waccamaw Higher Education Center in Litchfield. The event is free and open to the public.
The event celebrates the work of Joyner, distinguished professor emeritus of Southern history and culture at CCU. He will speak about his experience as editor of "Slavery & Anti-Slavery: A Transnational Archive," an acclaimed, four-part digital collection devoted to the study of slavery and made available through Kimbel Library at CCU.
For more information, click here
Noted authors gather for CCU's 'Writing the South'
More than 25 authors will discuss their craft at “Writing the South in Fact, Fiction and Poetry,” a symposium scheduled for Feb. 17 to 19, 2011 at Coastal Carolina University. The three-day event in Wall Auditorium will feature three Pulitzer Prize winners and an Emmy recipient. The sessions are free and open to the public. For further information and the program, please click here
Assistant Professor Amanda M. Brian selected for Summer Institute on Japan
Dr. Amanda Brian has been selected to participate in the 2010 Freeman Summer Institute on Japan held at Tokai University in Honolulu, Hawaii. Sponsored by the Japan Studies Association, the institute is an intensive introduction to a wide variety of topics related to Japan. Professor Brian will infuse knowledge gained from the institute into her courses on modern European history, for Japan provides rich comparisons in terms of imperialism and industrialization as well as culture.
She has noted in her own research particular connections between Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around a newly imagined modern and “scientific” childhood, a childhood promoted at home and exported abroad as universal by, in part, German child advocates. From the Summer Institute on Japan, Professor Brian will return to Coastal to trace the cultural and social exchanges between the modernizing empires of Germany and Japan around their most precious resource—children. Her study will not only illuminate Japan’s response to this universal childhood of western imaginations, but will also indicate Japanese articulations of a modern childhood that then German specialists took note of.
Associate Professor Eliza Glaze wins NEH sabbatical year fellowship to the National Humanities Center
Dr. Eliza Glaze has been awarded a National Humanities Center sabbatical fellowship for the academic year 2010/11. She will use this scholarly reassignment time, and the outstanding resources of the National Humanities Center, to complete a book on medical history in southern Italy during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Glaze has two projects for the year. The first, entitled Gariopontus and the Salernitans: the 'Passionarius' and Medical Practice in Southern Italy, c. 1000-1200, will include an edition and partial translation, with scholarly commentary and analysis, of the medical book called 'Passionarius' or 'Book of Diseases,' which originated in Salerno, Italy early in the eleventh century. The text and its significance has never been examined prior to Glaze's studies of it; she has identified and examined more than 70 surviving manuscripts--fewer than 10 of which were known previously--in major libraries and collections across Europe. This early Latin text, as Glaze has shown, was widely owned and well-regarded by university-educated professional physicians well into the sixteenth century. She has previously published studies of surviving and heavily annotated manuscripts of the text owned by significant historical figures like John Somerset, physician to King Henry VI of England, and Coluccio Salutati, Chancellor of the city of Florence, Italy, and one of the most important early Renaissance humanists. Salerno, the city at the core of Glaze's focus, is where formal medical education first originated in Europe in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. It became the model for nascent universities everywhere that offered medical degrees. Glaze's research is part of a collaborative effort to discover and understand the origins and pedagogical processes of medical study and practice at Salerno, which is not well documented. Her book will be published as part of the series "Edizione Nazionale 'La Scuola Medica Salernitana'" by SISMEL, la Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino, based in Florence, Italy.
A second project for the year is “Excavating Medicine in a Digital Age: Palaeography and the Medical Book in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance.” This collaborative project for which Glaze is co-principal investigator is funded separately by a National Humanities Center “Conversation” grant. A press release on the meeting’s accomplishments can be found at
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsrel2010/prrevmedicine.htm.
Phi Alpha Theta activities at Coastal. Check out the Department’s Phi Alpha Theta page for the latest information on the Phi Alpha Theta Regional Conference.
Dr. Eldred “Wink” Prince interviewed by Walter Edgar. Check out Dr. Prince's interview about "The Tobacco Trail" on Walter Edgar's Journal.
Alumni News Needed. We now have a new Alumni page to keep up with our graduates. If you are a graduate from Coastal Carolina University, and want to let everyone know what you have been up to, please e-mail Stephanie Freeman at freeman@coastal.edu with a description of your news.
|
