Greetings from the Chair, Kenneth W. Townsend
Welcome to Coastal Carolina University’s Department of History.
The Department of History stands as one of the most respected departments at Coastal Carolina University. Many of the faculty are recognized nationally and internationally for their pathbreaking, scholarly publications and their frequent paper presentations at important academic conferences. The faculty’s record of scholarship surpasses that of most institutions similar in size. Moreover, students routinely comment that the history faculty are among the best classroom instructors on campus and are genuinely committed to their students’ academic development.
The department offers numerous opportunities for students who major in the discipline or who simply take an occasional course in the department. You may pursue independent study on a narrow topic not featured in a standing course, involve yourself in interdisciplinary and multi-media projects, study abroad in Europe, or hold internships at local museums. The Department's History Club, open to all interested students, is quite active, and CCU's chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the international history honors society, annually participates in regional conferences and has won numerous awards for student research. The department is constantly evolving and offering new programs for students and faculty alike.
I encourage you to visit the attached links to learn about the department’s faculty, previous and on-going historical projects, and special programs sponsored by the department. I also invite you to contact us directly should you have any specific questions or concerns not addressed by these links. We in the Department of History look forward to working with you.
*News and Events*
Branham history award given at CCU
Lara Blake of Surfside Beach is the 2010 recipient of the James Branham History Award, which recognizes the top graduate of Coastal Carolina University's history program.
Blake earned a bachelor’s degree in history from CCU in 2009, graduating with a 4.0 grade point average. During her collegiate career, she worked as an intern at the Horry County Museum and mentored a student at Lakewood Elementary School. Blake plans to become a high school social studies teacher and will begin the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program at CCU in June.
As recipient of the Branham award, Blake received a certificate, a medallion and a $500 check. The presentation was made at the annual induction ceremony for Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society. To be considered for the Branham award, students must demonstrate academic excellence, a record of service and a scholarly agenda outside the regular curricular requirements.
The award is named for the late James A. Branham, who served on CCU's history faculty from 1963 to 1991 and was a longtime chair of the Department of History. He died in 2009.
Professor Amanda M. 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 in the Department of History 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's project, 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 68 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.
The National Humanities Center, located in Research Triangle Park, NC is a private non-profit institution designed to support advanced study in all disciplines within the humanities. Fellowships are supported by grants from private foundations, corporate philanthropy, the National Endowment for the Humanties, individual donors, and the Triangle Universities (Duke, NC State and UNC Chapel Hill). Each year the Center fields approximately 500 applications from an international pool of scholars, artists and professionals, from which it selects 40 successful fellows. Each fellow is provided with office space in the Humanities Center building, a fellowship, travel support, and library resources. The Center supports an active and open intellectual discourse, hosting major speakers and encouraging interaction between these visiting speakers, the fellows, neighboring universities, and the public.
"It is a tremendous honor to be awarded a position at the National Humanities Center" says Glaze. "If it weren't for the generous support of colleagues in medical and pre-modern history, my department and university, and the heroic assistance of our librarians--and archivist/librarians in general, in the US, the UK and the continent--I would never have been able to pursue a study like this with such doggedness over the course of the last six years." Glaze regularly teaches courses in the History of Western Medicine from Antiquity to the Renaissance, the Age of Crusades, and the Byzantine Empire, and uses her research interests in southern Italy and Sicily to enliven her classroom activities.
Congratulations to Dr. Whalen on winning the 2009 Alfred De Vergnette de Lamotte prize. Click here for more information.
Check out the Phi Alpha Theta page for the latest information on the Phi Alpha Theta Regional Conference
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, e-mail Mrs. Freeman at freeman@coastal.edu.
Interested in traveling abroad this spring, check out the 2010 Short-Term Study Opportunities page.
Check out Dr. Prince's interview about "The Tobacco Trail" on Walter Edgar's Journal.
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