Tufts History Department

A nice early career opportunity at the Boston Public Library's Levanthal Map and Education Center! Deadline to apply is March 20.

Home - Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library We use maps, geography, and history to explore the connections between places and people in Boston, New England, and beyond. Our collection of a quarter million goegraphic objects, our educational programs, and free exhibitions bring the power of historical geography to everyone.

Congratulations to recent History PhD Tathagata Dutta, who has had an article, title "Making the Margins Viable: The Colonial Economy of Waste Lands in Bengal, Assam, and Burma, 1820s–1920s," published in the prestigious Journal of Asian Studies. Dutta is currently a Lecturer in History at the Auburn University at Montgomery. See comments for a link to the abstract.

Congratulations, Dr. Perri Meldon! Perri, who graduated from Tufts with a BA in History in 2013, has just defended her doctoral dissertation at Boston University! Titled "Dwelling with Ditches: Conservation, Cultural Memory, and Ecological Resilience in the Great Dismal Swamp," Perri's dissertation involved a bit of kayaking in addition to traditional archival research.

The History Department had a pronounced presence in this year's North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) meeting in Montreal.

Prof. Sarah Mass chaired a panel titled "Cultural Consumption and Britishness in the Twentieth Century."

Daniel Waqar (PhD, '26) presented a paper titled "Policing Crowds and Anticolonial Resistance: The Case of Section 144 and "Unlawful Assembly" across Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia, c. 1920s-1960s."

Margot Rashba (A18, MA in History and Museum Studies, 2021) presented a paper titled "The Filth and the Fury: Vivienne Westwood's Punk and Britishness."

This is an excellent full time job opportunity at a great museum in the heart of the Adirondacks!

Congratulations to Dr. Katherine Hollander! Her book, "Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History 1900-1950," will be released by Bloomsbury/Methuen on November 13.

Congratulations to our doctoral student, Daniel Waqar, who has just been selected as a 2025 Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar! Here is a link to the website with more information on the 2025 scholars and their research. Congratulations, Daniel!

https://www.hfg.org/hfg-welcomes-its-2025-emerging-scholars/

Congratulations to Kendra Field for being appointed the Gerald R. Gill Associate Professor of History for her outstanding research and teaching in the Tufts School of Arts & Sciences!

Congratulatoins to Matthew Bowser, wo was a dynamic and popular lecturer in the History Department from 2020-2022. Now an assistant professor at Alabama A&M University, he has just had his first book published. Titled "Containing Decolonisation: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma," it is available from the Manchester University Press.

Manchester University Press - Containing decolonisation Containing decolonisation - Browse and buy the Hardcover edition of Containing decolonisation by Matthew Bowser

This is a great event for MA students in particular, well worth the trip across the river. RSVP soon!

Massachusetts Historical Society: Graduate Student Reception 2025 Graduate Student Reception 2025 MHS Event Hybrid Event At MHS / NOTE: time is shown in East Coast time. Calling all graduate students and faculty! Please join us at our sixteenth annual Graduate Student Reception for students in history, American Studies, and related fields. This year we invite you....

Meet Tufts History PhD Dane Morrison! After completing his degree at Tufts in 1983, Dane accepted a position at Salem State University. Since then Morrison has authored or edited six books, including (most recently) "True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity" (Johns Hopkins University Press). A Jumbo for life, he writes that:

“When I entered Tufts as a doctoral candidate in 1975, the tides of History were turning in so many ways. Not only were we aware that the times were historic (the close of the Indochina War, rising tensions in the Cold War, fraught progress in the struggle for African American, Native American, Latino, and women’s rights), but the discipline of History was itself experiencing dramatic changes. New approaches to scholarship and teaching, styled the “new social history” or “history from the bottom up,” were challenging the bastions of a largely white, largely male-dominated profession.

"Brilliant scholar-teachers such as Douglas Jones, Howard Malchow, Virginia Drachman, Pierre Laurent, and Howard Solomon responded with exciting offerings such as Poverty in Colonial America, Social Deviance in Early Modern Europe, and Crime in Victorian England, inspiring me to break dusty conventions in my own teaching and writing. They taught me to incorporate Native American voices to recall the Puritan invasion in colonial America or sailors’ logbooks and journal to trace the first American voyages across the Pacific in books such as True Yankees and Eastward of Good Hope.

"I am retired now, after nearly forty years of teaching the 'Tufts way,' hoping that I brought the same spirit of passionate inquiry into my own classrooms and looking forward to what the next generations of Tufts historians will achieve."