Undergraduate Writing Fellowships

Posted on March 22, 2023 by briansandberg

The Nation magazine is offering Student Writing Fellowships for current undergraduate students in the United States. Ten Student Writing Fellowships will be offered.

Here is the call for applications from The Nation:

The Nation Fund for Independent Journalism is accepting applications for ten Student Writing Fellow spots for an eight-month fellowship program. This program offers college students the opportunity to write for The Nation and to work with professional editors and writers to develop skills critical for a meaningful career in journalism.

Through this concentrated period, fellows will receive editorial and fact-checking training, mentorship, networking opportunities, and support in publishing their writing. Student journalists will apply to be trained and report on specific, dedicated subject areas/beats, all with mentoring by relevant veteran writers who will offer both hard-learned advice and invaluable contacts.  

The broad scope of this project is to show what matters most to young people at this highly fraught historical moment through deeply-reported enterprise journalism. Training sessions will focus on substantive reporting techniques and how to get beyond sensationalized profiles and horse-race coverage of politics. The project will tap into the lived experiences of young people and will focus on the development of a distinctive narrative voice. During the summer and fall of 2023, students will publish at least two long-form reported stories on their stated areas of interest. 

Subject Areas:
1. Racial Justice
2. Labor 
3. Abortion rights 
4. Sports 
5. Climate
6. Immigration 
7. War & Peace/US Foreign-Policy
8. Technology 
9. + 10. US Politics & young people

Requirements
The Fellowship will run from April 10 to December 15, 2023. Fellows will participate in online editorial sessions and conversations with Nation editorial staff and special guests. Fellows will also have a series of one-on-one editorial meetings as their article moves through the editorial process. Fellows work remotely from their own campuses. Fellows will receive a $1,500 stipend, plus compensation for articles upon publication. Students need to be enrolled in college in the fall of 2023 to be eligible.

Application
Applicants must submit the following:
1. A cover letter of not-more-than 250 words telling us why you want to become a StudentNation Fellow and which subject areas you’d be most interested in. (Pick up to three.)
2. One published piece of journalism (a link to the piece is fine).
3. A resume.

Applications will be accepted until 5:00pm EST, March 31, 2023. Application materials should be in Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) format and emailed to studentfellow@thenationfund.org. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Applicants will be informed of their status by April 7. 

Eligibility
Any matriculating undergraduate students at all two and four-year schools in the United States, Canada or Mexico who will still be enrolled through the fall, 2023 semester. Previous StudentNation Fellows ineligible. For questions, email studentfellow@thenationfund.org.

The Nation Fund for Independent Journalism welcomes all applicants, without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or veteran status.

Posted in Careers in History, Grants and Fellowships, Humanities Education, Political Culture | Leave a comment

Digital Humanities Position with the NEH

Posted on March 20, 2023 by briansandberg

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is hiring a Program Specialist with the Office of Digital Humanities.

The NEH indicates that “The Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) offers grant programs that fund project teams experimenting with digital technologies to develop new methodologies for humanities research, teaching and learning, public engagement, and scholarly communications. ODH funds those studying digital technology from a humanistic perspective and humanists seeking to create digital publications. Another major goal of ODH is to increase capacity of the humanities in applying digital methods.”

According to the job description, “The Program Specialist acts as an expert in matters pertaining to digital humanities, library, and museum-related grants, and grant-funded research.”

This position would be perfect for a recent graduate of a M.A. or Ph.D. Program in History. The job announcement indicates that a Ph.D. is preferred, but not required.

For more information on this position, see the job description at USA Jobs.

Any Northern Illinois University graduate students or recent M.A.s and Ph.D.s interested in this position should contact me via email.

The Graduate Programs in History at Northern Illinois University prepare graduate students for positions in Digital Humanities and Public History. For information on NIU’s graduate programs in History, see the Department of History’s website.

Posted in Careers in History, Digital Humanities, Graduate Work in History, Humanities Education, Jobs and Positions | Leave a comment

University of Chicago Graduate Assistants Unionize

Posted on March 20, 2023 by briansandberg

Graduate students employed as teaching and research assistants at the University of Chicago have voted overwhelmingly to unionize.

According to Inside Higher Ed, “University of Chicago graduate student workers have voted 1,696 to 155 to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board announced Thursday evening.”

This is the latest in a series of unionization initiatives at universities across the nation. Graduate assistants, adjunct instructors, and faculty members have successfully unionized in many of those institutions.

Within the State of Illinois, the graduate assistants at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign successfully unionized in 2003. Graduate assistants at many other universities have been seeking to unionize, and Northwestern University graduate students recently voted to form a union. The faculty of University of Illinois at Chicago and Northern Illinois University are unionized and have recently renegotiated their contracts.

For more information, see the article in Inside Higher Ed and the website of the UChicago Graduate Students United.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Pension Reform in France

Posted on March 20, 2023 by briansandberg

The French government and its Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, have survived a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly. Borne heads a government led by President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance Party (formerly known as La République en Marche !).

The no-confidence vote had been triggered by the government’s use of Article 49.3 of the French Constitution, a rarely used provision which allows for governmental passage of certain bills without a vote of the full National Assembly.

Roger Cohen reports that “The French National Assembly rejected a no-confidence motion against the government of President Emmanuel Macron, ensuring that a fiercely contested bill raising the retirement age to 64 from 62 becomes the law of the land.”

Cohen notes that “Lawmakers were also voting on a second, and final, no-confidence motion filed by the far-right National Rally party. It has virtually no chance of passing, as most opposition lawmakers vowed not to support a motion put forward by the far right. The first motion received 278 votes, nine short of the 287 needed to pass. The close result reflected widespread anger at the overhaul to the pension law, at Mr. Macron for his apparent aloofness and at the way the measure was rammed through Parliament last week without a full vote on the bill itself.”

President Macron’s sweeping pension reform proposal has been highly controversial, provoking protests across France over the past several months. Macron has been accused of arbitrary rule and tyranny over his use of Article 49.3 to pass this major pension reform.

For more on this breaking news, see reporting in the New York Times and Le Monde. I will try to post additional resources as they become available.

For broader historical context on French political culture and protest culture, see Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (1986).

Posted in Contemporary France, Crowd Studies, European History, European Studies, European Union, French History, Political Activism and Protest Culture, Political Culture, State Development Theory | Leave a comment

Remembering the Invasion of Iraq

Posted on March 20, 2023 by briansandberg

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the United States and Coalition Forces’ Invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Bombardment of Baghdad at the beginning of the Invasion of Iraq on 21 March 2003. Image: Mirrorpix/Getty.

I will be posting resources on this historical commemoration soon.

Posted in History of Violence, Human Rights, Political Culture, Strategy and International Politics, United States Foreign Policy, United States History and Society, War, Culture, and Society | Leave a comment

Cataloger of Western Manuscripts

Posted on March 20, 2023 by briansandberg

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) is hiring a Cataloger of Western Manuscripts.

Recent Ph.D.s in medieval and early modern history may be interested in this position.

The job description reads:

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) invites applications for the full-time, benefit-eligible position of Cataloger of Western Manuscripts. This is a three-year, grant-funded position.

The Cataloger will participate in HMML’s effort to catalog Western manuscripts and to support the creation of authority files by HMML’s metadata librarian. The Cataloger will focus primarily on the migration and correction of legacy data for microfilmed manuscript collections. This position is supervised by and reports to the Director of Cataloging.

Founded in 1965, HMML holds the world’s largest archive of manuscript photographs in both microfilm and digital format. HMML identifies manuscript collections around the world that need photographic preservation and online access. Its archives now contain more than 500,000 complete manuscripts, ranging in size from large codices of hundreds of folios to brief documents consisting of just a few leaves.

Visit  hmml.org to learn more about the places, people and communities that have been part of HMML’s global story, and the manuscripts in HMML’s digital and microfilm collections.

Located on the campus of Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, HMML is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit corporation that contracts with the Order of Saint Benedict (OSB) for employees and employee services. 

For more information, see the full job description on H-Net.

Posted in Archival Research, Careers in History, European History, History of the Western World, Jobs and Positions, Manuscript Studies, Medieval History, Museums and Historical Memory, Paleography, Rare Books and Pamphlets | Leave a comment

Historian Positions with the Department of Defense

Posted on March 19, 2023 by briansandberg

HISTORIAN, Department of Defense

Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is hiring 5 Historians in Hawaii. The position is open to candidates with a B.A. in History and those with a M.A. in History may be especially competitive for these positions.

“The mission of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is to provide the fullest possible accounting for our mission personnel from our Nation’s past conflicts to their families and our Nation. DPAA personnel research, investigate, recover, & identify remains of DoD personnel unaccounted for from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, & the Iraq conflicts and Persian Gulf War. The Director, DPAA (SES-111), reports to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD(P)).”

The full job description is on USA Jobs.

Any Northern Illinois University students or recent graduates in History who are interested in applying for one of these positions should contact me via email to discuss the application process.

Posted in Jobs and Positions, Public History, War, Culture, and Society | Leave a comment

Archaeologists Discover a Sumerian Tavern

Posted on February 22, 2023 by briansandberg

Archaeologists working in Iraq have discovered the remains of a Sumerian tavern in the ruins of the city of Lagash.

“Archaeologists found a seven-room structure featuring an open courtyard with benches and a large open cooking area with a 10-foot-wide mud-brick oven. They also discovered a primitive refrigerator. Known as a ‘zeer‘ in Arabic, the device consisted of two bottomless clay jars that used evaporation to help cool perishable items. In another room, the team discovered a large quantity of conical bowls that held ready-to-eat food and jars that the archaeologists think contained beer.”

The Washington Post reports on the tavern ruins and the city: “Lagash was once a bustling community with a thriving commercial district in southern Mesopotamia,known today as the ‘cradle of civilization.’ Located near the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, Lagash was one of the oldest cities of the Early Dynastic period, about 2900–2350 B.C. … Archaeologists don’t know for certain what was in the numerous jars at the tavern. However, the vast number of clay stoppers with seals featuring government markings — the ancient Sumerians kept track of goods for tax and quality purposes — indicates that some of them at least contained alcoholic beverages.”

Students in HIST 110 History of the Western World I will be interested in this new finding. The Washington Post reports on the tavern ruins in Lagash.

Posted in Ancient History, Cultural History, Food and Cuisine History, History of the Western World, Material Culture, Urban History, World History | Leave a comment

Zemmour contre l’histoire Review

Posted on February 22, 2023 by briansandberg

I was conducting research in Marseille during the 2022 French Presidential Elections and observed the campaign of far-right politician Éric Zemmour closely. I have published a book review related to Zemmour’s campaign in Modern and Contemporary France:

“The stunning growth of far-right politics in France has been associated with the remarkable rise of Éric Zemmour, a journalist, author, political pundit, and media personality who has transformed French political culture with his ultra-nationalist, Islamophobic, and anti- immigrant rhetoric. Zemmour’s overtly racist and neo-fascist political programme is based on disturbing alterations and reinterpretations of French and European history.

“Now, historians are responding to Éric Zemmour’s provocative rewriting of history in Zemmour contre l’histoire, a collective volume that critiques Zemmour’s uses and misuses of the past in his media appearances and his writings. Contributors include Alya Aglan, Florian Besson, Jean-Luc Chappey, Vincent Denis, Jérémie Foa, Claude Gauvard, Laurent Joly, Guillaume Lancereau, Mathilde Larrère, André Loez, Gérard Noiriel, Nicolas Offenstadt, Philippe Oril, Catherine Rideau-Kikuchi, Virginie Sansico, and Sylvie Thénault. Short, engaging essays expose Zemmour’s dangerous distortions of the past for political purposes, revealing the ways in which he ‘continually deforms history’ (3). …”

For access to an eoffprint of the full review (for the first 50 visitors) is available at the Taylor and Francis website.

Posted in Contemporary France, European History, European Studies, European Union, French History, French Revolution and Napoleon, French Wars of Religion, Historiography and Social Theory, History in the Media, Political Culture, Public History | Leave a comment

Position in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Posted on February 20, 2023 by briansandberg

The U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY, is seeking an Assistant Professor in Holocaust, Genocide, Atrocity, Human Rights Studies.

The job description indicates: “Applicants will be evaluated on the following: 1) Academic accomplishment (Ph.D. in History to include demonstrated accomplishments in the fields of Holocaust, Genocide, Atrocity, Human Rights Studies or a closely related field preferred.) 2) Ability to teach an introductory survey in a regional World History and/or on US Army History. 3) Experience and commitment to student centered and active learning instruction. 4) Scholarly successes to include writing and communication ability; 5) Ability to contribute to a Human Rights Center to include assistance with academic administration.”

“The U.S. Military Academy, West Point, NY is an academic institution located in the Hudson River Valley, 50 miles from New York City. The historic site is the oldest continuously occupied military post in America. West Point is a self-contained city with housing, a Department of Public Works, libraries, hospital, fire department, chapels, and restaurants. Employees have access to Eisenhower Hall Theater, Hudson Valley’s performing arts center, and recreational facilities.”

For more information, see the full job ad at USAJobs.gov.

Posted in Atrocities, Civilians and Refugees in War, Genocides, History of Violence, Human Rights, Religious Violence, War, Culture, and Society | Leave a comment