Top Young Historians: 2008
Edited by Bonnie K. Goodman
Ms. Goodman is the Editor / Features Editor at HNN. She has a Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University, and has done graduate work in history at Concordia University. Her website is historymusings.com
This page features profiles of interesting historians who are making their mark on the profession. All historians are nominated and undergo a review process before they are chosen. Each historian on this list has made outstanding contributions to the discipline in their area of research through their commitment and achievement to scholarship and teaching. They are also highly regarded outside academia for their expertise, and many are consulted by the popular media.
We are trying to represent all fields within history. We are currently looking for new nominations, and appreciate any suggestions; they can be submitted to Bonnie Goodman for consideration. Click here to send your nominations. (All nominations and suggestions will be given serious consideration.)
Sunday, December 14, 2008
J.P. Daughton, 38
Basic FactsTeaching Position: Assistant Professor, Department of History, Stanford University, 2004-Present Personal AnecdoteThe best thing about being an historian, in my opinion, is working in archives. The research for my book, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914, took me to almost twenty archives on four continents. They ranged from the high-ceilinged reading room of the Archives Nationales in Paris to a small table next to a photocopy machine in a cramped office of the Papeete, Tahiti archdiocese. Non-historians often ask me what exactly I do at the archives. For me, it is a little like digging through the old papers left in someone's long abandoned desk. An average box or bundle of documents - at least the ones I look at most - is often a hodgepodge of letters, handwritten notes, receipts, a calling card from some forgotten visitor, official reports, and faded photographs. Spending hours sifting through dead people's refuse is not for everyone. But at no point in researching or writing do I feel more connected to my subject than in the archives. There is something undeniably voyeuristic about archival work: reading letters never meant to be read by outsiders, seeing pictures not taken for posterity's sake, perusing someone else's secrets and exposing their plans. These remnants present great puzzles to be unraveled. Who were these people whose lives we now look into? How did they see their world, and how did they organize their vision of it? Trying to answer such questions inevitably requires looking for more and more sources, opening wider the cast of human characters, complicating the plot, drawing you in like a good mystery. The probing historian can discover things about historical figures - their motives, insecurities and contradictions - that they themselves may have denied or hidden from friends and loved ones. Archives are also much more than repositories of documents. They are often themselves places where memories of the past come alive - sometimes in astonishing ways. One archivist, for example, at a religious archive in Paris assured me that, had the Catholic missionaries of the South Pacific failed to spread Christianity in the nineteenth century, the cannibal Polynesians would have eaten one another into extinction. On another occasion, a French woman working in the departmental archives in Tahiti told me that she did not know why so many people wrote critically of colonialism when it was obvious that the Tahitians were happy to have gained the great cultural traditions of the French. While this struck me as a misguided assessment, I was equally surprised to have an octogenarian Vietnamese historian at the national archives in Hanoi wax nostalgic about the 1930s when he and his friends spoke French and devoured the latest books and music from Paris. I have been in archives where I saw a rat scurry across the floor. I have unearthed worms gnawing through documents. I have seen people weep, sleep, and get angry in archives. I have even seen an archivist pass out from too much drinking at lunchtime. But I have never been bored in an archive. It is a place where Faulkner's often quoted observation - "The past is never dead. It's not even past." - takes on real meaning. QuotesBy James Patrick Daughton  reform and develop colonial societies - was in fact much less an extension of revolutionary republican values than a set of individual projects defined by degrees of dissent, debate, competition, and collaboration between people both at home and abroad. Differences of opinion over strategies of colonizing... forced administrators, missionaries, colonists, local inhabitants, and others to present, critique, and defend plans for expansion and control.... The "civilizing" policies ultimately adopted were neither strictly republican nor Catholic. Instead, they were shaped by the anxieties and aspirations of a variety of French men and women faced with the challenge of living with one another and ruling large indigenous populations. -- James Patrick Daughton in "An Empire Divided"About James Patrick Daughton |
In God's Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World, co-edited with Owen White (a collection of thirteen articles, currently under review with Oxford University Press). Daughton is currently working on Imperial Hardships: The Politics of Suffering in the Rise and Fall of the French Empire(book length project in progress), and Humanity So Far Away: Empires, International Organizations, and the Making of International Humanitarianism (book length project in progress). Daughton is also the author of numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and reviews including among others: "When Argentina Was 'French': Rethinking Cultural Politics and European Imperialism in Belle-Époque Buenos Aires," Journal of Modern History (forthcoming, December 2008); "Documenting Colonial Violence: The International Campaign Against Forced Labor during the Interwar Years," Revue de l'Histoire de la Shoah, No. 189 (October, 2008); "Recasting Pigneau de Béhaine: French Missionaries and the Politics of Colonial History," in Nhung Tuyet Tran and Anthony Reid (eds.), Viet Nam: Borderless Histories (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); "A Colonial Affair?: Dreyfus and the French Empire," Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 31: 3 (Fall 2005): 469-84; "Kings of the Mountains: Mayréna, Missionaries, and French Colonial Divisions in 1880s Indochina," Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction25: 3/4 (2001): 185-217; Reprinted in Eric Jennings (ed.), French Colonial Indochina (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming), and "Sketches of the Poilu's World: Trench Cartoons from the Great War," in Douglas Mackaman and Michael Mays (eds.), World War I and the Cultures of Modernity(University Press of Mississippi, 2000). Awards: Daughton is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including among others:Sunday, November 16, 2008
Matthew Avery Sutton, 33
Basic FactsTeaching Position: Assistant Professor of History at College of Liberal Arts, Washington State University, 2008- Personal AnecdoteI remember as an undergraduate watching teachers ruffle through their notes in the middle of a lecture, looking totally perplexed as they hunted for the one page that was eluding them. And I remember others who would check every pocket-pants, shirt, coat, and bag-looking for that lost piece of chalk, or the one white-board marker that still had some ink left. I vowed then and there that I would never become one of them-I would never be an absent minded professor. Well, I have become one. At no time was this clearer than one day last semester. Although I did not teach that day, I had a series of meetings with students. I thought everything had gone fine-until I got home that night and discovered that my polo shirt had been on inside-out the entire day. Yep, the tag was sticking out from the back of my neck, my buttons were on the inside, and the seams ran along the outside of the shirt. I hoped that students might think that I was a trend-setter, but I know what they really thought. There is Sutton-the absent-minded professor. Unfortunately, I suspect my absent-mindedness is only going to get worse. Fight it as I may, I guess I am going to have to embrace the label. I suppose I am in good company. My research explores the intersections among religion, politics, and American culture. Despite the fact that "religion an |
awarded annually to the best book in any discipline by a first-time author. The book also served as the basis for the Public Broadcasting Service documentary Sister Aimee, part of PBS's American Experience series.