E. Wayne Carp recently completed a book manuscript under the title Jean Paton: Adoption Revolutionary, which is currently under review at several university presses. A chapter from the book, entitled “The Evolution of a Reformer: Jean Paton and the Early Decades of Sealed Adoption Records, 1949–1980,” will be published in the journal Adoption & Culture. He also was invited to lead a panel discussion at the National Fulbright Conference, Washington, D.C. in Nov. 2011 on the topic, “Should Adoption Records be Opened.” National Fulbright Conference, Washington, D.C. Nov. 3-6, 2011. Earlier this year, he gave a paper on “Jean Paton and Madalyn Murray O’Hare: The Power of the Stigma of Illegitimacy in the 1950s” at the Society for the History of Children and Youth’s Sixth Biennial Conference, Columbia University, NYC. He also has been hired as a legal consultant/expert witness for a Seattle law firm in the case of a “wrongful adoption” of an Ethiopian child. To read some of Carp's recent articles, click on: http://ssrn.com/author=1342242.
After teaching a PLU J-term course on Modern Korea, Assistant Professor Adam Cathcart spent the spring and summer of 2012 in East Asia and Europe, working primarily on projects related to China's relations with North Korea. He gave lectures at King's College (London) and Leiden University (Netherlands), as well as at the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu, and published several highly-regarded document dossiers in his capacity of chief editor of SinoNK.com. Cathcart's research articles were published in Journal of Cold War Studies and Yonsei Journal of International Studies, and he placed essays in The Atlantic, The Diplomat, Daily NK, and Foreign Policy. Dr. Cathcart continues his research into Sino-Japanese relations, an area in which his article "To Serve Revenge for the Dead: Chinese Communist Responses to Japanese War Crimes, 1949-1956" won China Quarterly’s Gordon White Prize in 2010. His work on Sino-European cultural relations is small but growing; he recently had an article about Simone du Beauvoir and Sino-French relations accepted at Chinese Historical Review, and published a piece about artist Ai Weiwei in Sino-German relations in China Beat in December 2011. Cathart's personal website contains more complete information about his publication, research, and lecture/performance agenda; he can also be followed via Twitter, @adamcathcart.
Robert Ericksen has completed a book manuscript under the title, German Churches, German Universities and the Holocaust: The Question of Complicity. This book, based on the Kaplan Holocaust Lectures he delivered at Cape Town University in 2004, has been accepted by Cambridge University Press, with publication expected in late 2011. He also has a contract with Cambridge University Press to complete a book entitled, Churches in Nazi Germany. He expects to finish by next fall and the book will appear in 2012 in the Short History Series published by Cambridge . In Nov. 2010 Ericksen organized a panel session for the Lessons & Legacies Biennial Holocaust Conference in Boca Raton, FL under the title, "German Protestants and Jews." He gave a paper on "Cioma Schoenhaus and the Kaufmann Circle: Forged ID and the Confessing Church." He also gave a paper in November at a conference sponsored by the University of Chichester and Chichester Cathedral in England. The conference was on "Churches and Intellectual Freedom" and his paper dealt with "Emanuel Hirsch, Intellectual Freedom, and the Turn Toward Hitler." This paper will be published in the Spring 2011 edition of a German journal, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte. Other recent publications by Ericksen include, "Parsing Science and Prejudice: Susannah Heschel on the 'Aryan Jesus' in Germany," The Review of Rabbinic Judaism, 13/1 (2010); and the chapter on Protestants in John Roth and Peter Hayers, ed., The Oxford Handbook on Holocaust Education (Oxford, 2010).
In 2010, Michael Halvorson published a biographical study of a German Lutheran pastor during the late Reformation entitled Heinrich Heshusius and Confessional Polemic in Early Lutheran Orthodoxy (Ashgate). He also presented a paper at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Montreal (October, 2010) entitled “The Psalms as Polemic? Anti-Catholic Propaganda in Lutheran Sermons on the Psalter during the Early Age of Orthodoxy”. In 2008, he published Defining Community in Early Modern Europe, a collection of essays co-edited with Karen E. Spierling (Ashgate), and "Jews and Jesuits in a Confessional Age: Heinrich Heshusius and the Boundaries of Community in Hildesheim", Sixteenth Century Journal 39/3 (2008). He is currently working on a trade press manuscript provisionally entitled Ten Brilliant Leaps of Imagination from Early Modern Europe, which blends historical analysis with contemporary travel narratives.
Recent publications by Beth Kraig include articles on Grace Jones and Cynthia McKinney in the African American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2008 and available through Oxford's online African American Studies Center. Recent journal articles include "Are We There Yet, Driver? Searching for the Automotive Human," Midwest Quarterly 48 (2007), and "It's About Time Somebody Out Here Wrote the Truth: Betty Bard MacDonald and North/Western Regionalism," Western American Literature 40 and "The Unquiet Death of Guglielmo Olivotto," Peace & Change 30 (2005).
The History department is pleased to announce the publication of a new book by Professor Emeritus Phil Nordquist entitled Inquiry, Service, Leadership, and Care: Pacific Lutheran University, 1988-2008 (PLU Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-87362-971-3). This is Professor Nordquist's second volume devoted to PLU's history as an educational institution (founded in 1890); the new volume chronicles influential faculty, institutional commitments and struggles, and PLU's emerging global focus. Copies can be purchased at the Garfield Book Company at PLU.