Department of History

Faculty Research

Recent faculty research within the Department of History at PLU:

In October 2007, Benson Family Chair and history professor E. Wayne Carp chaired a panel at the 2nd International Conference on Adoption and Culture, which was held at the University of Pittsburgh. His paper “How Tight Was the Seal?: A Reappraisal of Adoption Records in the United States, England, and New Zealand, 1851-1955” will be published this summer in International Advances in Adoption Research for Practice, edited by Elsbeth Neil and Gretchen Wrobel (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons). A second paper, “Does Opening Adoption Records Have an Adverse Social Impact?: Some Lessons from the U.S. Great Britain, and Australia, 1953-2007," will be published in Adoption Quarterly also this summer 2008.

Professor Adam Cathcart published “Atrocities, Insults, and ‘Jeep Girls’: Depictions of the U.S. Military in China, 1945-1949” in the International Journal of Comic Art (Spring 2008) and had book reviews published in Korean Studies and Acta Koreana. In May 2008 he presented a paper at the Ricci Institute Symposium on Western-Chinese Musical Exchanges at the University of San Francisco and also participated in a Korean War panel at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting. His article “Peripheral Influence: The Sinuiju Student Incident and the Soviet Occupation of North Korea, 1945-1947,” with Charles Kraus, is forthcoming in Journal of Korean Studies (Fall 2008).

Robert P. Ericksen, Kurt Mayer Professor of Holocaust Studies, delivered the annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in November 2007. This lecture, “Christian Complicity? Changing Views on German Churches and the Holocaust,” will appear as an occasional paper of the Holocaust Museum in summer 2008. He recently published “The Question of Complicity” in Katarzyna Stoklosa and Andrea Strübind, eds., Glaube – Freiheit – Diktatur in Europa und den USA. Festschrift für Gerhard Besier zum 60. Geburtstag (2007). His lecture from a 2006 conference in Poland, “American Churches, The Fall of the Wall, and American Foreign Policy: Some Reflections,” appeared in Religion – Staat – Gesellschaft (2007). His “Protagonists—Protestants” will appear in The Oxford Handbook on the Holocaust (2009). During the summer of 2008 he is a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, working in Berlin on his book manuscript, Complicity in the Killing? German Churches, German Universities, and the Holocaust.

Professor Gina Hames wrote an article “Maize-Beer, Gossip, and Slander: Female Tavern Proprietors and Urban, Ethnic Cultural Elaboration in Bolivia, 1870-1930,” Journal of Social History, 37 (Winter 2003): 351-364.

Professor Michael J. Halvorson is co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection entitled Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (with Karen Spierling), in press with Ashgate Publishing. An article entitled "Jews and Jesuits in a Confessional Age: Heinrich Heshusius and the Boundaries of Community in Hildesheim" appears this Fall in Sixteenth Century Journal. He completed research in Germany during Spring and Summer 2007 on a fellowship granted by the Herzog August Bibliothek, and returns again to Germany in Summer 2008 with a PLU Regent's Award. In October, 2008, he chairs a panel on Jewish-Christian relations in early modern Europe at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in St. Louis.

Professor Beth Kraig wrote two articles in Business and Industry, ed. William Childs, et al. In 2008-2009, she will be working with History major Kristen McCabe on a PLU Severtson Research Award project, which emphasizes student-faculty research and collaboration.