Humanities Program Spotlight:

Center for Historical Research Established

The Department of History recently celebrated the official opening of the Center for Historical Research (CHR), one of three targeted investment initiatives in the College designed to build upon existing intellectual strengths and add new pedagogical and research opportunities for faculty and students. With its opening, Ohio State joins a handful of the most prestigious history departments in the country, such as those found at Harvard, Princeton, and Rutgers Universities, which are home to similar centers.

Led by Professor Alan Gallay, the Warner Woodring Professor of Atlantic World and Early American History at Ohio State, the CHR provides a stimulating intellectual environment for visiting fellows to interact with faculty and students to discuss issues of broad contemporary relevance in historical perspective. With its inauguration, the center launched a two-year program, "Crossroads of Globalization: ‘Hot Spots' in the Early Modern World," to investigate sites which had especially significant cultural, economic, and political impact in world history. Through a series of seminars and an international conference in 2009, the CHR will examine the effects of globalization on the sites, surrounding regions, and other areas of the world, thereby bridging local and global history. Gallay notes that graduate courses will be offered to coincide with the seminar, allowing students an extraordinary opportunity to work with scholars from around the world.

As part of its current programming, the CHR welcomed senior fellow Ana Maria Presta, professor of history at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, a specialist in colonial Bolivia with expertise on the hot spot of Potosí, the world's foremost producer of silver in the early modern period. The center also welcomed dissertation fellow Neil Norman, an archaeologist completing his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia, who has conducted extensive research on the West African town of Ouidah, one of the two most important ports for the export of slaves in the eighteenth century.

Due to the broad interdisciplinary appeal of its annual themes, the CHR will involve colleagues from across Ohio State and visiting fellows will be drawn from a range of fields such as anthropology, art history, law, literary and cultural studies, folklore, philosophy, political science, and economics, whose scholarship relates to the subjects at-hand. Information on the CHR and a programming schedule can be found at its Web site.