This latest in from our friends on the Native Studies Listserve:On January 23 the chairs of the Department of History and the American Studies Program at Yale University circulated email announcements stating that Yale successfully concluded negotiations with Ned Blackhawk and Birgit Rasmussen. Blackhawk, a leading scholar of American Indian history whose first book Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West garnered awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Western History Association, the AmericanSociety for Ethnohistory, the American Studies Association, and the Western History Association, will join the Department of History as Professor of Native American History. Birgit Rasmussen, as scholar of early American literature, will join the American Studies Program as Assistant Professor. (Hat Tip.)
Birgit Rasmussen's work I know less well, but your Radical is a huge fan of Ned Blackhawk, and in addition to congratulating her friends in the History and American Studies Departments at Yale for pulling this off, is running up the Radical flag in celebration of soon having Blackhawk and Rasmussen as neighbors. In other Native American Studies news, anyone in the Zenith vicinity is invited to attend a public lecture by Phil Deloria, American Studies, University of Michigan, this Thursday, January 29th at 8 p.m. The talk is titled "Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family Memoir," and is at the Center for African American Studies Lounge, 343 High Street, Wesleyan University, Middletown CT, 06459. Deloria is the outgoing president of the American Studies Association.
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8 comments:
Good thing he's coming in with tenure. Yale is notorious for being vicious to their untenured faculty.
Congrats to Ned and Birgit, though we'll miss both of them here in Wisconsin. I have to say, however, that I find these losses, that once again go to a large university in the East, disheartening. We don't have the resources, or the state support, to compete, and while a terrific and exciting move for faculty, seems also a loss for all of the rest of us out here.
Dear Anonymous 2:18,
You are the second Wisconsin person I have heard from about how decimated the department is. Perhaps I should have extended my sympathies in the post, but since it was written as a welcome to Ned and Birgit, I actually don;t think that would have been appropriate. But welcome to my world, denizens of the R-1 -- Zenith is one of the places from which senior women and faculty of color in particular tend to get cherry picked as research universities try to bolster their miserable performance at hiring, tenuring and promoting. Here, although departments can get hammered, with a faculty of 225 or so, the loss of 5 or 6 senior women, or even 1 or 2 faculty of color, across the university is decimating to our efforts to have a critical mass of senior people who are in a policy-changing role.
This is depressing to see, and proves that capitalism is alive and well in the heart of academia.
anonymous 11:37 --
I know. It's puzzling why academics can't rise above the desire for a good salary, the kind of challenge that a new job often provides, and being rewarded for their achievements by new opportunities.
Beats me.
TR
Are you implying these opportunities weren't available at Wisconsin?
The beast slouches towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.
Ned's leaving Wisconsin has been in the works for some time and it had nothing to do with Wisconsin's supposed lack of money. Let's just say that both Wisconsin and Ned are very fortunate that his book was so well received that he could go elsewhere on his own terms.
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