CHIEF EDITOR

Laura J. Mitchell (University of California, Irvine)  teaches African and World History at UC Irvine. She works on making sense of early-modern societies in a digital age, and on making history accessible to diverse audiences. Her research on colonial Southern Africa has been supported by grants from Fulbright, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She has served on the World History Association Executive Council, currently serves on the AP World History Curriculum Assessment and Development Committee, is Vice President of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, and directs the Past Tense writing seminar at the Huntington Library. Her book, Belongings: Property, Family and Identity in Colonial South Africa (Columbia University Press, 2009) is available online at www.gutenberg-e.org/mitchell .

NEWS EDITORS

Justin Bengry holds a PhD in modern British history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His dissertation, “The Pink Pound: Commerce and Homosexuality in Britain, 1900-1967,” illuminates the relationship between commercial enterprise and homosexuality before the partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967. It explores the fullest range of economic incentives offered both by queer consumers as well as commercial invocations of homosexuality directed at mainstream consumers regardless of sexual orientation. He is particularly interested in the use of cultural history to explore political and economic experience. His research interests focus on queer history, consumerism, and popular culture. More on Justin at: www.justinbengry.com and http://independent.academia.edu/JustinBengry.

John Cunningham has recently completed his doctoral programme. He has been based at the Moore Institute, N.U.I., Galway for four years under the supervision of Professor Nicholas Canny. His thesis title was ‘Transplantation to Connacht, 1641-1680: theory and practice’. This was a study of a key aspect of the land settlement implemented in Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century.

Yaniv Fox is a PhD student at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel. The title of his PhD thesis: ‘Frankish aristocracy and Columbanian monasticism:  Power and religion in Merovingian Burgundy’. He is currently researching the relationship between Frankish and Gallo-Roman noble families and Columbanian foundations in Merovingian Gaul, with particular focus on land donations as a political strategy of the nobility.

His webpage: http://sites.google.com/site/earlymedieval

Kimberley Knight is a PhD student at the St Andrews Institute for Mediaeval Studies, Scotland. Under the supervision of Professor Frances Andrews and funded by the Art and Humanities Research Council, Kimberley’s thesis explores the Gift of Tears in the 13th century. Using hagiographic materials from the new spiritual orders her research explores why weeping became an increasingly prevalent feature of sanctity and seeks to understand how weeping was practiced as well as prescribed during this period.
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/saims/

Jana Remy is a PhD candidate in American History at University of California, Irvine.  She studies medical history during the late nineteenth century in the American West. Her dissertation explores the application of new medical knowledge into clinical practice, specifically for the treatment of infectious diseases.  Her teaching areas include 19th century America, gender studies, history of medicine, and disability studies.  As a side interest, she enjoys contemplating the possibilities of the digital humanities. Though she hasn’t yet applied any digital tools to her research other than using Zotero and digitized images, she is currently exploring ways to use data or text mining for my dissertation.  Her history-related blog and podcast are at www.makinghistorypodcast.com (on twitter: MHpodcast ).  For non-academic topics, she writes at www.pilgrimsteps.com.

Jean Smith is a doctoral student in modern British history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Virginia and a master’s from U.C., Santa Barbara. Her dissertation focuses on British migration to Southern Africa during the Second World War and after. More broadly, her research interests include settler colonialism, migration, gender, and oral history.

Angela Sutton is working on her PhD in Atlantic History at Vanderbilt University, and completed her B.A. (Hons) at the University of Stirling, Scotland. In her doctoral dissertation, she uses 17th century Dutch, English, and German sources to investigate piracy and the culture of lawlessness surrounding the Atlantic slave trade in Africa and the Americas. Darkmatter Journal has recently published an article about Atlantic Orientalism and the Barbary Pirates, available at http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2009/12/20/atlantic-orientalism-how-language-in-jefferson%E2%80%99s-america-defeated-the-barbary-pirates.

James Wallace is currently working on his PhD at McGill University in Montreal after completing a B.A (Hons.) at the University of Toronto and a MSc. at the University of Edinburgh. His doctoral dissertation entitled, ‘Scotland on the Cheap: Popular Printing, Networks and News, 1685 – 1810’, examines the creation and maturation of a ‘cheap’ or ‘popular’ printing industry in Scotland during the long eighteenth century. It seeks to:

1) Identify trends and obstacles in the production and distribution of cheap or popular print in order to link them with recent scholarship on the organizational, regulatory and discursive aspects of the Scottish book trade;

2) To document the ways in which formats and genres identified as ‘cheap’ or ‘popular’ participated in the development or re-imagining of Scottish political, religious, and cultural identities during this period;

3) A re-evaluation of the relationship between cheap print formats (particularly broadsides, pamphlets and chapbooks) and the production, distribution and consumption of news during the eighteenth century, with a focus on the role of reprinting in abstract to create a ‘sensational’ atmosphere for domestic news. His other major research interest is the history of sexuality in Britain during the long eighteenth century with a particular focus on the role of space and urban topography in framing sexual ‘moments’, interposing on the formation of identities and creating sexual geographies in the public sphere. He is also affiliated with the Making Publics project at McGill, the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (CSECS), and the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP).

Shellen Wu is currently a visiting assistant professor at Bates College. She completed her Ph.D. at Princeton University. Her advisor was Professor Benjamin Elman, and her dissertation was entitled: “Underground Empires: German Imperialism and the Rise of Modern Geology in China, 1860-1919.” Her research interests, like her dissertation, are transnational, and she is also interested in science and technology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.