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New Faculty

 

Cynthia Brokaw joins the faculty in the fall of 2009 as a Professor of History.  A historian of late imperial China, she specializes in the study of publishing and book culture.  Her recent book, Commerce in Culture: The Sibao Book Trade in the Qing and Republican Periods (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), draws on archival sources and field work to describe the workings of an important regional woodblock publishing-bookselling center and to analyze the impact that its products had on literacy and social order in southern China from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. She has also edited, with Kai-wing Chow, a volume of essays on late imperial Chinese book history, Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2005). Now, after a year of research in Sichuan province (funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies), she is working on a study of the role that publishing and the spread of book culture played in the integration of frontier regions into the Qing empire. 

Linford Fisher joins the faculty in the fall of 2009 as Assistant Professor of History. Fisher's research centers on the religious and cultural history of Native Americans in eighteenth-century New England. He is interested in the processes of long-term cultural and religious change. His current book project, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, looks at Native American communities in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Long Island (NY), over the long course of the 18th century, particularly with regard to their involvement in the so-called "Great Awakening" of the 1740s. Using a variety of court documents, land deeds, letters, and church records, he traces the selective adoption of Christian ideas and practices by Native individuals prior to and during the Great Awakening, and the subsequent emergence, post-awakening, of a distinct Indian separatism and partial rejection of Anglo-American religious institutions in response to a growing proto-racism. His next book-length project will look at the history of slavery and the shades of servitude in colonial New England among Africans and Native Americans.