Dr. Huffman Featured on Messiah Website

You might not expect a historian of Medieval and Renaissance Europe to be among the first educators at Messiah College to volunteer to lead a pilot project exploring the impact of mobile technology—in this case, the iPad—on students’ ability to learn. But that’s exactly what happened.

Joseph Huffman, distinguished professor of European history, and the eight students in his fall 2011 Intermediate Latin course exchanged their paper textbooks for iPads loaded with the required texts, relevant apps, supplementary PDFs and a Latin-English dictionary. The primary goal was to advance the learning of Latin. The secondary goal was to determine whether the use of the iPad improved, inhibited or did not affect their ability to learn a foreign language.

Why Latin?
“A Latin course is about as traditional a humanities course as one can find,” Huffman says. Because any foreign language course requires deep and close readings of the texts, studying how student learning and engagement are affected by mobile technology is especially provocative in such a classic course. In addition, Latin fulfills general language course requirements and, therefore, classes are comprised of students from a variety of majors with, perhaps, diverse experiences with mobile technologies like iPads.

Read the rest here.

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History Department Faculty Updates

I asked history faculty what they had been up to recently with their teaching, research, and service.  Here are some updates I received:

• Anne Marie Stoner-Eby began her new project on the history of Mennonites in Tanzania and Ethiopia this Fall with two conference papers given at the Conference on Faith and History (CFH) held at George Fox University in Oregon and the annual meeting of the African Studies Association (ASA) held in San Francisco.  Her CFH paper was titled “Effects and Limits of the East African Revival on the Mennonite Mission in Colonial Tanzania, 1930s-1950s.”  Her ASA paper was part of a panel that she organized and chaired titled  Constructing Lives of Faith:  Self, Community, and Agency in African Christian Biography/Autobiography. Her paper was titled:  “Building a Church Locally and Globally: The Twentieth Century Autobiography of the First African Bishop of the Tanzanian Mennonite Church.”  Anne Marie enjoyed her research for these papers which took her to the headquarters of Eastern Mennonite Missions in Salunga, Pennsylvania and the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  She had fun conducting a number of interviews.  She has also enjoyed  helping to organize events for International Education Week held in mid-November and planning a May Term in Ethiopia for 2012.  Finally, she’s helping to get the Peace and Conflict Studies major off the ground.  BTW, the 36 credit PACS major makes a great second major for History majors!

 

• In addition to his duties as department chair, John Fea is ramping up for the publication of his new book, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction and the speaking engagements that accompany it.  His co-edited book Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation has already been adopted as a textbook at a few colleges and universities around the country.  In November 2010 he signed a contract with Baker Academic for a book tentatively titled The Power to Transform: A Christian Reflection on the Study of the Past.  This Spring he is working on two essays–one on the relationship between evangelicalism, Anabaptism, and the study of the past for an edited collection on evangelicalism and Anabaptism to be published by Cascade Books and the other on New Jersey in the American Revolution for an edited volume on new directions in New Jersey history to be published by Rutgers University Press.  Long term projects include a book about Presbyterians and the American Revolution and a book about the memory of an 18th century “tea party” in the town of Greenwich, NJ.  For the later project, John has again received funding from the New Jersey Historical Commission to bring a group of students and former students to Greenwich to conduct summer research.  And finally, John continues to blog daily at The Way of Improvement Leads Home.  His blog was recently chosen by the Social Science Research Council as one of the top 100 religion blogs in America.

 

• Joseph Huffman has once again assumed the directorship of the Center for Public Humanities, and this year he has not only to provide leadership to the Center’s many educational, civic, and cultural programs but also has been conducting a program review of the Center.  In addition, he continues to teach both medieval & Renaissance European history as well as Latin language and literature courses.  He is scheduled to teach a Readings Course steeped in primary sources on the Trial of Joan of Arc next fall semester, which should be fun!  Along the way he has also published four book reviews with the European journal Francia: Studies in Western European History and the American Library Association’s journal Choice.  His article titled, “Between History and Romance: Teaching Medieval Culture to Undergraduates through Chivalric Biography” appeared December in the journal Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (17: 2).

 

• David Pettegrew has been busy preparing for archaeological fieldwork at the Stauffer farm, a site near Dillsburg that dates from the later 1700s.  Some two dozen history students will be excavating at the farm in late March recording the buildings on the property, and documenting a nearby cemetery that is badly in need of preservation.  Look for updates via this blog.  Over the last semester, David has been making progress on a book on the Corinthian Isthmus, and has delivered papers on the commercial image of the Roman city.  He has forthcoming articles on the diolkos of Corinth, the ancient railway used for transporting cargoes across the Isthmus and occasionally military ships.  He is preparing for an archaeology field school in Cyprus in May-June 2012 and encourages any interested students to stop by and discuss the opportunity. Finally, David has been blogging somewhat frequently on Corinthian history, archaeology and religion.

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Summer in Review

The history department is gearing up for another academic year that will begin on Monday with our orientation for new history majors. Over the last week, as we gathered for meetings to discuss our plans, I asked my colleagues how they passed their time this summer. Yesterday Bernardo posted on his research at the British Library. Here is what others had to say.

Jim LaGrand spent some of this past summer moving into and remodeling his family’s new home near the campus. There, he built a desk for himself at which he finished writing an article on Progressive-era urban reform and continued reading for a project on American nationalism and its uses. He was also busy with several church responsibilities, including preparing to teach an adult Sunday School class on the Reformation (N.B. as a complete interloper-novice). And he enjoyed trips with his family to see relatives in Georgia and Michigan, and watching the World Cup with his son.

John Fea had a busy summer bringing to completion two books. Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation will be out in late October and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction will be out in February. He also spent the summer preparing public lectures he will be giving this fall, attending a conference on how to be an effective department chair, conducting workshops with American history teachers in New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina, doing some consulting work for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, and blogging at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. In June, he took two current history majors, a history department alum, and his daughter Allyson on a research trip to a small southern New Jersey town called Greenwich. They conducted research for a forthcoming project called “The Greenwich Tea Burning: History and Memory in an American Town.” Sometime in July, he managed to sneak in a family vacation to historic Philadelphia!

Joseph Huffman conducted research (for a book on the history of medieval Cologne) at the Abteilung für Rheinische Landesgeschichte [the Division for Rhineland Regional History] of the University of Bonn for a week in early August, thanks to a generous grant attached to his appointment as a Distinguished Professor at Messiah College. In Bonn he not only met with several German colleagues and graduate students of medieval history but also gathered an extensive amount of archival and library research data. Thereafter, he and his wife Peggy enjoyed a belated 30^th-wedding anniversary weekend in Cologne and Paris, and when in Paris they found Peggy’s original family parish church of St. Étienne du Mont in the Latin Quarter. The remainder of the summer was spent reading for both fall courses and for the book project, and taking on new responsibilities as the director of the Center for Public Humanities.

Anne Marie Stoner-Eby enjoyed camping this summer in Acadia National Park with her husband and two sons, ages 5 and 9, and she also found time for several work-related projects!  She is helping launch the new Peace and Conflict Studies major, an interdisciplinary major with history as one of its three core disciplines.  She has been leading a committee considering partnerships with African Christian colleges, and she began a new research project on the history of the Mennonite mission and church in Tanzania and Ethiopia.

David Pettegrew took seven students majoring in history, art history, and biblical and religious studies to Cyprus in late May to take part in the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project field school. He conducted several days of research in the Corinthia, Greece, and found time for vacation with family in Ohio and Kentucky. During the rest of the summer, he finished articles on the “diolkos” of Corinth and Hellenistic towers in Greece and continued working on a book manuscript called The Isthmus of Corinth. He enjoyed making progress on some home projects (like chainsawing branches off his trees!) and spending time with his wife and baby son.

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