Welcome to a new feature on the CSH blog: Good News. As the semester draws to a close, we want to share some good news from our community, starting with the Department of History.

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Faculty

This year three History professors celebrated milestone anniversaries in teaching at Ball State. Congratulations to Profs. Bruce Geelhoed (45 years), Abel Alves (30 years), Carolyn Malone (25 years), and Nicole Etcheson (15 years)!

 

Prof. Dorshele Stewart and her project team have being awarded the Provost Immersive Learning Pilot Grant for their project “Building Better Elementary School’s Educators: Pre-Service Teacher Candidates Become Civil Rights Content Experts.” Project partners include Muncie’s Roy C. Buley Community Center, faculty from Teachers College, and History’s own Prof. Max Felker-Kantor.

Prof. Ronald Morris has released a new book with the University of Notre Dame Press, titled Yountsville: The Rise and Decline of an Indiana Mill Town. 

Prof. Bruce Geelhoed has just published a new book with the University of Oklahoma Press, Diplomacy Shot Down: The U-2 Crisis and Eisenhower’s Aborted Mission to Moscow, 1959-1960.

Prof. Sergei Zhuk has been granted a Fulbright Award to teach in the People’s Republic of China in 2021.

Prof. Ken Hall has been appointed to the Editorial Board of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History.

Students

On April 1, 2020, we held an online awards ceremony. No dress code! No speeches! No handshakes! Lots of faculty bragging on their students. Find out who won scholarships and awards on the CSH blog. 

From April 26 to May 3, we’ll hold a Gratitude / Graditude Week of social media posts to celebrate our graduating seniors, announce our Outstanding Juniors and Seniors, and thank our ‘essential workers’. Join us on Facebook and Instagram each day at 12 noon and congratulate everyone who made this strange semester run so smoothly. @ballstatehist

Graduating senior Natalie Bradshaw has received a Fulbright. Out of 22 applicants from Ball State, there were eleven finalists, three of whom were ultimately awarded Fulbrights. Natalie is a student in the Honors College with majors in history and social studies education and a minor in German. Natalie has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Germany, where she also intends to become involved with a Wandertag hiking club.

Graduating senior Emma Brauer interned full time at the Henry County History Museum. She had the opportunity to run an entire museum for a day as part of her capstone internship, as well as create a historical narrative about a 9-year-old girl from New Castle, Indiana who went missing in 1913.

Graduating senior Elise Schrader interned with the Indiana State Museum in Fall 2019, where she worked with some “out-of-this-world” pieces of history.

History and Biology double major Emma Cieslik completed a Collections Internship at the David Owsley Museum of Art (DOMA) this semester, where she learned collections management skills.

Graduating senior Noah Nobbe worked as a curatorial intern at the Indiana State Museum in Spring 2020. Learn more about how he created short biographical videos with historical reenactors that focused on Indiana figures in the American Revolution. 

Seniors Joel Bowers, Allyssa Hunt, Lauren Lee, Zoie Kay Mann, and Sydney M. Smith wrote grants for the teachers in their elementary social studies methods class under the direction of Dr. Ronald V. Morris. Their grants won funding for elementary teachers from the Society of Indiana Pioneers to take students on field trips to learn about the pioneer period in Indiana 1800-1850. 

Alumni

John Marsh (MS World History 1989) recently published an article on History News Network entitled, “Teaching During a Pandemic–A Century Ago” based on letters his grandmother (a high school teacher in Michigan) sent to his grandfather during World War I. Marsh teaches social studies at the Indiana Academy and frequently teaches history courses at Ball State as well. 

After earning her BA in History at Ball State, Noël Sucese is pursuing her Ph.D. at Loyola University of Chicago, where she teaches Western Civilization discussion sections. 

Welcome to alum Kerry Williams. Williams has recently joined the Ball State History Department faculty as an Administrative Coordinator. She started her college studies in 1994 as an Elementary Education major, but fell ill and had to quit. Then she returned as a non-traditional student, changed her major to History, worked full-time at Marsh while earning her degree, and graduated in 2010. She says that she hopes her work will ultimately help history students achieve their dreams.

Sydney Schrock (BS in Public History 2019) has accepted a position as an archival specialist at Eli Lilly and Company. She reports, “Starting my career as a historian and archivist in the city I’ve grown up in is such a dream come true.”

 

If you have good news to share, let us know at ballstatehistorydept@gmail.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Alumni and Students: Join this Facebook group, “Stars to Steer By: The Humanities Work” and get (or give) tips on jobs and internships.