This roundtable will offer history department faculty perspectives on the sometimes-controversial subject of Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about race and slavery. Faculty members will discuss how they teach about Lincoln and race in the classroom and introduce audience members to documentary evidence that reveals Lincoln’s complicated relationship with race and slavery. Additionally, Lincoln’s place in visual culture will be addressed. Finally, the roundtable will conclude with plenty of time for Q&A with the audience.
Panelists:
Terry A. Barnhart is professor of history and graduate coordinator of the M.A. in Historical Administration Program at Eastern. He joined the history faculty in 1994 and previously worked as an associate curator and director of special projects within the Education Division at the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus. Barnhart received a Ph.D. in history from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, in 1989. His research and teaching interests include Midwestern history and culture, American regionalism, and American state and local history. He teaches U.S. history and Illinois history at the undergraduate level and research methods in American local history, introduction to archival methods, and historical interpretation for public audiences within the M.A. Historical Administration program.
Lynne Curry is a professor of history at Eastern. She is the author of several works pertaining to American legal and constitutional history and co-editor of a four-volume collection of historical documents, The Constitution and the Nation. A member of the history department faculty since 1996, she has been named faculty laureate, the Rodney S. Raines graduate faculty mentor and distinguished honors college faculty. Her courses include an undergraduate survey on the U.S. Constitution and the nation, as well as a special topics graduate seminar on American civil liberties.
Charles Foy is associate professor of history at Eastern. His scholarship and teaching activities focus on the 18th century black Atlantic. His articles on black seamen have appeared in numerous journals. In addition to his book project, Liberty’s Labyrinth: Freedom in the 18th Century Black Atlantic, he is developing a Black Mariner Database with records on more than 25,000 black mariners and black maritime fugitives. He earned a Ph.D. at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J.
Mark Hubbard is professor of history at Eastern, where he has taught since 1999. He is the author of Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Illinois’s War: The Civil War in Documents (Ohio University Press, 2013), as well as numerous scholarly essays and reviews. Since 2014, he has served as editor of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society.
Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz is a historian of 19th century America and of women’s and gender history. She has recently completed a chapter on the Lincolns as parents for the Blackwell Companion to Abraham Lincoln and is the author of The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Memory of Radical Abolitionism.
Malgorzata J. Rymsza-Pawlowska is assistant professor in the Department of History and the graduate program in historical administration. Her research and teaching interests include 19thand 20th-century U.S. history, media history and theory, critical theory, museum studies, public history and digital humanities. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film & History, The Public Historian, and Technology and Culture. She is working on a manuscript on historical consciousness in the postwar U.S. At Eastern she is chairwoman of the Digital Humanities Committee at the Humanities Center. She has a Ph.D. in American studies from Brown University, and M.A. degrees in public humanities from Brown University and communication, culture and technology from Georgetown University.
