Competing Kingdoms Conference Panelist Biographies

Biographical Sketches of Conference Panelists and Chairs

Bryan Bademan is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, CT. Among his forthcoming works are "Monkeying with the Bible: Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation" in Religion and American Culture and "The Edwards of Faith and the Edwards of History" in Reviews in American History. He was recently Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University (2003-2004) where he continued work on a manuscript titled “Civilizing Faith: Religion and the American Nation from Abolition to World War.”

Beth Baron is Professor of Middle East History at the City College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her publications include: Egypt as a Woman: Nationalisms, Gender, and Politics (University of California Press, 2005) and The Women's Awakening in Egypt: Culture, Society, and the Press (Yale University Press, 1994). She edited Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (Mazda, 2000), with Rudi Matthee, and Women in Middle Eastern History: Shifting Boundaries in Sex and Gender (Yale University Press, 1991) with Nikki R. Keddie. Baron co-founded and now co-directs the Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. Baron has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford Foundation.

Betty Bergland is Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She teaches recent U.S. history, including immigration and ethnic history, women's history and U.S. foreign policy. Her publications, focused on gender, ethnicity and race in American culture, appear in various journals, edited volumes and encyclopedias. Her current project examines relations between Scandinavian immigrants and indigenous peoples in the Upper Midwest during the 19th and 20th century. This long-term, book project has (thus far) resulted in ten scholarly presentations on both sides of the Atlantic (including OAH, WHA and the 19th International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo) and several articles, most recently the forthcoming piece on the Bethany Indian Mission in Wittenberg, Wisconsin.

Mary Kupiec Cayton is Professor of History and American Studies at Miami University. She is the author of Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800-1845 (University of North Carolina Press, 1989) and co-editor of two prize-winning reference works, The Encyclopedia of American Social History and The Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History. Her published essays include contributions to the American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, American Quarterly, and Reviews in American History (among others). The work she will be presenting on Harriet Newell’s memoir and female evangelical activism is part of a larger project on the shaping of an evangelical culture in New England from 1780 to 1830. Her research on this project has been funded by the Howard Foundation, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Beinecke Library of Yale University.

Derek Chang is Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at Cornell University, where he is also a member of the American Studies faculty. He recently contributed a chapter, "'Marked in Body, Mind, and Spirit': Home Missionaries and the Remaking of Race and Nation," to Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2004), edited by Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister. He is currently completing a manuscript on African American and Chinese interactions with the American Baptist Home Mission Society, tentatively entitled, "Converting Race, Transforming the Nation: Evangelical Christianity and the 'Problem' of Diversity in Late-Nineteenth Century America." He is a recipient of the Anne Firor Scott Research Award from Duke University's Women's Studies Program and a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council's Religion and Immigration program.

Sue Gronewold is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Kean University, Union, NJ. Her publications include Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China 1860-1937 (Haworth Press and The Institute for Research in History, 1982) and “Exile and Identity: The Door of Hope in Taiwan, 1955-75” in Women in Modern Taiwan, edited by Murray Rubinstein (ME Sharpe Press, 2003). She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively entitled “Encountering Hope: The Door of Hope Mission in Shanghai and Taipei.”

Daniel W. Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History emeritus at Oxford University in England, and professor of history emeritus at UCLA. His writings have dealt chiefly with the intellectual and cultural history of antebellum America. His many publications include Making the American Self (Harvard University Press, 1997), and, most recently, "Church, State, and Education in the Young American Republic," Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2002). He is presently writing What Hath God Wrought: The United States, 1815-1848, a volume in The Oxford History of the United States. Howe is a former president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.

Jane Hunter is Professor of History and Director of the Gender Studies Program at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon. She is the author of several publications, including The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China (Yale University Press, 1984) and How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of Girlhood in the United States (Yale University Press, 2002). She has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Humanities Center at the University of Utah. During the academic year 2003-2004, Hunter was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Shanghai, China.

Susan Haskell Kahn is a doctoral candidate in twentieth-century American cultural and intellectual history at University of California Berkeley. She is a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies and the 2003 Lawrence Gelfand-Armin Rappaport Fellowship from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Her dissertation (2006) is a study of the mainline Protestant missionary encounter with Indian Nationalism and its significance for American religious and national identity. She argues that nationalist pressures in the inter-war period forced significant changes in missionary tactics, with important and unrecognized consequences for racial liberalism, the human rights movement, and changing perceptions of liberal Protestant world "mission" in the post-World War II period.

Sylvia Jacobs is Professor of History at North Carolina Central University. Her books include The African Nexus: Black American Perspectives on the European Partitioning of Africa, 1880-1920 (Greenwood Press, 1981) and Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (Greenwood Press, 1982). She has also published over four dozen articles, essays, and biographical sketches on the relationship of African Americans with Africa and Africans and is presently completing a trilogy on African American missionaries in Africa. Dr. Jacobs has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellowship. Her publications have won her awards from several organizations, including the Letitia Brown Memorial Publication Prize, given by the Association of Black Women Historians (1984, 1992).

Maria Jaschok is Director of the International Gender Studies Centre in Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University, Research Associate in Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Institute for Chinese Studies, Oxford University. Her publications include: The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A Mosque of Their Own (Curzon Press, 2000), co-authored with Shui Jingjun, and published in Chinese as Zhongguo Qingzhen Nüsishi (The History of Women's Mosques in Chinese Islam) ( Sanlian Chubanshe, Harvard-Yench'ing Series, 2002), and Concubines and Bondservants: A Social History (Zed Books, 1988). She has co-edited Chinese Women Organizing; Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers (Berg Publishers, 2001). She has published numerous articles in journals such as Feminist Studies, various encyclopedias, and in both Chinese and English language edited collections. She has recently received fellowships from the Nordic Institute for Asian Studies, Copenhagen, and the University of Hong Kong, Centre of Asian Studies. Her current research project engages American missions in China.

Rui Kohiyama is Professor of American and Gender Studies at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University in Tokyo, Japan. Her first book, As Our God Alone will Lead Us: The Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Foreign Missionary Enterprise and Its Encounter with Meiji Japan (University of Tokyo Press, 1992) was a groundbreaking work in the academic field in Japan and was awarded two prizes. Kohiyama has written widely on women and missions since and received several fellowships for her research projects, including the Rockefeller Foundation and the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program. Her current project concerns the process of decline in the American women’s missionary enterprise in the first half of the twentieth century within a context of increasing tension arising from modernity, native nationalism, and international conflicts.

Barbara Reeves-Ellington is Assistant Professor of U.S. History at Siena College, Loudonville, NY. Her most recent article “A Vision of Mount Holyoke in the Ottoman Balkans: American Cultural Transfer, Bulgarian Nation-Building, and Women’s Educational Reform, 1858-1870,” appeared in Gender & History in 2004. She is currently preparing a book length manuscript tentatively entitled “Boston on the Bosphorus: American Missions and Social Change in Ottoman Europe.” She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation (Institute of Balkan Studies, Bulgaria, 1999-2000) and the Dartmouth Humanities Institute (2002).

Mary Renda teaches history and women’s studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA, having received her doctorate in history from Yale University in 1993. She is the author of Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), for which she was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association, the Albert J. Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association, and the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Professor Renda is currently at work on a study of the changing forms of U.S. imperialism between the world wars.

Jay Sexton is University Lecturer in American history at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on nineteenth century foreign relations, with a particular emphasis on transatlantic finance, Anglo-American relations and the diplomacy of the Civil War era. His first book, Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 was recently published by Oxford University Press. Currently, he is working on a book on the history of the "Monroe Doctrine."

Connie Shemo is Assistant Professor at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She is currently preparing a manuscript entitled "An Army of Women: The Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1896-1937". This study explores issues of cultural transfer, gender and changing constructions of Western medicine, and perceptions of race and culture in American missions through the lens of the medical work of two Chinese women Methodist missionary physicians, Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu (a.k.a. Ida Kahn and Mary Stone.) She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Archives Center and the Special Collections on Women and Medicine at the Medical College of Pennsylvania.

Ian Tyrrell is a Professor (and former Head of School) in the School of History, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of six books, including Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800-1860 (Greenwood Press, 1979) and Woman's World/Woman's Empire: The Woman's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (University of North Carolina Press, 1991). For five years he edited the Australasian Journal of American Studies and has contributed articles to the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History; Environment and History; Histoire Sociale; Amerikastudien; and the Journal of World History. He has twice been awarded an Australian Research Council Large Grant. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and current President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association and of the Alcohol and Temperance History Group of the American Historical Association. His current research interests focus on 19th century America's transnational connections, especially in regard to imperialism and the cultural and economic expansion of European peoples.

Wendy Urban-Mead is a member of the Faculty in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College. Her research interests include the history of southern Africa, European imperialism and religion and gender. She is a member of the editorial board of Le Fait Missionaire (Lausanne, Switzerland) and has published articles in Le Fait Missionaire, Brethren in Christ History & Life, Women's History Review, and Women in African Colonial Histories (Indiana University Press, 2002.) Her awards include a German Academic Exchange Service Grant (1984–85), a Richard Hofstadter Fellowship (1995–2000), and a Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Grant (1999).