| Honors Students Present at FURF | Twelve Honors in History students (pictured below) participated in the 2024 Fall Undergraduate Research Festival this month and presented their original research in historical topics ranging from 16th-century pirates to 20th-century American history.
The Honors in History program provides an excellent opportunity to hone your research and writing skills. Working with a faculty mentor, participants gain professional experience and create a final project to demonstrate their abilities. Previous students have called Honors in the History their favorite experience in the History major! Find out more on our website. | | 
Top (L-R): Adeline Bradley, Elisa Burba, Joy Curry, Madeline DeCoste, Jaide Domatob, Colin Gillund. Bottom (L-R): Kaitlyn Masse, Zack Paulsen, Kaleb Schlatter, Brenna Schultz, Gavin Scott, and Isabella Thomas. | | | Coming up | 
Join us for a talk by Jake Ransohoff about the intersection of punishment, incapacity, and exclusion in the Byzantine world. Ransohoff will focus on a particular penalty—blinding—commonly used by Byzantium’s rulers to disqualify rivals from positions of political leadership. Despite its official justification as a merciful alternative to death, “political” blinding in Byzantium often backfired and provoked popular opposition. Drawing on evidence from across the medieval Mediterranean, he will examine the sightless body as an unstable site of meaning: whether it reflected the compassion, or the injustice, of the state remained an open question. It is blinding’s ability to provoke contestation and controversy that makes it revealing of persistent tensions across Byzantium’s millenary history.
| | | Multicultural Showcase Tonight! | International Education Week, (IEW), a joint initiative of the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education, in partnership with universities around the country, celebrates the many ways international education and exchange opportunities prepare citizens for community building in both national and international settings.
This year, IEW will take place November 18-22, though activities celebrating IEW will take place at Iowa throughout the month of November. During the university’s week-long celebration, events are organized by departments, colleges, and student orgs from across the university.
The Multicultural Showcase introduces UI students, faculty, staff, and the greater Iowa City community to different cultures through vocal and dance performances, ethnic dishes to try, as well as interactive tabling hosted by student organizations and UI colleges and departments.
Food and tabling will begin at 7 p.m. and the showcase will start at 8 p.m.
All are welcome to attend the University of Iowa 2024 Multicultural Showcase on Friday, Nov. 15, 2024, at 7 p.m. (CT) in the International Ballroom (2nd floor, Iowa Memorial Union). The Multicultural Showcase is part of the University of Iowa’s (UI) annual celebration of International Education Week (Nov. 22–26).
The Multicultural Showcase is put on by the Organization for the Active Support of International Students (OASIS) and is in partnership with International Programs and International Student Support and Engagement.
While International Education Week takes place in mid-November, Iowa will be hosting events throughout the month of November. Visit the International Education Week site to see all the events. | | | State Historical Society of Iowa Internships | | | | | PhD in Digital History at Clemson University | A note from Doug Seefeldt, PhD
I am the Director of Clemson University’s first in the nation doctoral program in Digital History. We welcomed our first cohort in the fall of 2022 and our third cohort this fall. Ours is a face-to-face program that does not require significant previous digital history experience. The link to our program website above contains specific information about the program, its curriculum, and graduate assistantship funding.
Our application deadline for consideration for assistantship funding is December 1, 2024 for fall 2025.
Our program is particularly well-situated to support doctoral work in several fields of history, but our faculty have particular strengths in Southern History, Slavery Studies, Women and Gender, and the history of Colonialism and Empire broadly. In addition to myself, our digital history faculty includes Josh Catalano, who is a, Early America digital public historian, Mandy Regan a U.S. women and gender historian, and our most recent digital history faculty member, Camden Burd, who is an environmental historian.
Today's historians increasingly have to rely on new analytical techniques to sift through and make sense of large amounts of data. Digital history utilizes computer technology to develop and investigate historical research questions. It allows historians to conduct textual, spatial, and network analyses, and to visualize these results over time and space. As the prevalence of born-digital sources increases, technological fluency will be an even more important part of conducting historical research. Historians must know how to critique and understand the inherent biases built into algorithms, digital archives and emerging technologies in order to use them effectively. | | | |
