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We are delighted to publish the preprint of the first paper to be accepted for the next volume of our peer-reviewed open-access journal The Independent Scholar. Keenan Baca-Winters’ fascinating essay examining trauma and narrative in the work of Greek poet and historian Agathias can be downloaded and read here.
We were very sorry to hear of the sudden death of Joanne Lafler (1934-2023), one of the founding mothers of NCIS. She gained her doctorate in theater history from UC Berkeley in 1974 and became a renowned theater historian, later turning to California social and cultural history, 1900 to 1950. In 1998 she became an editor of H-Scholar, an H-Net discussion list sponsored by NCIS, which she halped found. She was also a founding member of The Institute for Historical Study (San Francisco Bay Area) in which she was still active: her most recent contribution was an article is the latest issue of the Institute for Historical Study newsletter (42, no. 3, winter 2023) in the form of a short article about Henry Lafler’s friend Jack London: “What’s in a Name? Jack London and Racism.”
Joanne is commemorated in a touching piece by fellow founding mother Margaret DeLacy, published on H-Scholar: https://networks.h-net.org/node/10673/discussions/12632963/commemoration-joanne-lafler
Our sincere condolences go to Joanne’s husband John and her daughter Janet.
Maritime historian Phillip Reid was granted an NCIS Conference Support Grant in 2022 to enable him to attend the American Historical Association (AHA) conference in Philadelphia (7-8 January 2023). He reports that all went well, and that “we had a lively, smooth-running session Sunday morning at AHA on “Maritime Microhistory and Public History: Global Perspectives.” Thanks to Prof. Robert Harms (Yale) for chairing (far right in photo); Prof. Harms works on Africa, and if you have not read his 2002 The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Basic Books), treat yourself. We were honored that he graciously agreed to chair our session (and have dinner with us), and he ran the kind of old-school tight-ship session that I appreciate. Adrian Shubert and Boyd Cothran (York, far left and center in photo, respectively) gave us a preview of their forthcoming book on the 1853 Indian-built East Indiaman Edwin Fox, whose career spanned the entire second half of the nineteenth century, and whose largely-intact remains are preserved at Picton, New Zealand. She carried convicts and coolies, settlers and troops, and their hopes and terrors, as she sailed through a period of imperialist globalization. Look for their book from University of North Carolina Press in November of this year.
Julia Stryker (Texas at Austin, second from left in photo), drawing on her own experience, made a strong case for the continuing value of the huge collection of nineteenth-century British Merchant Navy crew agreements held at MUN, where she and I both studied under Neil Kennedy (thanks Neil!). Yes, there is “hard data” here, but there are also countless stories worth teasing out of the terse notations typical of official records. Julia will defend her doctoral dissertation at UT this spring, and we all wish her the best.
I gave a talk on Sultana, and focused much of it on how the replica at Chestertown is used for teaching and experiential learning. Information on my forthcoming book on this vessel’s history may be found here .
Finally, thanks to those of you who attended; attendance was quite respectable, especially for an 0900 session on Sunday morning, the last day of the conference! And thanks to AHA for including our session, and from me personally, for contributing partial funding for my travel.The National Coalition of Independent Scholars covered the lion’s share of my expenses through a Conference Support Grant, for which I am grateful; I was proud to represent NCIS at the conference.
I had time to attend two additional sessions while I was there: #217–Archaeoastronomy and History:Perspectives from Africa, North America, West Asia, Oceania, and Europe, on Saturday afternoon; and #254–The Revolutionary Archive: New Directions, on Sunday midday after my own session. I was also able to have dinner Saturday night with my co-panelists and our chair; the professional benefits of meeting other scholars at conferences must not be gainsaid. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that it got my first book published, straight-up.
Thank you for the support. It made this possible.
Congratulations to NCIS member James Magrini who has just published a new philosophy book. Philosophical Sojourns in Aesthetics, Existence, and Education (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2023) is a collection of seven speculative and critical essays that initiates a journey, inviting readers to abide, for a short time, with philosophical themes emerging from aesthetics, poetry, existentialism, ancient Greek philosophy, and education. It opens vistas into the insightful wisdom of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Jaspers, Rilke, and Plato’s Socrates. The book confronts such perennial issues as the practice of philosophy as a way of life, the understanding of subjecthood and human transcendence, the pursuit of ethical knowledge in ways that inform and direct the choices we make in the company others, and the philosophical quest for unique ways of learning that transcend contemporary pedagogical practices embracing standardization and adopting an instrumental approach to education. This book is novel in that it offers these insights across board, but related fields of study. Although essentially a philosophy text, it provides scholarly inroads to the academic fields of literary critique, classical studies, psychology, and educational theory. The text can be effectively employed as a secondary avenue of study in institutions of higher learning, supplementing primary philosophical sources in the curriculum. In addition to programs offering advanced degrees, the book also serves as a challenging introductory text for students at the undergraduate level demonstrating an interest in, and proclivity for, philosophy.
Hannah Pethen Barrett’s excellent hands-on workshop on “Building your website, establishing your research identity” is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K3-IFH40zs on our NCIS YouTube channel. You will also need to download the PDF document provided by Hannah.
NCIS member and grant award recipient Dr Doaa El Shereef has shared some news of her latest academic exploits. She writes:
” I participated as an Independent Scholar and a member of NCIS in 6th International Conference on Culture and History (ICCH 2022) that was held in Paris, France during July 25-27, 2022 and the conference was co-sponsored by Loyola Marymount University and Utrecht University this year. My participation was attending the conference in person not virtually for the first time after COVID-19 and I was happy to share my new research (A Theory about the First Amphibious Battle between Canaan and Egypt at Abydos in the prehistoric period about 3500 BC). The research paper will be published in their peer-reviewed journal and before the conference they told that they chose me to chair the session of Humanities and Social Sciences. It was a great experience as I have missed participating in conferences in person. I wanted to share this with the NCIS organization that I am proud to be part of.”
Thank you Doaa!
Congratulations to military historian Neil Dukas, author of “A Military History of Sovereign Hawai‘i” and “The Battle of Nu‘uanu, 1795” whose new book “Sometime in Africa” has just been published.
Sometime in Africa The year was 1983. Convinced his college education was incomplete, Neil Dukas, set out on an ill-considered 14,000-mile journey on the cheap across the length of Africa determined to address the shortcomings in his schooling and to experience, first-hand, some fragment of the developing world.
The book is available at Amazon.com: Neil Bernard Dukas: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle
We’re proud to announce that no fewer than three British independent scholars, all Full members of NCIS and also of our Partner Group FIRE-UK, have had their contributions accepted for the #WIASN publication ResearcHER. They are Dr Linda Baines (business management), Dr Helen Ross (dyslexia speicalist) and Dr Jasmine Shadrack (sociomusicologist)
This book features female researchers talking about “their journey into research and what research they do – busting myths of who does research and what research is” and “will be distributed to school libraries in as many countries as possible.” (Women in Academia Facebook page). We can’t wait to see the results!
Pic: Edinburgh PhD student with tattoos celebrating her research topic (transport logistics)
Congratulations to NCIS Communications Officer Kathleen Stein-Smith, whose latest article, “The Independent Scholar as Change Agent: The Case of Foreign Language Advocacy,” has been accepted (with revisions, of course :)) for publication in the Journal of Language Teaching and Research in late summer. http://www.academypublication.com/jltr/
