Desert Harvest 14.2

... and a Happy New Year to us all!
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Director

   Positions dedicated to the teaching of specific subjects have been endowed for a very long time. The Roman Emperor Vespasian (AD 69-79) is said to have established and financed chairs in Greek and Latin rhetoric. His successor, Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-180), founded chairs in rhetoric and philosophy. During the European Middle Ages, pious individuals gave money to create priestly positions for the reading or singing of masses, which they thought would assist theirs or their loved ones’ souls into heaven. The faculties of medieval universities were often closely related to the Catholic Church, and thus the endowment of professorial chairs seemed but a slight difference from the funding of these more plentiful benefices. When Erasmus was at the University of Louvain, the Trilingual College had just been founded there and chairs in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew established.
   President Robert Shelton has arrived and taken charge. One of the first opinions he voiced was that The University of Arizona should seek 200 additional endowed chairs. These would bring further distinguished scholars to a faculty that is already star-studded.
   As a physicist, President Shelton may or may not be aware of the history of endowments. Given our area of specialization, we in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies are. We are ahead of this praiseworthy presidential objective. Five years ago we were propelled into action by the last will and testament of Heiko A. Oberman—whose birthday at this writing has just passed. As a historian, Heiko knew how transitory modes, even intellectual modes, were. Because the early modern era in Europe was decisive in the shaping of Western culture, he asserted the ongoing desirability of teaching that subject at an advanced level at this university. For this reason, and not out of vanity, he provided that his personal research collection would come to the University upon the permanent endowment of a chair in late medieval and Reformation history.
   On December 31, 2006, the $300,000 matching challenge offered by an anonymous donor expires. As I write, we have not done badly! You have given approximately $228,000. Your generosity has been astounding. Before the end of the year, we need the remaining $72,000 in order to acquire every dollar of the match. Achieving this goal will bring us significantly closer to our ultimate $2 million target. We are, of course, still gloating a bit over our (and your) success in gathering $1.1 million overall to date.
   Let us make the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History one of the first of President Shelton’s Two Hundred! Let us bring Heiko’s fabulous book collection decisively into the University Libraries.

Bazy Tankersley's Affair for the Chair   photos

   At the invitation of Bazy Tankersley, guests gathered at Al-Marah Arabians for an autumn lunch under the shade of the cottonwoods. The event benefitted the endowment of the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History and the acquisition for the UA Libraries of the peerless Oberman research collection.
   John Schaefer, 15th president of the UA, talked about the essential nature of fine libraries in determining the academic stature of a university. He, himself, is remembered for the expansion of the UA Libraries that he undertook as president. The Center for Creative Photography is named for him. The new UA Foundation president James Moore, Jr., added his willingness to meet with and accommodate interested donors.

Associated faculty achieves emerita status
Professor Helen Nader wins Bodo Nischan award
by Julie Kang, doctoral student

   We in the Division were delighted but not surpised to hear that our own Professor Helen Nader, lately emerita of the History Department and a Division affiliate, was to be honored as the winner of the 2006 biannual Bodo Nischan Award for Scholarship, Civility, and Service from the Society for Reformation Research.
   During our seminar last fall semester (2005), the students of the Division learned firsthand how much Professor Nader enjoys working with graduate students. In her formal dining room, we discussed all aspects of the Habsburgs. So when asked to describe the highlights of her 35 years in academia, it was not surprising that Professor Nader began to speak about her doctoral students and the interesting work produced by them. She beamed with pride as she described the successes that her former students have achieved over the years. Professor Nader’s enthusiasm for her graduate students is well known. During our conversation about this article, however, I learned what many people may not know: how she came to be such an expert in the Spanish archives. Her appreciation of primary source documents she attributes to a 1971 dock strike in Hawaii. Since the University of Hawaii library held little in the way of Renaissance and Spanish sources (fewer than two dozen books!) and interlibrary loans could not physically reach her, Professor Nader decided she needed to go to Spain. In the archives, she had the chance to engage sources about the Mendoza family in a way that historians thus far had not. Through this experience, Professor Nader learned that historians have to “read everything and question everything.” In addition to employing good methodology, she advises keeping moral and ethical components in mind when writing history: “We have a great responsibility to people who lived centuries ago. We have to really listen to what they said.”
   With these thoughtful and simple philosophies in mind, Professor Nader has produced a curriculum vitae that swells with her accomplishments. After the publication of her first book, “The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350-1550” (1979), she produced her second book, “Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns 1516-1700” (1990), which won the American Historical Association’s 1991 Leo Gershoy Award. Between books, Professor Nader joined the history faculty at the University of Indiana (1976-1996). She developed a course on the Black Death and attracted students interested in her scholarship. In the 1990s, she began to assume the role of expert on documents relating to Christopher Columbus and the exploration of the New World. Professor Nader edited “Power and Gender in Renaissance Spain: Eight Women of the Mendoza Family, 1450-1650” (2003), containing articles written by some of her former students. In 1994, Professor Nader returned to her alma mater the University of Arizona as head of the Department of History. She had received her B.A. here in 1958, after which she completed her M.A. in 1959 at Smith College. Finally she took her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley in 1972. Professor Nader’s return to the UA and the state in which she grew up testifies to her devotion to her family: her sisters Leila and Marsha both resided in Tucson when she moved here. Even now, she enjoys participating in the community orchestra as a clarinet player at Coronado K-8 School, where her niece is a special education teacher and two of her grandnieces attend school.
   In looking back at her own career, Professor Nader has been true to form in downplaying her successes and attributing her accomplishments to external circumstances. However, her colleagues and students know better: Professor Nader’s dedication to the historians’ craft and her enthusiasm for the study of the past emanates from an honest and loving personality. Although she officially retired this summer, Professor Nader continues to be a part of the support system for graduate students, and her face does not fail to beam when listening to the developments in their recent projects.

At the feet of visiting scholars
Professor Scott Hendrix, Princeton Theological Seminary
by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Professor of History

   Scott Hendrix, James Hastings Nichols Professor of Reformation History and Doctrine at Princeton Theological Seminary, graced the last meeting of our seminar in late April. He started out his career by acquiring the doctorate under Heiko Oberman’s direction at the University of Tübingen in Germany. In the winter semester of 1968-1969, he was a member of a doctoral seminar on the Leipzig Disputation (1518), which Oberman and Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) co-taught. Hendrix recalls, “The contrast of personalities was striking, with Ratzinger and his quiet demeanor and black suit over against Heiko. Both were amazingly young, as I think back on it.”
   Always a very productive writer and speaker on the Reformation, Hendrix experienced a turning point in his scholarship when, for several years, he worked as a family therapist. He brought the perspectives of that field into his historical analysis, which he had never abandoned. He and I are coediting a volume of essays on masculinity in Reformation Europe.
   Hendrix asked the seminar members to read two items in preparation for his visit: his most recent book, “Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization” (Louisville 2004); and an essay that is just now appearing in the Archive for Reformation History, “Post-Confessional Research and Confessional Commitment.” Both take up matters under discussion among Reformation historians today. Hendrix stated his position, based on experience, that although some teaching affiliations doubtless do still require denominational loyalty in the classroom, his post at a major theological seminary affords him, as a Luther scholar with theo-logical interests, the liberty to explore the Reformation as a whole. His training in contextual family therapy influenced him to see the differences among reformers as rooted in piety, culture, politics, and human relationships. Confessional commitments are no more damaging to historical scholarship than other personal and academic agendas. I am sure that he is right.
   This eminent colleague has always been a steadfast friend of the Division. He met with all the graduate students individually and reacted constructively and helpfully to the research plans they laid before him. He and Emilee Hendrix called on Toetie Oberman and Hester Oberman, whom they had known well in Tübingen.

At the feet of visiting scholars
Professor David Nirenberg, Johns Hopkins University
by Lizzy Ellis-Marino, master's student

   On November 1, the Division seminar hosted David Nirenberg, Charlotte Bloomberg Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Communities of Violence,” a study of Christian, Jewish and Muslim relations in fourteenth-century Aragon. Addressing the Division’s traditional question for visiting scholars, “What makes you tick as a historian?” Professor Nirenberg alluded to the difficulties and limitations of language, problems that he would address directly in his public lecture the next day, “Shakespeare’s Jewish Problem: ‘The Merchant of Venice.’”
   Held in the UA Art Museum in a room filled with medieval and early modern works of art, Nirenberg’s talk placed “The Merchant of Venice” squarely in the cultural and political context of seventeenth-century England. As the English began to engage more and more in the growing capitalist economy, and Englishmen, including Shakespeare and some of his relatives, began to engage in activities like money lending, that were traditionally considered Jewish, the question of relations between Christians and Jews became ever more pertinent, although there were few Jews in Britain. The play, set in Venice, where Jews and Christians lived in much closer proximity than in England, is greatly concerned with the transformation of Jews into Christians and Christians into Jews, a matter with which the Englishmen of Shakespeare’s day were especially occupied.
   With such a towering figure as Shakespeare, it is quite easy for students of history to fall into the trap of viewing his works as somehow beyond history, outside time and place. Professor Nirenberg’s contextualization of such an oft-discussed and problematic play as “The Merchant of Venice” reminds us students not only of the intellectual and artistic heights that our period’s great minds reached, but also of the absolute relevance of the more prosaic concerns of this period on its great minds.

New adjunct faculty in the History Department
Dr. Diane Korngiebel
by Mary Kovel, doctoral student

   The Division welcomes Dr. Diane Korngiebel, a medieval scholar who joins the UA community as a one-year adjunct professor. She comes to us from Wabash College, Indiana, where she also held an adjunct position. Dr. Korngiebel completed her undergraduate career at the University of Washington. She then spent the next eight years in the United Kingdom, where she earned master’s degrees in medieval history from both the University of Wales and the University of Durham. She took a doctorate in modern history in 2005 at the University of Oxford. While she completed her studies, she presented papers at several conferences in the U.S. and Great Britain, and in 2003 she was awarded the Denis Bethell Prize and the Proxime accessit award for her essays.
   During her post-doctoral career, besides teaching, she has served as an assistant editor for “The Haskins Society Journal” since 2004. Her publications revolve around her area of expertise: English colonization. Her most recent article will appear in the December 2006 “Welsh History Review.” Perhaps most impressive is her forthcoming book from Boydell & Brewer Press, a revision of her dissertation on English colonization strategies in medieval Wales and Ireland. Despite her demanding teaching and writing schedule, she plans to present a paper at the 2007 Anglo-American Conference in London.
   This semester, Dr. Korngiebel is teaching several undergraduate courses at the UA that are not only educational, but her quick wit has ensured a high attendance. Her teaching schedule for next semester not only includes undergraduate courses but a graduate colloquium on historiographical approaches to medieval Europe, to the delight of Division students.

Discovering Munich
by Sean Clark, master's student

   To be perfectly honest, Germany has always held something of a negative place in my mind. This is how I have traditionally done the math: add its history of fascism and genocide to its proclivity for leather clothing, coo-coo clocks, and oompa music, and that equals a country I would probably rather avoid. As, however, over the last two years I have found myself in the lucky position of being the student of a brilliant historian of sixteenth-century Germany, I decided it would be best to put aside my prejudices by spending a month improving my German skills at the Goethe Institute in Munich.
   My first hours in Munich got off to an inauspicious start. Getting on the train from the airport, I sat down next to a window on which someone had scrawled a particularly disturbing racial epithet in black marker. Then, at the first stop, a gentleman sat down across from me with what I determined to be a can of Jack Daniels and Coke. It was 8:30 in the morning. I was worried.
   From there, however, things did begin to look up. I cannot say enough good things about the staff of the Goethe Institute. From the moment I walked through the door, tired, disheveled, bleary-eyed, and speaking only monosyllabic English, much less German, I was immediately made to feel welcome and at home. The famous Germanic efficiency was everywhere in evidence. Along with my fellow new students I was guided through paperwork and placement exams, before finally being pointed toward the nearest u-bahn station with directions to my accommodation.
   Even though I had literally not slept in two days, neither could I sleep with a new city just waiting to be discovered. So, after dropping off my luggage, I returned to the city center and wandered around until I could barely stand. Munich is a beautiful city that draws you in more and more around every corner. Unlike some other German cities that were also largely destroyed during World War II, Munich chose to recreate its former glory rather than modernize. We are all lucky that she did. I spent that first evening walking from Karlsplatz, through Marienplatz via the Marienkirche, to the Viktualienmarkt, and then back over to the Residenz and the Englischer Garten.
   My class was a microcosm of the new European cosmopolitanism: four Americans, one Russian, two Ukrainians, a Finn, two Italians, one fellow from Italophone Switzerland, a young Korean woman, and a Bulgarian. Several of the non-Americans spoke some English, but for the most part, German was our lingua franca. Discussions were always wide-ranging and often very funny, especially when they turned to comparisons of the many cultures represented in the room. I went to Munich to learn German but ended up learning almost as much about Korean architecture and the Italian national soccer team.
   Speaking of which, I cannot relate a description of my time in Germany without mentioning the epitome of global sport, the World Cup. Soccer fans from all over the world crowded the city. Cars sped through the streets with rabid fans, bodies painted, hanging out the windows, national flags in hand. At game time every bar, beer garden, and restaurant brought in televisions, attracting huge crowds gathered in rapt attention. I went from bar to bar, caught up in observing this strange spectacle or joined some classmates at the Olympic Center or one of the beer gardens in the Englischer Garten. The level of excitement was well beyond even the most raucous Super Bowl I have ever attended. The night France lost the championship to Italy, I saw grown men and women bawling their eyes out, beating their chests, pulling their hair, rending their garments as if their closest friend had just died.
   Those first weeks were full of surprises. Germans were much friendlier, and Munich itself was much more cultured and just plain more fun than I had expected. Then I went to Dachau. Just an hour’s train ride from Munich and I was at Germany’s first concentration camp. It is well beyond my capacity to convey the depths to which I was moved by that place, so I will not even try. If you have been there, you know; if you have not, there is little I can do other than encourage you to go.
   In the end, I have come to feel that my ambivalence toward Germany, my love/hate relationship with the country, is not such a bad thing academically. I hope that it will provide me with a degree of distance and objectivity that will serve me well in my studies. Also, I find that those things that both attract and repel end up being more interesting for that very fact—certainly an important characteristic for any course one intends to pursue indefinitely.

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