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USF history professor receives “Best New Journal” award
[02.04.2013]

TAMPA, Fla. -- Brian Connolly, a history professor at the University of South Florida, is one of six editors of “History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History,” a journal awarded the title “Best New Journal” by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

The award was presented at the 2013 meeting of the Modern Language Association, and Connolly said receiving the award was both exciting and gratifying.

“We thought we were sort of marginalized by our discipline,” Connolly said. “We’ve only been putting out the journal for two years, so it was nice for someone to recognize what we were doing.”

The journal was created in 2008, and the first issue of the journal was published in 2011. Currently, the journal is published twice annually, and features a collection of articles submitted by various writers.

“History has long been seen as an anti-theoretical discipline, and so we were all interested in writing sort of critically theorized history,” Connolly said. “We wanted to create a journal that promoted that kind of historical work.”

Alongside his co-editors, Connolly works to solicit, edit and read articles submitted by writers who hope for their work to be included into the publication.

“I hope that others can gain the value from using these kind of theoretical and critical tools in writing history,” Connolly said. “I also think it’s appealing that it relates many of the issues of the past in history that we’re talking about to contemporary political categories and political concerns.”

In the future, Connolly said he and his co-editors hope to increase the publication rate of the journal to three times a year, as well as broaden the geographical scope of the articles included within the publication.

“I find it appealing that the journal has a broad geographical and temporal scope,” Connolly said. “So you can get an issue that has an article on 18th century American and German colonialism in Indonesia and carnivorous eating in early modern France… so there’s no geographical focus, exactly.”

Connolly has been an instructor at USF since 2008, and has taught various courses in the history department such as theory of history, history of 19th century United States and history of sexuality.

Filed under:Arts and Sciences History    
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Author: Elizabeth Engasser
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