On Monday, Nov. 18, the University of Idaho History Department brought together five professors for a panel discussion, titled “Breaking Boundaries,” to commemorate the release of their new historical publications. A reception with light refreshments followed.
Panel members included professors Alyssa Kreikemeier, Jeff Kyong-McClain, Alyson Roy, Alexandria Ruble and Rebecca Scofield. The discussion was facilitated by Hayley Noble, the Executive Director of the Latah County Historical Society.
“I love the range in both subject matter and time period that we have represented here tonight,” Noble said. “I’m thinking that since you are all here, you are all fans of history, so hopefully there’s something here for everybody, which is wonderful to see.”
The first to speak was Kreikemeier, an Assistant Professor of Environmental History. Her book, “Ancient Sites in Modern Times: Bandelier National Monument in the Twenty First Century,” was produced under a contract with the National Park Service and will be published in 2025.
Her research centered around the environmental and political history of the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. “Primarily, the story tells really important changes in Federal-Indian relationships since the 1990s,” she said. “You also have changes in environmental management…managers and scientists at Bandelier seek to manage cultural resources at archaeological sites and natural resources—wildlife biology, fire ecology—together.”
When asked why she was interested in environmental history, Kriekemeier mentioned her time in Boston. “I became an environmental historian because I, as someone who has lived my whole life in the west, only became aware of how much the place I grew up in and love deeply shaped me when I was out of it.”
The second speaker was Kyong-McClain, an Associate Professor of Asian History and Director of the Habib Institute for Asian Studies. He produced an edited volume, titled, “From Missionary Education to Confucius Institutes: Historical Reflections on Sino-American Cultural Exchange,” with co-editor Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, a professor of History and Executive Director of the Global Asia Institute at Pace University. The book was published in 2023.
“[This] came together at the sort of high tide in 2019-2020 of anti-[Confucius Institute] sentiment emerging around the United States,” Kyong-McClain said. “A big takeaway is the layers that go into Chinese and U.S. educational or cultural exchange…it is very complicated and not just simply some kind of top-down effort by part of big political leaders.”
The third panelist, Roy, is an Assistant Professor of Ancient History, Director of Graduate Studies and Co-Director of Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her book, “Empire of Images: Visualizing the Conquered in the Roman Republic,” was published in 2024 and explores Roman imagery created by conquered peoples.
“A lot of you probably have an image in your head of ancient Rome, whether that is Liz Taylor as Cleopatra or Russell Crowe, Gladiator,” Roy said. “We have this idea in our minds of what the Roman Empire looks like, and particularly how the Roman Empire talked about and visualized the people that they controlled…I wanted to look across and see whether the approach to looking at the people they were conquering was the same in each place.”
“My field is a very old field, and it is a field that is very elitist, both in its actual identity and in the way it’s perceived, and it does not change quickly,” Roy said. “What I’m doing in my book challenges a number of preconceptions in my field that didn’t really want to be challenged…One of the big things you learn as you do this is that not everyone has to like your work, and that’s okay.”
Next was Ruble, an Assistant Professor of European History, who wrote, “Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany,” published in 2023. “My book examines the reforms of the German Civil Code, which is a controversial and very patriarchal law passed in 1900 that designated women as second-class citizens in their marriages, marital property and parental rights,” Ruble said.
The book is one of very few works comparing East and West Germany, and one of the first to do so through a gender studies lens. “I’m able to argue that social movements, particularly feminist movements, were far more influential than historians have given them credit for,” Ruble said. “They reemerge from Nazi suppression, and they become really influential factors in these debates over legal reforms…for both the post-war German states.”
As a women’s and gender historian, Ruble tries to incorporate the topics into all of her courses at UI. She often does this through reading material and in-class activities. “I’ll occasionally create mock debates,” she said. “In particular, I draw from International Women’s Conferences, which a lot of the feminist groups that I look at often participated in.”
Finally, Scofield, an Associate Professor of American History and History Department Chair, discussed her book, “Slapping Leather: Queer Cowfolx at the Gay Rodeo.” Scofield co-authored the book, published January 2024, with Elyssa Ford, a professor of History, Honors Program Director and Public History & Museums Studies Director at Northwest Missouri State University.
“There was this real nightmare situation where another person also wrote a similar book to mine…we were really set up to be academic nemeses,” Scofield said. “And one day, she gives me a call, and she’s like, ‘Look, it seems like the world is melting down. We could do the dude thing and we could each race to write a monograph on gay rodeo and compile our 10 years-worth of research each and compete against each other for the rest of our careers, or we could combine our strengths, and we could write a book together.’”
While Ford mainly conducted in-depth research of archival material in the southwest, Scofield created an oral history project with a team of students. “The book looks at the 50-year history of LGBTQ people engaging sort of formally with country western culture…they have always been around rodeo,” Scofield said. “We tend to boil people down to single identities. We don’t capture the complexities of what it means to be a queer person who loves horses, who loves hunting and who have existed in these spaces for a very, very long time.”
To finish off the discussion, Noble asked the panel members what was next for them. Scofield is currently drafting a book titled “Astride the Beast: Women Riding Horses, Dragons and Everything in Between,” looking at imagery of women riding astride and its connection to political feminism. Ruble is working on a project covering what happened to political prisoners after World War II. Roy is combining the topics of Roman comedy and magical amulets into one project. Kyong-McClain is researching the history of cartography in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, part of a larger project of knowledge production in the area. Finally, Kriekemeier is writing an atmospheric history of the American West over the long 20th century.
All books are available for order or pre-order with BookPeople of Moscow.
Dakota Steffen can be reached at [email protected].