This is Yerxa’s third Professional Achievement Award. 

Lovett is the principal organizer for the CFH’s Student Research Conference at Oklahoma Baptist that precedes the main CFH meeting. Two ENC students, Anne Reilly and Kevin Uscinski, will present papers at this student conference. 

Professor Lovett is passionate in her desire to introduce ENC history majors to the world of professional historians and to public speaking. She has been active in New England’s Regional Phi Alpha Theta and has encouraged several ENC students to present papers at its conference. This past April, she took four ENC students to Yale University, her alma mater, to participate in the annual New England Regional Phi Alpha Theta Conference. (See story below.) And she has worked diligently to make senior thesis presentations a major event in the life of the History Department.  Lovett has helped make ENC history program one of the strongest majors on campus by encouraging student involvement in academic as well as social activities.  She continues to serve as faculty advisor for the History Club, which has accounted for part of the strength of that goup

In late February, Stephens was an invited guest at the Southern Intellectual History Circle held at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. Radcliffe Dean Drew Faust organized this year’s meeting and drew together leading scholars in the field of southern history and American intellectual history. In March Dr. Stephens took part in Boston College’s Conference on the History of Religion, where he chaired and commented on the panel, “Rethinking the Bible Belt: Modernization, Culture, and Religious Transformation in the American South.”  The session was well attended and drew provocative questions from the audience.  Stephens and the panel participants will be reworking the session into a forum to be published by the Journal of Southern Religion.  In June 2006 Stephens chaired a session on “Christianity, Globalization, and Imperialism” at the Historical Society meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  Further down the road Stephens will be heading South again to speak at the Southern Historical Association’s  annual meeting in Birmingham, Alabama.  Participants in the organization’s annual conference hail from colleges and universities around the globe.  The SHA has asked professor Stephens, as a representative of the Journal of Southern Religion, to deliver a paper on web publishing.

In addition to his work on the Historical Society’s web page, Dr. Stephens has had a couple other opportunities to ply his virtual trade.  He recently revamped the look and feel for the Journal of Southern Religion’s web site.  The new page has already received high praise from professors at Emory University, Florida State University, and the University of Arkansas.  Stephens is  now co-editing the Journal with Library of Virginia researcher, Bland Whitley.  Stephens also created a page for ENC’s newly created Polkinghorne Society.  He is currently developing another page for the Open Theology Conference, which will convene on ENC’s campus in the summer of 2007.

Stephens has several writing projects in the works as well.  He recently wrote two entries for the African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates at Harvard and to be published by Oxford University Press. Stephens is also composing two chapters edited books, one on American religion and the other on southern history.  One of the volumes, under review at the University of Alabama Press, will cover the history of American denominationalism.  Stephens’s contribution will be on the history of pentecostalism in the U. S.  The second book, now under review at the University of Florida Press, will be a festschrift honoring the life and work of Bertram Wyatt-Brown.  Stephens’ chapter for that collection is tentatively titled, “‘Ohio villains’ and ‘pretenders to new revelations’: Wesleyan Abolitionists in North Carolina and Virginia, 1847-1857.”  In addition Stephens continues to conduct interviews for Historically Speaking and the Journal of Southern Religion.  He interviewed Robert Orsi (Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, Harvard Divinity School) for a forthcoming issue of Historically Speaking, for which Stephens serves as associate editor.  And, more recently, Stephens interviewed Steve Haisman for the Journal of Southern Religion.  Haisman wrote for the documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which has aired on the BBC and the Sundance Channel. 

Finally, Stephens has kept busy on the teaching front, adding new courses every semester.  This spring he taught an upper level seminar on Recent American Historiography.  The course surveyed the writing of U. S. history from the mid 19th century to the present, covering the major themes and ideas that have shaped the profession.  Next year he will be putting together another new class on the Liberal Imagination (see below). 
 

Science and religion are two of history’s most powerful forces and ways of thinking about our world, but they have been uneasy partners in some higher education contexts. According to ENC history professor Donald Yerxa, this is regrettable. On March 31, 2006, he urged Christian educators to focus on the rewards of engaging in the tough questions that the interaction between science and religion raises. He was invited to participate on a panel at the International Forum on Christian Higher Education sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU). Yerxa argued that Christian educators can (and must) handle even such a volatile issue as evolution vs. intelligent design in such a way as to improve understanding, in marked contrast to the shrill tone of most of the current debate. The distinguished European scholar, William Shea, joined Yerxa and ENC physics professor Karl Giberson on the panel. Shea, who holds the Galileo Chair at the University of Padua in Italy, drew from his recent book on Galileo to provide historical perspective on how Christian colleges and universities should approach science and religion today. Shea met the two ENC professors at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University during a three-summer intensive program in science and religion in 1999-2001. Since then the three have collaborated on several projects in Europe and the U.S. The CCCU conference, held in Dallas from March 31 through April 1, attracted presidents, academic deans, and administrators from over institutions in North America and 24 countries. 

Professor Yerxa also chaired a session on “The Religious Accommodation to Nazism in Germany” at the Northeast Regional Meeting of the Conference on Faith and History at Gordon College on March 25th. 

Yerxa continues to edit Historically Speaking, which a prominent historian has likened recently to the New York Review of Books for History. Several of his interviews have or will appear in recent and forthcoming issues, including an interview with Tony Judt, author of the acclaimed Postwar; the British military historian Richard Holmes; Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Hackett Fischer; and Oxford classicist Bryan Ward-Perkins, author of The Fall of Rome. He has two publications in the pipeline: a chapter on “Transdisciplinarity and a More Meaningful Past” to appear in Transdisciplinarity: Theory and Practice. Ed. Basarab Nicolescu. Hampton Press and an essay, “Guadalcanal Revisited,” for Books & Culture.

Yerxa will present a paper at the Conference on Faith & History’s 2006 Biennial Meeting at Oklahoma Baptist University in September on “Some Heretical Thoughts on the Limits of History.”  He also has refereed several book manuscripts: for Reaktion Books, for the University of South Carolina Press, and another for Doubleday.