April 19, 2007
Raymond Jonas named to Costigan endowed professorship
UW History Professor Raymond Jonas, an expert in the field of European and African history, has been named the inaugural Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor in History.
To celebrate this appointment, Jonas will deliver the Costigan Professorship History Lecture, Ethiopia in the American Imagination: When Menelink Came to America, at 7 p.m. on Friday, April 27 in 220 Kane.
Giovanni Costigan was a beloved history professor at the UW from 1934 to 1975 and was the original lecturer for the UW Alumni Association and College of Arts and Sciences’ annual History Lecture Series, which is now in its fourth decade.
Gifts in memory of Professor Costigan — along with seed money from the UW Alumni Association — created an endowed lectureship, which grew large enough to create two new professorships in history named for Giovanni and Amne, his wife.
Jonas is the author of four books and has lectured at Stanford, Princeton, UCLA, Cornell and the University of London. He specializes in the politics, culture and society of modern Europe and beyond, as well as the ritual, art and architecture in political culture. His current research interests include Ethiopia in the 1890s, aspects of the history of Italy since the 1790s, and European entrepreneurs in the horn of Africa.
A Fulbright Scholar, Jonas has received many prestigious awards including a 2004 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.’
In his lecture, Jonas will talk about the military forces under the command of Menelink, the emperor of Ethiopia, who in 1896 routed an invading Italian army at a place called Adwa.
Thanks to Menelink and those who fought with him, Ethiopia was the only African country to resist European colonization successfully before 1914. The battle of Adwa was a global event because it unsettled convictions about race and nations in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
The lecture is free and open to the public, but registration is requested. To register or for more information on the lecture or on Washington Weekend, visit www.uwalum.com or call the UWAA at 206-543-0540.
