Beth Notar and Samuel Kassow Honored for 2007 Work
HARTFORD, Conn. – Two members of Trinity College’s faculty -- Beth Notar, an associate professor of anthropology, and Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History -- have each been honored for books that were published last year.
Notar’s book, Displacing Desire: Travel and Popular Culture in China, has been named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2007 by Choice, a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries, which is a division of the American Library Association.
The list of outstanding academic books cited by Choice “reflects the best in scholarly titles…and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community,” the magazine said in citing Notar’s book.
Displacing Desire answers the question: Why do millions of people from around the world flock to Dali, a small border town in the Himalayan foothills of southwest China? The answer, in part, is that Dali is a place where people can indulge their craving for authenticity, display their status in the present, and act out their nostalgia for the past. The book is based on more than a decade of groundbreaking ethnographic research.
Kassow’s book, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, was selected by the Jewish Book Council as runner-up for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award. The awards are given to books that enlarge the enterprise of Jewish scholarship. The National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 57th year, is the longest-running program of its kind in North America.
Kassow is the world’s leading authority on Emanuel Ringelblum, who, in 1940, established a secret organization named Oyneg Shabes in Nazi-occupied Warsaw to document Jewish life in wartime Poland and to compile an archive that would preserve the events for posterity. Ringelblum perished in 1944 but before he died, he hid thousands of documents in milk cans and tin boxes. They were discovered in 1946 and 1950. Who Will Write Our History tells the gripping story of Ringelblum and his determination to use historical scholarship to resist Nazi oppression.
Kassow will receive his award at a gala ceremony March 4 at 7:30 p.m. at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. The event is open to the public.