Johnathan Ocko Memorial Lecture Series Launched

On April 9, 2024, the Department of History launched The Johnathan Ocko Memorial Lecture series to honor the legacy of Dr. Jonathan Ocko, the History Department’s former Chair and faculty member. Ocko was a  highly respected historian of modern China, particularly on the relation of law and society.  The first lecture in the series, “The Chinese Question: Diasporic Histories and the Global Politics of Race,” was presented by Dr. Mae Ngai of Columbia University to a standing room only crowd. Dr. Ngai is a prominent historian of immigration, citizenship, nationalism and the Chinese diaspora.

The event also served to announce the History Department’s new legal history concentration. According to Dr. Julia Rudolph, “the legal concentration lecture series will continue into the future as a way to show how legal history is applied and how it can relate to the work or scholarship of graduate students, public historians, or undergraduates going into all sorts of fields.”