History Professors Markham, Muntz to Serve as Cambridge University Visiting Fellows

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Elizabeth Markham (left) and Charlie Muntz.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Assistant professor Charlie Muntz and professor Elizabeth Markham have been named visiting fellows at Wolfson College and Lucy Cavendish College, respectively, at the University of Cambridge in England. Both are members of the history faculty in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and will serve as fellows for the 2014-15 academic year. 

 “I am very excited for professors Markham and Muntz,” said Kathryn Sloan, chair of the department of history. “The visiting fellowship program is an excellent opportunity for Fulbright faculty to have access to world-renowned academic resources. The program also exposes the international community to exceptional scholars and highlights the excellent work being done in Fulbright College and at the University of Arkansas.”

Markham, a historical musicologist, will serve as the visiting fellow at Lucy Cavendish College. Cambridge is the leading international center for the study of pre-modern Asian music, which will benefit Markham’s work on music and culture in East Asia with a focus on the court and temple arts in Medieval Japan. She will use her time researching materials for her upcoming book, The Songs of Chinese Poet and Musician Jiang Kui (1155-1221).

Markham is an alumna of Cambridge’s Lucy Cavendish College and has many contacts in the United Kingdom and around the world. Her book Saibara—Japanese Court Songs of the Heian Period is considered an essential text on medieval Japanese music.

Muntz will serve as the Wolfson College visiting fellow. Cambridge libraries own the only surviving and complete commentary on the Greek historian Diodorus – the 18th century edition of Diodorus's Bibliotheke. While at Cambridge, Muntz will work on his book Writing the World: Diodorus I-III and the Invention of Universal History. After exploring a comprehensive analysis of contemporaries' writings, Muntz breaks with the traditional literature that dismisses Diodorus as a grand epitomizer. Instead, Muntz posits that Diodorus originated the idea of universal history and significantly influenced later and more well respected writers such as Strabo, Pompeius Trogus and Nicolaus of Damascus.  

Muntz is a Duke-trained specialist in classics. The most recent publication in his research record is "Diodorus Siculus and Megasthenes: A Reappraisal," which appeared in Classical Philology. 

The Visiting Fellows partnership between Fulbright College at the University of Arkansas and Wolfson College and Lucy Cavendish College at the University of Cambridge began in 1988.  Since that time, faculty members from 14 of Fulbright College’s 19 departments have been chosen as fellows.  Participating departments include anthropology, art, biological sciences, chemistry and biochemistry, communication, English, geosciences, history, journalism, mathematical sciences, music, philosophy, sociology and criminal justice, and world languages, literatures and cultures.

The visiting fellow program gives tenure-track faculty the opportunity to join the vibrant academic community at the University of Cambridge, which celebrated its 800^th anniversary in 2009. Visiting scholars are typically engaged in teaching and/or research at the university or in a recognized research establishment while in Cambridge. Visiting fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis to scholars who are not normally residents in Cambridge. Fellows are expected to be in residence for at least one term, and their status cannot normally be extended beyond one academic or calendar year.

Fulbright College seeks to advance J. William Fulbright’s legacy of peace through education through such partnerships.

"Perhaps the greatest power of such intellectual exchange is to convert nations into peoples and to translate ideologies into human aspirations.” – J. William Fulbright