Cynthia Ross
Cynthia Ross is an Associate Professor of History at East Texas A&M University near Dallas, Texas, Editor of World History Connected, and the Vice President of the World History Association. She earned her doctoral degree from Washington State University in 2011, with specializations in World History, War and Society, Environmental History, Food History, and American Empire. She has extensive experience teaching World History, U.S. History from a global perspective, historiography and theory, and courses in her specializations to diverse student populations including undergraduate, graduate, dual credit, first generation university students, and active adult learners. She holds numerous research awards including the Global Human Rights Fellowship and is a Global Fellow at her university. Her most recent publication “Dinner in the Trenches: Army Rations, Rolling Kitchens, and the Logistics of Food for American Doughboys” is in Mandy Link and Matthew Stith, Eds., Beyond No Man’s Land: New Perspectives of the First World War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Her two current monograph projects focus on the role of botanists in creating militarized landscapes in the Pacific and a history of Texas wine.
East Texas A&M University
Sessions
This is an opportunity for conference participants to hear about World History Connected's vision and related publication opportunities. The Editor will walk participants through the publication process, especially addressing the concerns and questions of attendees that have not yet published work and those interested in guest editing a forum on a special topic. Teacher-scholars welcome!
How do global connections persist when borders harden, through war, empire, and coercive social orders? This panel explores being global after globalization by examining three kinds of circulation that thrive under constraint: information, gendered labor, and cultural narrative. Emma Allen analyzes Operation Mincemeat (1943) to show how wartime intelligence moved through indirect channels - neutral Spain, bureaucratic documents, and carefully staged credibility - demonstrating the strategic power and moral ambiguity of misinformation. Sarah Bryant Genung argues that patriarchy is a historically constructed system sustained through coercion and control of women’s labor, comparing the formalization of gender hierarchy during Romanization in Western Europe with the World War II Japanese comfort women system as state-organized exploitation. Daniel Mayfield traces the Japanese biwa as a portable medium of storytelling and memory, charting its post–World War II decline and its modern revival through adaptation and cross-genre exchange. Dylan Deman's paper on Japanese survivor testimony grounds the panel in the lived experience of wartime devastation and its difficult survival, showing how ordinary Japanese people narrated the experience of destruction and loss. Together, these papers reveal a shared dynamic: when borders close, networks do not disappear; they reroute through shadow systems, coerced dependencies, and resilient cultural forms that sustain connection across time and space.