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 examines three forms of circulation that survive under constraint: information, gendered labor, and cultural memory. Emma Allen reconstructs Operation Mincemeat (1943) to show how wartime deception moved through indirect channels — neutral Spain, forged documents, and carefully staged credibility — and evaluates Montagu's postwar memoir as a curated account shaped by censorship and self-presentation. Sarah Bryant Genung argues that patriarchy is a historically constructed system maintained through coercion and the control of women's labor, developing this claim through two comparative case studies: the formalization of gender hierarchy under Roman imperial law and the Japanese military comfort women system as state-organized sexual exploitation. Daniel Mayfield traces the biwa — a traditional Japanese lute and storytelling medium — from its courtly and martial traditions through its postwar decline and contemporary revival through cross-genre adaptation, arguing that the instrument's portability made it a durable vehicle for cultural memory across disruption. Dylan Deman grounds the panel in lived experience, drawing on oral testimony and survivor accounts to examine how ordinary Japanese civilians narrated the destruction wrought by war and the atomic bombings, arguing that civilians bear the true cost of imperial ambition. 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, memory, and identity across time.