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Margolies Awarded Mednick Memorial Fellowship
Professor of History Dan Margolies' research receives support from VFIC
Featured News | May 14, 2018
Dr. Dan Margolies, Professor of History and Chair of the History Department and the American Studies Program, has been awarded the 2018 Maurice L. Mednick Memorial Fellowship by the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges. His project will focus on “Jurisdictional Disputes over Offshore Submerged Lands and the Spatiality of State Sovereignty, 1947-1953.”
Through his research, Margolies will further investigate tension between state sovereigntist claims and state affirmation of empire by examining the state political and legal responses to three Supreme Court cases, starting with United States v. California, the 1947 case which clarified the boundaries between ownership (dominium), jurisdiction, and sovereignty as expressed in the foreign relations imperium. According to Margolies’ project description, this case, and the rapidly following U.S. v. Louisiana and U.S. v. Texas cases of 1950 which built directly upon it, were ultimately overtaken by political agitation in one of the most intensely waged domestic political campaigns of the postwar era. Despite being later overturned, he says, these cases created a potent case for imperial governance as a new postwar modality arguably as significant as a recognized cornerstone of U.S. global extraterritorial jurisdiction such as the 1945 U.S. v. Alcoa decision.
This grant project will complete archival research for a chapter on the submerged lands (“Tidelands”) controversy for Margolies’ current book project, Zones of Sovereignty and Exception: United States Jurisdictional Regimes Through the Law of the Sea Conventions.
Margolies has been on the faculty at Virginia Wesleyan since 2000. His research specialty is American foreign relations (the U.S. in the world) and foreign relations law. He has a strong interest in interdisciplinary work and has published widely in history and in other fields. He teaches a wide variety of classes on topics such as U.S. Foreign Relations, the Civil War, Sound and Noise in American History, Space and Place in the Global USA, Globalization and Empire, Old and New South, the Nineteenth Century, and Radicalism and Violence in American History. He also teaches courses on Asian (particularly Korean) history, Appalachian traditional music, Texas-Mexican conjunto music, and the history and practice of beekeeping.
The Maurice L. Mednick Memorial was created in 1967 in honor of a young Norfolk industrialist who died from accidental causes and whose family and business associates wished to perpetuate his name by establishing a memorial that would emphasize his and the donors’ strong interest in higher education. Administration of the Mednick Memorial Fund is vested in the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges to encourage the professional development of college professors and improve their academic competence through fellowships for research and advanced study.