15thAnnual History Student Conference
Beyond Boundaries: Challenging Limits and Narratives in an Expanding World
Dear Esteemed Attendees,
On behalf of the Ph.D. Program in History at the CUNY Graduate Center, we extend a warm welcome to the 15th Annual Graduate Student Conference. This year we are proudly celebrating a remarkable milestone. For fifteen years, the graduate students in our program have passed the torch to one another with the same intention: to bring together our CUNY peers, faculty, and consortium colleagues for a day of intellectual exchange and community building. We are thrilled to have you join us once again for these engaging and thought-provoking discussions.
This year’s program features a wide range of panels exploring varying historical fields and methodologies, in the process highlighting the expansiveness of the historical discipline. Covering topics such as British imperialism, gender and sexuality in the 20th century, U.S. race and labor histories, and more, our panels reveal the questions being asked by emerging historians across their respective fields. We also provide practical career guidance to junior academics through roundtable discussions with experienced peers and faculty. For the second year, we are excited to continue welcoming historians from beyond the Graduate Center, including those from Fordham University, Columbia University, Stony Brook University, and the University of Tennessee.
This year’s theme, “Beyond Boundaries: Challenging Limits and Narratives in an Expanding World” speaks broadly to the ways that globalization has shaped not only our academic lives but the historical discipline itself. What challenges or opportunities does the discipline face as the field becomes more interdisciplinary and technologies make distant source bases more accessible? What are the main questions guiding academic and public historians, and where might they converge? We hope this conference offers an opportunity to consider these and other unique questions facing the discipline as we move out of the first quarter of the 21st century. Above all we hope that the conference serves to reaffirm the value imparted to the discipline by the free and critical exchange of scholarly ideas amongst early career scholars of all backgrounds. Together we chart new territory and foster the creation of new knowledge. We look forward to an inspiring and enriching experience for all.
Warm regards,
KristenFoland,YuliyaBarycheuskaya,andIanGregory
The Conference Organizers
9:30-10:20: Registration and Coffee (History lounge, Room 5114)
10:20: Executive Officer Opening Speech (Professor Jonathan Sassi)
10:30-11:30: Session 1
Panel 1 (History lounge, Room 5114): Historiography and Public History
Discussant: Mila Burns (CUNY Graduate Center)
Chair: Marta Millar (CUNY Graduate Center)
Jessica Webster (CUNY Graduate Center) “The Activist Turn: Archivists, The New Social History, and the Theories of Collecting, 1965-1990”
Biography: Jessica Webster is a first-year Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center as well as the Head of Archives and Special Collections, and an Associate Professor, at Baruch College, City University of New York. She holds an MLS in archives and an MA in history from the University of Maryland. She serves as library liaison to the history department, and has developed and taught archives-focused undergraduate credit courses. She served as the 2023-2024 Chair of the MidAtlantic Regional Archives Conference. Her collaborative projects have received funding from major granting agencies such as the Mellon Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.Herscholarlywork hasbeenpublishedinjournalsincluding The American Archivist, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, and she has presented widely at archives, library, and digital humanities conferences. Much of her current research revolves around outreach and advocacy for investment in archives, support for archival labor, and diversifying the historical record through the collaborative efforts of archivists and historians.
Abstract: In 1970, noted activist and historian Howard Zinn presented the keynote speech at the Society of American Archivists ’annual meeting, held at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. This moment has suffused archival lore; many scholars have pointed to this keynote as a galvanizing moment that began the activist archivist era, a period from the late 1960s through the 1980s when archivists begantocollect morebroadly in supportofscholarshipto document society “from the bottom up.” Zinn, along with colleagues like archivist F. Gerald Ham, argued that archivists have the power to broaden the historical record by proactively collecting materials related to those outside of traditional archival collecting practices, which favored white men in positions of power. In making this argument, these scholars were challenging nearly a century of practice, which focused on archivists being “objective” custodians of all material received by their institutions. By the 1960s, scholarship in the humanities and social sciences was also starting to change. The new social history, heavily influenced by related work in sociology and oral history, came to focus on documenting history “from the bottom up,” emphasizing the lives of the “voiceless” instead of the powerful.The main questions I will be exploring in this study are: how,
when, and why did archival collecting undergo a shift in favor of collecting more materials from underrepresented groups? To what extent did historians and archivists collaborate around the developing research needs of the new social history in the 1970s? What were some key ways that historians intervened in archival praxis through their research, presentations, or collaborative work? Did archivists shift their praxis at the behest of historians, for reasons native to the archival field, or a combination of the two? And lastly, how did these collecting approaches change over time as this movement gained traction in the archival field during the 1970s-1990s period?
Meagan Schulman (Fordham University) “Misinformation Management: Reconsidering Dualing Narratives in 17th-Century Bermuda”
Biography: Meagan Schulman is a second-year Ph.D. student at Fordham University. She focuses on multidisciplinary Atlantic World history, particularly piracy, privateering, and foreign policies between early British colonies, England, Spain, and the Netherlands in the 17th century.
Abstract: This paper will present a case for the importance of discussing misinformation present in primary sources. It will specifically target the colony of Bermuda, beginning with its intentional colonization(1612),and willdealwithtwocasestudiesdealingwithmisinformationintheprimary sources. For historians, the importance of primary sources is indisputable, but what happens when it becomes apparent that misinformation has been codified into the very sources revered by scholars? This research is the culmination of my master's thesis, which dealt with privateering policies regarding the Bermudian government and the English crown in which Governors of the Somers Island Company in Bermuda created a middle ground that portrayed the colonists as obedient to the English Crown’s policies regarding piracy. However, it is also influenced by an AHA roundtable titled “Secrecy, Lies, and Misinformation in Primary Sources,” where panelists discussed their encounters with misinformation in research documents. As such, this paper will encourage others to question primary sources and ask new questions based on the findings. I will use two case studies from my previous research to do this. First will be official documentation of one Early Governor, Nathaniel Butler, recorded regarding a severe famine overcoming the colony. Paired with this are various other primary sources, including private letters from other officials in the colony, that show Bermuda’s ability to produce suitable sustenance for its colonists. A second case study will be conducted on a wrecked vessel on the colony's coast. Historical records state that the vessel was wrecked in a storm following the rescue of all passengers onboard. Yet the archaeological record tells a different story, not of a storm but of an intentional wrecking event. These events will encourage reconsidering how scholars view and use their sources, prompting the use of alternative questions and disciplines.
Panel 2 (Room 5414): Gender, Sexuality, and Resistance Beyond Borders
Discussant: Karen Miller (CUNY Graduate Center)
Chair: Blake McGready (CUNY Graduate Center)
Elisabeth Champion (CUNY Graduate Center) “Female Sexuality and Promiscuity”
Biography: Elisabeth Champion is a first-year Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center studying ModernEuropean History.Herresearch interests areNazi Germany, HitlerYouth, sexual politics, women, gender, and sexuality.
Abstract: This paper is an edited chapter from my M.A. thesis, “Prudish or Promiscuous? How the Nazis Policed Gender and Sex in the Hitler Youth.” The thesis examines how the Nazis addressed fears of teenage promiscuity in the Hitler Youth. Chapter three, titled “Female Sexuality and Promiscuity,” focuses on the League of German Girls, the girl’s branch of the Hitler Youth. This chapter, and the focus of this paper, examines official’s reactions toward female promiscuity in the youth organization. By the outbreak of war, Hitler Youth officials believed a “sexual problem” existed within the League. Leaders argued that the disruptions of war, lack of parenting, and lack of discipline in school resulted in the moral neglect of adolescent girls. Hitler Youth officials took different measures to police female promiscuity, and male leaders typically blamed girls more than boys for promiscuity. Leaders witnessed a rise in prostitution, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and unwanted pregnancies, igniting fears about a sexual problem in the organization. The League dismissed pregnant teenagers from the movement and, in exceptional cases, deemed promiscuous girls as asocial and racially inferior. However, the extent to which a sexual problem existed in the League depended on the Nazis ’gendered perceptions of morality. Nazi leaders upheld traditional moral attitudes towards women’s roles and expected girls to preserve racial purity in Third Reich. Hitler Youth leaders perceived sexually active adolescents as alarming threats to the purity of the German Volk and increasingly monitored girls ’bodies and sexuality.
Tabitha Payne (Columbia University) “Thinking transness in the Cambodian genocide”
Biography: Tabitha Payne is afirst-yearAnthropology Ph.D.student at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to Filipino and American parents. A worker organizer and researcher before graduate school, she is interested in labor, sexuality, and subject formation under state power.
Abstract: Under the Khmer Rouge’s 1975 - 1979 state, Democratic Kampuchea, Cambodians were forced to work in labor groups segregated by assigned gender. As many as three million Cambodians died. Despite such conditions of famine, genocide, and execution, queer Cambodians made the most of the supposedly homosocial spaces the new regime inadvertently opened up for them. Some had previously thought they were alone, only meeting others like themselves during the genocide. This early research by a first-year Columbia Anthropology PhD student draws from
oral histories with survivors and a short documentary that she produced with a local activist group. It is an anthropological microhistory of three transmasculine friends: their separation from their families, the providence of their meeting, their polyamory, their romances with the women who would remain their wives. The Khmer Rouge disciplined these trans men per the whims of individual authorities – under some, threatened with the killing fields; under others, promoted for their abilities to ‘work as hard as men ’and permitted to cut off their state-mandated bobs. In contrast to trans women, who were typically subject to rape and other ‘corrective ’forms of bodily violence, trans men could find themselves valorized for their ability to perform masculinized labor in service to a state that nonetheless refused to recognize them as men. Drawing from trans Holocaust scholar Zavier Nunn, this paper considers the trans past in terms that challenge contemporary expectations for queer histories, conveying the uneven ways totalitarian states govern transness when no theory may exist for how to discipline it. It questions how totalitarian power operates in the absence of categories, reflexively questioning how categories such as transness and resistance also operate unexpectedly when transmuted across borders.
Emma Banks (CUNY Graduate Center, Center for Study of Women and Society) “Not Sanitized For Your Protection: AIDS and The Politics of Trash”
Biography: Emma Banks is am a freelance journalist currently working part-time for the Center for the Study of Women and Society here at the Graduate Center. In 2024 she earned her master's inWomen'sand GenderStudiesfromCUNY.Herresearchinterestsincludequeerhistory,material culture, environmental humanities, and queer domesticity.
Abstract: Metaphors of waste are particularly potent when enlisted to describe and justify the segregation and subjugation of marginalized communities. For, as discard studies scholars have shown, waste is not merely about trash; it is about power (Liboiron and Lepawsky). Maintaining power necessitates hierarchical categorization, whereby the needs and desires of some people are prioritized over those of others, to frequently catastrophic effect. At the turn of the 21st century, AIDS patients and allies needed no such explanation of what it meant to be relegated to the fringes and designated as waste. Thrown to the proverbial curb of society, PWAs (people with AIDS) were considered as good as garbage. And yet – many fought back, not by attempting to redeem the category of trash, but rather, by reclaiming it. Exemplified by the trashy, obscene rhetoric of Diseased Pariah News (DPN), and the literal trash art of Stephen Varble, these vanguards subverted their “wasteful and/or wasted” (Sikora 378) status by embracing trash as a weapon of dissent. It is here, then, that I locate what Christopher Schmidt calls “the “mysterious charisma of waste” (xii) – the liminal space where something gross just might become something glorious; where the rejected stuff of society is suddenly imbued with political force. Through these two case studies of DPN and Stephen Varble, this thesis will thus seek to elaborate on the power of waste work,exploreitssignificanceinthebroaderlandscapeoftheAIDS epidemic,and,finally,consider its heretofore unacknowledged relevance to the future of queer ecology.
Panel 3 (Room 5409): Physical and Discursive Migrations in the Modern Middle East
Discussant: Zoe Griffith (CUNY Graduate Center)
Chair: Phoenix Paz (CUNY Graduate Center)
Sesil Artuc (CUNY Graduate Center) “Armenians in Sivas: Stories of (Dis)Possession, 18581890”
Biography: Sesil Artuc is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her major field is the Middle East. Her research interests include nineteenthcentury Ottoman Empire, modern state-formation, and history of capitalism.
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of the migration of North Caucasians into the Ottoman Empire during the mid-to-late 19th century on local Armenians, focusing on their settlement in the province of Sivas which was the largest recipient of immigrants among the six Armenian provinces. The Ottoman Empire’s policies of resettling Muslim refugees from Russia on lands traditionally cultivated by Armenians led to the displacement and dispossession of the local Armenian population. This study explores how the settlement of North Caucasians contributed to the erosion of Armenian livelihoods through land appropriation, attacks and robberies. It sheds light on the mechanisms of dispossession and the role of state policies in fostering intercommunal conflict. Ultimately, this study aims to contribute to broader debates on the continuity of violence in the transition from empire to nation-state, offering insights into the historical processes that preceded genocidal violence.
Firat Koklu (CUNY Graduate Center) “Zonguldak coalfields and foreign labor migration into the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century”
Biography: Firat Koklu is a first-year Ph D student in History at the CUNY Graduate Center focusing on Middle Eastern history. His research interests are the social and economic history of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Period; transimperial labor mobility in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; migration and mobility in the modern Middle East; settlement patterns and land use among migrants and refugees; political ecology; and political economy.
Abstract: This paper examines the dynamics of foreign labor migration in the Zonguldak coalfields of the late Ottoman Empire during a period of increasing global connectivity and industrial expansion. Initially a peripheral and sparsely populated region, the Zonguldak coalfields became the empire's most important mining center after the discovery of its only coal deposit in the1820s. Whileproviding alocal and cheaperfuel fortheempire's industries, theearlierprimitive mining methods and the limited labor of local villagers became inadequate over time. For this reason, the Ottoman government, despite its earlier reluctance, allowed foreign capital to enter the region, believing that it would increase production. Indeed, the establishment of the Frenchcapitalized Ottoman Ereğli Company in 1896, with a large investment, introduced mechanization and infrastructure development that greatly increased production and attracted workers from
within the empire and abroad. The arrival of foreign workers created a multiethnic workforce characterized by disparities in wages and working conditions. While foreign workers from Europe tended to occupy skilled and wellpaid positions, local workers, including conscripted villagers, were relegated to low-paying and unskilled jobs. This exacerbated class and ethnic divisions and occasionally led to intercommunal conflict in the basin. Meanwhile, Ottoman officials perceived the presence of foreign workers as a threat to political stability, framing them as a source of intercommunalconflict andpotentialforeignintervention. Indoingso,Ottomanofficialsneglected the material inequalities that fueled unrest in the region and focused instead on concepts such as foreign citizenship and extraterritoriality. Drawing on archival documents, provincial yearbooks, and a miner's memoir from the period, this study situates the Zonguldak coalfields and foreign labor migration to the region within broader discussions of transimperial labor mobility, state policy, and socioeconomic transformation. It focuses on intercommunal relations, state officials' perceptions of foreign workers, and Ottoman policies toward these labor groups. It also examines how these foreign workers used various petitioning mechanisms to gain support from their home countries to overcome difficulties created by Ottoman policies at a time when the Ottomans were under increasing pressure from foreign powers. Thus, this study contributes to the understanding of labor relations and migration in the late Ottoman Empire and the political and diplomatic implications of foreign labor migration.
Kyra Dezjot (Fordham University) “African American Activists and the Creation of a Jewish State in 1948”
Biography: Kyra Dezjot is a second-year doctoral student at Fordham University in Modern American History. She investigates American Jewish communities, antisemitism, and how the Holocaust as an event impacted these communities.
Abstract: This historiographical analysis paper will examine African American critiques of Israel from 1948 to the present, emphasizing the arguments of prominent figures such as Kwame Ture, Marc Lamont Hill, Illian Pompe, Nora Ekarat, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. By exploring these critiques, this paper seeks to illuminate the broader discourse around race, colonialism, antisemitism, antiZionism, and global solidarity within African American intellectual and activist traditions. It will also consider arguments outside traditional academic histories to capture the multifaceted nature of these critiques, such as Ta-Nehisi Coates ’The Message, published in 2024. The paper will also consider relevant newspapers, including “The Black Scholar,” “Mohammed Speaks,” and “The Black Panther." Thegoal ofthis paperis to explore questionssuch as: HowhaveAfrican American critiques of Israel changed and developed, specifically as a consequence of military engagements in 1967? How do these scholars put the ‘right to return ’and the ‘right to exist ’in a complex conversation with each other, often using primary sources, including oral histories of Palestinians and Israelis?Howdo the arguments ofthesescholars fit into thelargerhistoriographical discussion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Pan- Africanism?
12:00-12:50: Roundtable 1, Article Publishing (History lounge, Room 5414)
Chair: Benjamin Carp (CUNY Graduate Center)
Panelists: Melanie Rush, Arinn Amer, Blake McGready (CUNY Graduate Center)
1:00-2:00: Session 2
Panel 1 (Room 5409): British Imperialism and Colonialism
Discussant: Simon Davis (CUNY Graduate Center)
Chair: Phoenix Paz (CUNY Graduate Center)
Catherine Williams (Fordham University) “1497-1594: A Voyage Behind the Allegory and Commentary of Early Modern Colonialism in “The Rape of Lucrece” Biography: Catherine Williams is a first-year M.A student in History at Fordham University with interdisciplinary research interests in Early Modern colonialism, literary traditions around travel and colonialism in addition to Shakespeare. Her contribution “The Airy Spirit, Prospero’s Indentured Servant: Ariel’s Complicated Presence in The Tempest” is forthcoming in the undercontract edited volume William Shakespeare: Tensions and Tempest. She is currently in the proposal stages for her first book project, titled The Rape of the World: Shakespeare’ s Allegory and Commentary on Early Modern Colonialism in “The Rape of Lucrece”.
Abstract: Shakespeare’s 1594 poem “The Rape of Lucrece” is an allegory and commentary on Early Modern colonialism. Yet, Shakespeare’s England did not have successful settler colonies in the Americas until 1607. My paper, “1497-1594: A VoyageBehind the Allegory and Commentary of Early Modern Colonialism in ‘The Rape of Lucrece’” examines the conditions that enabled Shakespeare, and English stay-at-home, to write and comment on Eary Modern colonialism. It begins in 1497 with the voyage of John Cabot to establish that English people and expeditions were involved in the New World as early as the late-fifteenth century. After briefly discussing John and Sebastian Cabot’s voyages to Newfoundland Island, my paper moves somewhere closer to home across a smaller body of water. Though sensitive, it is imperative to include Ireland in a historyofEnglish colonialism. Mypaperfocuses on theKilkennyStatues andHenryVIII’s Ireland to demonstrate how English people engaged in discourses of colonialism without overseas colonies. Then, my paper returns to the New World and its commentators. Moving to the New World and its commentators is a continuum of colonial discourses on regions beyond England. My paper presents a narrative beyond boundaries since it is centred on limits yielding to a centre. Actions at the limits of English sovereignty and consciousness yielded to the centre, both literally at English Royal Courts and figuratively in commentary writings. These limits yielding to the
centre enabled Shakespeare to write and comment on Early Modern colonialism in “The Rape of Lucrece”.
Changmin Lee (Stony Brook University) “Reimagining Colonial Authority in British India
Appointment of Governor-General Cornwallis and the Public Response”
Biography: Changmin Lee is a second-year Ph.D. student in History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on British imperial governance in the late 18th century, particularly emphasizing Governor-General Charles Cornwallis's administration, reforms, and wars in India.
Abstract: My paper examines the pivotal role of Charles Cornwallis in transforming British governance in India during the late 18th century. Following the loss of America and widespread crises within the East India Company, Cornwallis’s appointment as Governor-General in 1786 marked a decisive shift towards centralized imperial governance. The paper situates his tenure within broader efforts to stabilize the British Empire and reform colonial administration. The first section explores the legislative framework of Pitt’s India Act (1784), which established a dual governance structure with the Board of Control overseeing the East India Company. This act sought to address corruption, inefficiency, and financial instability in India. Cornwallis’s initial reluctance to accept the role is examined alongside public and political debates, with newspapers and political cartoons reflecting both support and skepticism regarding his leadership after his defeat at Yorktown. Cornwallis’s tenure prioritized fiscal soundness, peace, and anti-corruption measures. He enacted significant military and administrative reforms, including restructuring the East India Company’s army, curbing patronage and embezzlement, and instituting policies aimed at professionalizing governance. These efforts aligned with the broader imperial strategy of consolidating control and projecting British authority in India. The paper concludes by arguing that Cornwallis symbolized a shift from company-dominated rule to aristocratic-led governance, highlighting his administration’s role in the British Empire’s transition during a period of global imperial crisis. Through extensive use of primary sources and a nuanced historical approach, the study offers insights into the complexities of British colonial authority in the late 18th century.
Bret Windhauser (CUNY Graduate Center) “Hyper-Masculinized Bodies and Racialized Necrogeographies”
Biography: Bret Windhauser is currently a second-year Ph.D. student in History at the Graduate Center of City University of New York. His research focuses on the intersection between imperial law and death studies. In particular, he investigates the creation of British law and legal typologies related to burial practices and funerary traditions in early 20th-century Iraq.
Abstract: During the invasion of Ottoman Iraq as part of World War I, the British army attempted to hinder what they perceived would be cultural, religious, and linguistic divisions within their ranks by propagating a notion of pan-masculinization. Such a hyper-masculinization of the war effort sought to flatten various identities but ultimately failed as material conditions and labor practices between various groups were radically different in military camps. As British and Indian
soldiers died in the campaign, the army created standards for how to deal with the amassing corpses. In this paper, I argue that the racial, religious, caste, and class identities of Indians who died in Iraq during World War I were reified in death despite the hyper-masculinization of living British and Indian bodies serving in the campaign. This reconsideration of treatment towards wardead based on religion and race ultimately altered the necrogeography of Iraq by selectively exhuming certain corpses and transporting the bodies of white soldiers to urban areas like Baghdad. Urban cemeteries and war monuments became the resting place of deceased British soldiers while small desert graveyards, isolated graves, and rural plagues represented the loss of Indian life.
Panel 2 (Room 5414): Defining Health: Sex, Medicine, and Disability
Discussant: Kathleen McCarthy (CUNY Graduate Center)
Chair: Melanie Rush (CUNY Graduate Center)
Fiona O’Brien (Fordham University) “Our Groans to God: The Synching of Sensory and Emotional Experience During the Early Modern Birth Process”
Biography: Fiona O’Brien is a first-year Ph.D. student in history at Fordham University. She obtained her MA in history from the University of Toronto, focusing on childbirth, ritual, and bodily experience in the early modern period. She is passionate about histories from the margins and microhistory as a whole.
Abstract: Noise is so often the way that emotion is expressed. This noise is recalled verbatim when utilized in divine acts of martyrial devotion, but audible emotion in situations considered too quotidian for legend are swept aside when they are too oral, too corporeal. Grief, pain, loss, suffering: these all are expressed audibly in the birthing room, hence why we struggle so to reproduce them. Though it could be joyful, early modern conception, pregnancy and delivery were characterized by frequent anxieties. But how exactly did women in the early modern period conceive of and express these anxieties? How did they mitigate them, and how was the bodily experience used to catalogue emotional and physical health of both mother and child, from conception to delivery? To understand what birth entailed within a society, we must understand what it looked like, sounded like, smelled like, tasted like. Through analysis of material culture, medical theory, and physical and emotional experiences of the “birth process,” which includes from conception to after delivery I have begun to construct a physical narrative from the late sixteenth century through the late seventeenth century in England, France and Germany, to understand how the inextricable physical, bodily experience both informed and shaped the emotional and cultural experiences of pregnancy and delivery. The corporeal and emotional are inseparable, the body's language crucial in expressing fear, joy, and grief during pregnancy and childbirth. Understanding birth requires grasping its sensory reality, revealing a cultural narrative shaped by physical experiences.
Kaitlin Shine (Fordham University) “Processing "Getting Better" after the Great War: Responses by Veterans' Organizations and Governmental Bodies to the Recovery of Ex-Servicemen”
Biography: Katilin Shine is adoctoral candidate and Teaching Fellowat Fordham University. Her research interests include late nineteenth and early twentieth-century western Europe and the U.S.; the First World War; nationalism; memory Studies; disability studies; wartime trauma; post-war transitions; and the representation of veterans in print media. She is working on her dissertation regarding the interwar era responses of the American federal government, veterans’ organizations, and civilians to veterans that experienced lasting injuries or chronic illness after World War I ended.
Abstract: Understanding governmental responses to the challenges that disabled veterans faced in interwar America is no easy task. There were many actors involved, from bureaucrats to the American Legion, that both represented and complicated the care that World War I veterans received. However, recent scholarly approaches offer hope that the voices of both disabled veterans, and those providing assistance, can be better understood to contemplate the relationships veterans had with civilians and government officials regarding medical care and financial assistance. Thousands of Americans returned to the U.S. after the war with a disability. More research is needed to understand the agency that all WWI veterans displayed in approaching questions ofcare and assistanceas well as various political, medical, and cultural forces attempting to shape veterans ’postwar futures. The return of WWI servicemen necessitated a new level of government attention. My research explores how veterans navigated their postwar experiences to utilize this governmental assistance and advocate for themselves via veterans ’organizations. Governmental correspondence and other communications between veterans, civilians, and the government demonstrated how politics and beliefs about economic productivity shaped the type of care and assistance that veterans received from the Veterans ’Bureau, War Risk Insurance Bureau, and Congress. While navigating matters like the bonus debate and hospitalization, veterans were often ensnared between: the legacy of the costly Civil War pensioner, the government’s agenda to protect masculinity and labor productivity ideals, a rapid rehabilitation timeline, and public opinion. Veterans faced these forces and tried to chart their own futures.
Chloe Stoia (CUNY Graduate Center) “Emko: Puerto Rico’s Forgotten Contraceptive Experiment”
Biography: ChloeStoiais afirst-yearPh.D.student in theHistoryprogram at theCUNYGraduate Center. Her research interests include Puerto Rican history, modern American history, women’s history, the history of medicine, and racial formation.
Abstract: Joseph Sunnen was just one of the many American capitalists interested in solving the island’s so-called “over population problem.” He sought to create a new contraceptive that could be produced cheaply and easy to use for the uneducated population. The result is the topic of my research: a three-year contraceptive experiment of Emko, a spermicidal foam, in the slums outside San Juan beginning in 1959. Although Sunnen created the foam and financed the experiment, Dr.
Clarence Gamble, of the Proctor and Gamble fortune, organized it through clinics under the international branch of Planned Parenthood. Unlike other experiments that were conducted by medical professionals, Emko was largely run by volunteer female social workers and teachers. However, the impoverished women who accepted Emko were unaware that it was an experimental drug. The foam was later proven to be ineffective, leaving women with unwanted pregnancies. Previous scholarship on contraceptives on the island has focused on the massive rates of female sterilization and Enovid, the first birth control pill. Emko is either mentioned in passing or not at all. My intervention is zooming in on this forgotten experiment. During the winter break, I’m traveling to the Harvard University and Smith College archives to compile all of my sources, primarily including outlines of the experiments and letters. My methodology is inspired by social and microhistory. I ask: what does this experiment reflect about the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico? How does Emko fit into the island’s greater history of contraceptives and medicine?
2:10-3:10: Session 3
Panel 1 (Room 5409): Contact, Conflict, and the Environment
Discussant: John Dixon (CUNY Graduate Center)
Chair: Sato Moughalian (CUNY Graduate Center)
Leah Hetrick (CUNY Graduate Center) “Cultural Hybridization at Aquae Sulis”
Biography: Leah Hetrick is a first-year Ph.D. student in CUNY Graduate Center’s History program. She studies Ancient and European History, and she is interested in the history of medicine, public health, material culture, art history and architecture, and cultural history.
Abstract: This paper focuses on cultural hybridization at Aquae Sulis and the Sanctuary of Sulis Minerva, located in the modern-day city of Bath, England. The bathing complex (thermae) was constructed in the 60s CE after the Romans conquered the land, which came to be known as the province of Britannia. In the early twentieth century, Francis Haverfield developed the theory of “Romanization,” detailing the process in which conquered societies would “become Roman” by speaking Latin and following Roman customs. Yet the theory of traditional “Romanization” is contested, as scholars disagree on how native populations adopted Roman culture and on their willingness to do so. Cultural hybridity is an aspect of the postcolonial approach to “Romanization” that started to take shape in the 1990s, championed by archaeologists such as Nicola Terrenato and Jane Webster. It is primarily concerned with how Roman culture and native cultureblended. This paper posits thatAquae Sulis wasnot simply a Roman settlement in a foreign location; rather, it represented the interaction between two different cultures, which resulted in a site that was not quite Roman nor quite Brittonic, but a blend of elements from each. The syncretized deity of Sulis Minerva, ritual activity, cultural landscape, and iconography present there serve as examples of this hybridization.
Blake McGready (CUNY Graduate Center) “Gender, War, and Wilderness during the 1779 Invasion of Iroquoia”
Biography: Blake McGready is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation, “Making Nature’s Nation: The Revolutionary War and Environmental InterdependenceinNew York,1775–1783,”examines theenvironmental legacies oftheAmerican Revolution. Blake has served as a co-chair of the CUNY Early American Republic Seminar. His previous work has been published in Pennsylvania History and Early American Studies, and he has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Society of the Cincinnati, and the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. He has previously worked at The Gotham Center for New York City and for the National Park Service.
Abstract: Ahead of the 250th anniversary of American independence, environmental historians face an urgent question: how environmentally consequential was the American Revolution? My paperconsiderstheRevolution’senvironmentallegacybyexaminingtheContinentalArmy’s1779 invasion of Iroquoia. Patriot soldiers laid waste to Haudenosaunee villages and agroecosystems, destroying the orchards, gardens, and croplands that were stewarded by Haudenosaunee women. As they rampaged through Seneca lands, revolutionaries also composed romantic descriptions of thescenery.Patriots ’rhapsodic descriptions were highly gendered; soldiers acted as men bylaying waste to Seneca agriculture and by commending sublime natural features. Haudenosaunee people, moreover, stewarded many of the environmental landmarks revolutionaries praised. While scholars have inventoried the Continental Army’s destruction in Iroquoia, they have not paid attention to how the Revolution produced a new environmental discourse, nor have they noted the important role gender played in shaping this vision of “nature’s nation.” My paper considers how environmental violence collided with Haudenosaunee stewardship and forged new environmental relationships for the infant United States.
Christopher Pascale (Stony Brook University) “Death by 1,000 Strokes”
Biography: Christopher Pascale is a second-year Ph.D. student in American History at Stony Brook University. His research interest is land treaties between Kanza Indians and the U.S. government.
Abstract: On June 3, 1825, famed explorer and US Superintendent of Indian Affairs Meriweather Lewis closed a deal with the Kanza Indians in the first of four treaties between the tribe and the government. It reduced their land by 90%, but appeared satisfactory due to a twenty-year annuity of cash and livestock. They also retained access to their western hunting grounds A common criticism of this treaty is that it was unfair based on the annual cash portion being equal to about $111,000 today, for a population of 1,200. But financial concerns negate that the treaty separated the tribe by race in a process by which the Kanza lands would be reduced by 90% again in 1846, and more so in 1859. The racial aspect of the treaty made exceptions to those who were half Native and half French. These people received individually deeded land of a square mile on the north side of the Kansas River, creating a vast wealth gap and social divisions between them and those who lived communally. Most treacherously, it rewarded people by race while creating a dependency
from the tribe on annual income that led to them making another seemingly fair deal that nearly led to their obliteration. Their population would fall to one-hundred-ninety-four in just three generations. In my talk and paper, “Death by a Thousand Strokes of the Pen,” I will discuss the original treaty’s details, the financial status of tribal members, and how these practices laid the foundation for a slow genocide.
Panel 2 (Room 5414): Intersections of Race and Labor in Modern U.S. History
Discussant: Donna Haverty-Stacke (CUNY Graduate Center)
Chair: Adam Kocurek (CUNY Graduate Center)
Jack Devine (CUNY Graduate Center) “The National Labor Union and Industrial Slavery”
Biography: Jack Devine is a fifth-year Americanist at the CUNY Graduate Center working on the American Civil War, its legacy, and the labor movement.
Abstract: The old world of slavery was dead. A new world of free labor was struggling to be born. War between the Union and Confederacy was centered upon the right to self-ownership. Working class reformers both celebrated emancipation and compared their conditions to that ofthe formerly enslaved. Advocates of the proletarian cause proclaimed that those who built the country through their brawn and brain needed both organizations to serve their interests as well as more free time to become full citizens of the American Republic. Recent history was a weapon in the new class war that had arisen between those who toiled for a living and the monopolies. While the National Labor Union failed to achieve their ambitious goals, policies they advocated for and institutions they promoted remained part of the American scene as did the manner in which they connected the plight of the laborer in an increasingly industrialized society with the trials of the Civil War. Their belief in the harmonious relationship in the workplace crashed against the reality of strike waves that emerged from the inherent conflict between capital and labor.
Samantha Chomsky (CUNY Graduate Center) “Grass Roots Organizing Work (GROW) in Laurel, Mississippi”
Biography:SammieChomskyisathird-yeardoctoralstudentin theHistory program attheCUNY GraduateCenter.Shestudies U.S. HistoryandLatin American Historyand focuses onlabor, social movements, and education.
Abstract: In 1966, soon after Stokely Carmichael gave his pivotal speech demanding “Black Power,” two white members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee presented a proposal to organize white workers alongside black workers in the rural South. This would be accomplished by pursuing two strategies: one was more goal-oriented, organizing for “tangible improvements in the conditions of poor whites,” whether that was on the job, in schools, or in
gaining access to government relief; the other was “constant education against racism” throughout theentireorganizingprocess. In themidst ofSNCC's decision to becomeanall-blackorganization, Bob and Dottie Zellner departed from SNCC and embarked on the "racially parallel" GROW project. They soon set up shop in Laurel, Mississippi to support an interracial wildcat strike of woodworkers, many of whom belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. GROW organizers believed that workers ’education was key to overcoming white supremacy on a local level, winning the strike, and building a broader movement capable of creating radical social change. This paper will investigate GROW’s educational theory and practice. Why did these organizers see education as so essential? How did they enact their vision for workers ’education and what impact did it have?
Camren Alexa Lewin (University of Tennessee) “Urban Renewal, Redevelopment, and Community Participation in Knoxville, Tennessee from 1969 to 1975”
Biography: Camren Alexa Lewin is a fourth-year Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at the University of Tennessee. Her research interests include African American History, Urban History, and 20th Century History.
Abstract: My dissertation studies Black communities in two areas of Knoxville (East Knoxville and the Beaumont-Lonsdale-Mechanicsville area) in the twentieth century and how urban renewal projects affected their lives. I argue that, from 1950 to 1993, African Americans fought for space and resources in Knoxville as urban renewal projects displaced families and businesses, impacted education, created food instability and job insecurity. Through the varying experiences of Black Knoxvillians, my work further explores the role of class in how Black communities responded to these projects. My research demonstrates that Black upper middle/elite class landlords (with multiple properties especially) benefited from the Knoxville Housing Authority (KHA) ’s appraisals. It looks at Black elites such as Knoxville College Professor James Beck’s ability to reap the benefits of urban renewal. My research also builds on historians who place African Americans as active agents in rebuilding their neighborhoods during this time. Urban renewal in Knoxville evolved in distinct stages. From 1954 to 1968, the KHA viewed the Riverfront-Willow and Mountain View urban renewal projects as a success. The ‘success ’of the KHA’s efforts relocated working and lower-class African Americans to public housing, justifying the destruction of their homes because they lacked running water, indoor plumbing, and electricity. In 1969, the KHA announced its plans to expand urban renewal efforts to Morningside in East Knoxville, causing concern amongst residents who lived there. Many Black families owned or rented properties here that already had amenities that urban renewal policies promised tenants and homeowners. Due to this encroachment by the KHA, the residents of this area formed the Committee for the Development of the Black Community as an act of resistance. Although some community members of this area worked with the KHA to mitigate relocation stresses, urban renewal projects still had an indelible impact on Black Knoxvillians and their neighborhoods.
3:20 - 4:20: Roundtable 2, Public History and the Archive (History lounge, Room 5114)
Chair: Yuliya Barycheuskaya (CUNY Graduate Center)
Panelists: Jessica Webster, Marta Millar, Rachel Pitkin (CUNY Graduate Center)
4:30 on: Closing Reception (History lounge, Room 5414)