14thAnnual History Student Conference
Controversial Times: History in the Changing World Order
Dear Esteemed Attendees,
On behalf of the Ph.D. Program in History at the CUNY Graduate Center, we extend a warm welcome to the 14th Annual Student Conference "Controversial Times: History in the Changing World Order." We are thrilled to have you join us for a day of intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking discussions.
This year's conference features a diverse range of panels that delve into various aspects of history within the context of our changing world order. From colonialism to contemporary power dynamics, our panels will explore critical issues and offer fresh perspectives on historical narratives. We are delighted to have panelists representing a range of institutions besides our own Graduate Center, including Stony Brook, New York University, Princeton University, Concordia University, University of Albany, and The New School.
After a prolonged disruption of real-life networking due to the global pandemic, we learned to appreciate the importance of getting to know your peers in person. Virtual interactions have been valuable, yet not a substitute for face-to-face engagement For this reason, this year's event is fully in-person. Our hope is ideas will flow freely and relationships strengthen We encourage attendees to take advantage of this opportunity to reconnect with colleagues, meet new peers, and foster collaborations that can enrich their academic journeys.
Together we foster the development of new concepts and create new knowledge. We look forward to an inspiring and rewarding experience for all.
Warm regards,
Yuliya Barycheuskaya and Robert Cleary, The Conference OrganizersParticipants
Panel 1: Colonialists, Anti-Colonialists, and Opportunities at Reform
Discussant: Professor David Gordon (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair: Duangkamol Tantirungkij (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Mounira Keghida (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Mounira Keghida is currently completing a doctoral dissertation at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research traces the development of the Physiocratic movement as it first developed and then transitioned from the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. She follows the Desjobert family, three generations of men of state. She has taught World and Modern European historyat several colleges in NewYorkCity,andpresentedaportion ofanearlier chapter at the2019AHAconferencetitled, “BeetingColonialism:Theanti-colonialist voices of theFrench Beet Sugar Industry speak against the colonialist program in Algeria.” She recently published an article in www.ageofrevolutions.com titled, “Revolution in Search of a Father: The Return of the EmirAbd el Kader.”
AWar of Words in the French Parliament, asAlgeria Burned, 1833-53
Abstract: During the conquest of Algeria, the military of the July Monarchy increasingly turned to fire as a weapon of war. In the Chamber of Deputies, Amédée Desjobert and Alexis de Tocqueville, the leading opponent and proponent of the conquest, each set out to be recognized as the leading expert on the subject ofAlgeria. This presentation is related to the research I have done for my dissertation in which I argue Desjobert’s anti-colonialist arguments in the Chambers reflect basic physiocratic principle, just as his activities outside the Chambers.
Charles Argon (Princeton University)
Biography: Charles Argon is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at Princeton University. He holds a B.A., also from Princeton, and an M.A. from Tsinghua University. In 2017 he was a Fulbright Scholar to China. His dissertation examines baojia, the idea and practice of neighborhood policing in early modern China.
Personnel Matters: The politics of baojia implementation in the Yongzheng reign
Abstract: My dissertation is the first monograph on baojia in early modern China. Baojia was the primary policy through which the Qing Empire (1644-1911) registered and policed its population. This paper is an empirical early portion from my third chapter, which addresses the expanding use of baojia in the eighteenth century. It uses the unusually rich and accessible archives of the Yongzheng reign (1723-1735) to understand when the Qing state thought that baojia should be implemented. I argue that, contrary to the findings of existing scholarship, the Qing state – and
especially the Yongzheng emperor himself – did not intend for baojia to be implemented everywhere in the empire. To the contrary, what emerges is a protracted intra-governmental policy debate about when and how to implement baojia, in which provincial bureaucrats called for standardization and the court resisted it. This suggests that we need to reconsider how much the Qing aspired to better understand and control their subjects.
Collin Bonnell (Concordia University)
Biography: Collin Bonnell is a doctoral candidate studying early modern Ireland and the British Atlantic under Ted McCormick at Concordia University in Montreal. Before moving to Montreal, he earned his master’s and bachelor’s degrees from Fordham University. He is in the second year of his studies at Concordia, and his research interests includes early modern Ireland, the history of political elites, religious and ethnic identity, and colonialism.
Displaced Colonizers: Repositioning the Irish Within the ‘BritishAtlantic’
Abstract: My dissertation challenges the traditional understanding of the ProtestantAscendancy, which dominated Ireland from the later seventeenth century, as a ‘foreign’ruling class. It does so by demonstrating the extent to which theAscendancy included much of Ireland’s pre-Tudor elite, especially elites of Old English descent. This group, which had arrived in Ireland during the late medieval period and remained predominatly Catholic following the Reformation, found itself in an ambiguous position during early modern Ireland’s religious and political conflicts. Historians often emphasize Old English involvement in several revolts against England, despite their usual tendancy to support the Crown. Indeed, the Old English often invoked their English ancestry to reserve an active role for themselves in England’s campaigns in Ireland, and were sometimes willing to abandon the Catholicism which defined their identity in order to remain relevant. My research demonstrates that Old English elites often participated in British colonialism across theAtlantic,andarguesthisbecameanessentialpartoftheirtransformationfrom‘Irish’to‘British’ elites.1 The Old English constituted much of the planter class in South Carolina and the West Indies, and provided many of the merchants who conducted trade between the British colonies and metropole. These individuals were deeply involved in the slave trade, and played important roles in colonial politics. My paper would thus reposition Old English elites within the British Empire in light of their participation in colonialism and the slave trade. It would also reconsider the Irish diaspora’s relation to colonial legacies, including institutional racism.
Nicholas Charnley (University ofAlbany)
Biography: Nick Charnley is a graduate student in the doctoral program at the University of Albany’s history department. He studies 19 th and 20 th century European military history, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which gender, nationality, and race inform both individual and group identities within the armed forces. His current dissertation, titled “Civilizing Demons:
Nation,Race,andGenderIdentityintheFrenchForeignLegion,1831-54”exploresthecultivation of the legendary fighting force’s institutional legacy during its first century of existence, amidst the social and political turbulence of France’s second colonial empire. In addition, he has taught numerous courses onthe globalimpact ofimperialism,colonization,andcultural hegemony across the world, throughout human history.
‘Great Things are Expected’: the Regiments of the Foreign Legion inAlgeria, 1841-49
“What a funny regiment, my brother!” exclaimed a middle-aged French lieutenant and future Marshal of France namedArmand-Jacques Leroy de Saint-Arnaud. He had recently arrived at Pau in November 1836 to join the first Legion battalion bound for North Africa. After several unfulfilling or unsuccessful army careers in both France and Greece, a heap of financial debts, and a falling-out with his family, Saint-Arnaud fled Europe and sought his fortunes across the Mediterranean. The aspiring officer would serve with the Legion for four years, seeing the organization as an opportunity for personal and professional advancement. Like other French military men, he wanted to prove his worth through both personal courage in battle, and by the paternal care for his troops. For Saint-Arnaud, the reputation of the Legion intertwined with his own, and he strove to mold it in the fashion of classic French military excellence. A fuller assimilation of the corps into France’s army might then prove the manly worth not only of its foreign recruits, but of their warrior-citizen cadre as well. And while he worried that the foreign nature of his men might prove a difficult obstacle to overcome, he believed that the French martial masculine ethos, combined with his own personal leadership, would prove up to the task of assimilating these outsiders into national warriors.
Panel 2: Navigating Gender, Race, and Sexuality amid Modern Worlds
Discussant: Professor Julia Sneeringer (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair: Cathy Cabrera-Figueroa (, Graduate Center, CUNY)
Ian Gregory (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Ian Gregory is a first-year student in the History PhD program, focusing on 19 th century France. They previously attended Penn State University and the University of Chicago. Ian’s research interests include the French occult revival, antisemitism, and mass culture.
Two Psychic Women in the DreyfusAffair
Abstract: In 1895, Mathieu Dreyfus met with the medium Léonie Leboulanger in Le Havre, introduced to her through the doctor Charles Gibert, who had been conducting experiments on her extrasensory abilities. She informed Mathieu about the health and state of his brother, Alfred Dreyfus, who was imprisoned on Devil’s Island, as well as the backdoor dealings that lead to his conviction.
Taken with her predictions, Mathieu invited Leonie to Paris, paid for her lodging, and used her as a confidant. A year later, Henriette Couédon, a young Parisian woman, found support among the right for her prophecies condemning the Republic and Emile Zola and proclaiming the return of the monarchy. Her father carefully managed the public’s access to her, and her prophecies were promulgated primarily through works of Gaston Méry, antisemite and editor-in-chief of La Libre Parole.
Both women, through their use of their visionary powers and timely association with the dramatic political issues of the day, secured (at least for a time) a livelihood for themselves, in the fashion of the great women mediums of spiritsme. Both women, however, had the details of their lives controlled and managed by men. Together, they form a compelling demonstration of the intersection between the occult and the political and the ways that women in France used the supernatural to advance their position in life, and how men of all political alignments were willing to use spiritualist women for their own ends but could easily discard them when convenient.
Dee L. Martin (The New School)
Biography: Deirdre L. Martin is first-year Historical Studies MA graduate student at The New School and aResearchAssistant atTheNewSchool forSocialResearchfor ProfessorEli Zaretsky. She is an Edward E. Shoaf Ethics Scholar interested in the intersection of Critical Security Studies and Women’s, Gender, and LGBTQ+ Studies. Her work for the LGBTQTask Force was presented at the White House Transgender Community Briefing in 2016. She helped amend the Library of Congress LGBTQIA+ Studies Resource Guide in 2020.
CIAExploitation of LGBTQ+ Civil RightsActivists at the First National Convention of Lesbians
Abstract: A suppressed Lavender Scare experiment conducted testing on 54 LGBTQ+ rights activists at the ‘First National Convention of Lesbians’ and two other locations in 1960. A close examination of LGBTQ+ archival documents and declassified files reveals unwitting members of the first national lesbian and gay rights organizations Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), Mattachine Society, and ONE were exploited by the United States government via the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for Project MKULTRA, a notoriously unethical cold war operation covered-up by theAgency.
Most evidence was destroyed, but clues are found in historic issues of some of the first LGBTQ+ magazines: DOB’s The Ladder and Mattachine’s Review, Newsletter, and Interim. A testing schedule lists testing subjects by name, including ONE co-founder W. Dorr Legg, ‘pioneer in the American gay rights movement andin GLBTQstudies’.Historicallysignificant membersof DOB, Mattachine Society, and ONE were exploited by this experiment, such as former DOB president Del Martin, a ‘Lesbian Rights pioneer,’ and her partner, ‘LGBTQ rights pioneer’ Phyllis Lyon, whofiledaFreedomofInformationAct(FOIA)requestaboutthetestingbutneverreceivednotice, explanation, or an apology from CIA. Undercover officers collected samples and conducted 108 hours of testing for six to seven days., two hours of psychological profiling per subject, for a
Project MKULTRA Sub-Project 60/Sub-Project 83 experiment to detect ‘homosexuals’ using handwriting analysis. Evidence strongly suggests the CIA testing contributed to the graphology section in the 1963 KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, known as the CIA’s ‘torture manual’.
Ava Freyaldenhoven (The New School)
Biography: Ava Freyaldenhoven is a second year M.A. student at the New School for Social Research in Historical Studies with a minor in Capitalism Studies. Her areas of study include 19th and 20th century gender and race relations within American consumer culture. Material culture and the history of fashion is the foundation to her research. Her thesis is on the impact of the American silk hosiery industry on consumer based identity formation. She will graduate from the New School in Spring 2024 and plans to pursue a PhD in American History. She is currently the student assistant specialist for the Robert L. Heilbroner Center of Capitalism Studies.
Two-Sided Stockings: Race, gender and theAmerican Silk Hosiery Market, 1919-1930
Abstract:The word “boyish” was frequently used to describe women’s fashion in the 1920s. Short hair, short dresses, and dropped waists negated corsets, a transition in fashion history that is familiar in public memory. What is less understood is the legacy of corsets, which projected a base standard of artifice to women’s bodies that remains relevant. Camp, corseted waists in American visual culture were replaced by skin-toned hosiery, an industry that profited from the centralization of women’s legs as embodied mobility and modern femininity. The social pressure of wearing skin-toned stockings over bare legs further perpetuated the standard of the “fake body” as a mechanism to objectify women. The relationship between “flapper” era hosiery and systemic standards for women illustrates how consumerism impacts gender identity in the name of progress while being inextricably linked to the past’s oppressive standards. The idea of the “flapper” as a modern, “progressive” woman in the interwar period contradicts the reality of how the rise of hemlinesperpetuateda racialized,sanitizedstandardoffemininity.This resultedin astrengthening of consumer-based identity formation and body objectification. The hosiery industry has yet to be realizedasanimportanthistoricalfacetofthiscontroversialtimewhenanewworldorderemerged. This decade of fashion deciphers social codes and reveals what has evolved toward equality and what has remained tied to old systems.
First Roundtable Identity and Research in Controversial Times
Moderator: Yuliya Barycheuskaya, (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Marissa Guijarro (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Nour Mohamad Jamil Hodeib (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Ray Self (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Panel 3: Building Institutions and Boundaries in Progressive Era New York
Discussant: Professor Kathleen McCarthy (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair: Evan Rothman (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Kristen Foland-Majkut (Graduate Center)
Biography: Kristen Foland-Majkut is a first year history student in the Graduate Center’s PhD Program. Her research interests are social and cultural history, Progressive Era NYC, private philanthropy, and the environmental historiography.
TheAdirondack Cottage Sanitarium, Tuberculosis, and Private Philanthropy; 1885-1915
Abstract: EdwardLivingstonTrudeauis widely considered apioneerinAmericanmedical history for his work on tuberculosis between 1873 and his death in 1915. As a member of New York’s elite, Trudeau leveraged his social position to crowd-source the first tuberculosis sanitarium in the United States, located in Saranac Lake, NewYork. The project survived and became an exemplary model for institutions in New York and around the country specifically because of it’s open-air design and clean-living ethos. Following various trips made by Edward Livingston Trudeau between New York City (his hometown) and Saranac Lake, this paper explores the ways in which changing medical knowledge, industrialization, and urbanization at the turn of the 20th century impacted understandings of the natural environment. By emphasizing Trudeau’s role as an intermediary between the two regions as well as between public and private political interests, I seek to: 1.) better understand the extent to which tuberculosis influenced perceptions of the environment over that time frame and 2.) understand how those beliefs were employed to meet progressive era urban reforms related to housing and immigration.At this stage, I argue that “fresh air” became an increasingly legitimate treatment for tuberculosis as a direct result of Trudeau’s experience in theAdirondack mountains and that his “findings”, compounded by advancements in medical knowledge, significantly influenced the legitimacy of urban reforms in New York City. Through this research I hope to emphasize the often overlooked developmental connections between the Adirondack Region and New York City, specifically highlighting how private philanthropies facilitated this development. I also hope to link intellectual developments about the natural environment with material reforms to urban policy.
Melanie Rush (Graduate Center)
Biography: Melanie Rush is a second-year history PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. She studiesAmerican history with a particular interest in the intersections of race, gender, and law
in early nineteenth-century New York. Her current research focuses New York's era of gradual emancipation, and her article “As Though Their Father Were Dead: Gender and Indenture in New York’s Legal Regime of Gradual Emancipation” was recently accepted by the Journal of the Early Republic.
‘Virtue and Usefulness’: Education and Indenture at the New York Colored Orphan Asylum
Abstract: This paper is an early exploration within my comparative study of the racialized and gendered experiences of children indentured by the New York House of Refuge and the New York Colored Orphan Asylum. This paper focuses exclusively on the New York Colored Orphanage, a female run Quaker institution dedicated to servingBlack children in poverty. Iexplore the tensions between the stated interests of the Quaker women in uplifting Black children through education, and the lasting legacy of the Asylum almost 350 children admitted between 1837-1863 who were indentured out to white families in rural New York and New Jersey and forced to perform unskilled, highly gendered,labor. Yet this is anoftenunexploredreality of laborhistory. For Black children in particular, indenture served as a crucial continuity of prolonged unfree bondage even after the end of New York’s gradual emancipation era in 1827. Ultimately, I argue that the history of post-emancipation benevolent organizations must include not only a history of ideological commitments to uplift and education, but also a history of Black child labor – labor directly connected to the gradual emancipation statutes of New York, and labor that many of these children appear to have strongly resisted.
Micah Blaichman (New York University)
Biography: Micah Blaichman is a first-year History PhD student at NYU, focusing on the relationship between democracy and technocracy in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century until World War II. I received an MA from CCNY in 2023 and a BA from Columbia University in 2007.
Sanitary Government:AICP, Public Baths, and the Battle To Clean New York City
Abstract: Throughout the 19 th century, urban elites became increasingly anxious about the threat from an impoverished and unhygienic urban proletariat to the health of the city, both epidemiologically and politically. The designers of public baths conceived of the facilities as didactic processors: dirty, chaotic immigrants would transform into clean, well-behaved Americans, who could then join the municipal polity, and properly exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. My thesis examines how charitable groups, like the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, sought to influence city officials to better administer the public baths to realize their vision of “Sanitary Government,” which would both run cleanly and produce a cleaner society.
The story of the public baths reveals broader trends of American governance during the Progressive Era.As the social and economic problems that government faced grew increasingly complex, political leaders grew increasingly reliant on experts to both craft policy and administer governance. In order for technocracy to succeed, and to gain democratic legitimacy, political elites had to convince average citizens of its benefits. The public baths intended to create the type of citizenry that would support “clean” governance, both in terms of public health programs and honest administration.
Panel 4: Centering Peripheries through the 18th & long 19th Centuries
Discussant: Professor Gunja SenGupta (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair: Phoenix Paz (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Rashmi (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Rashmi is a second-year PhD student at the Department of History, CUNY Graduate Center. My research interest includes the social and political history of marginalized groups in South Asia in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a special focus on the issues of race, sexuality, gender, and the history of social hierarchies.
Life in the Margins: Prostitution,Abolitionists, and the Colonial State in 19th-century India
Abstract: Examining British colonial documents, the Russell Committee Report of 1893, and Andrew and Bushnell’s Queen’s Daughters in India (1898), this paper attempts to reconstruct the life-story of a young girl, Massamat Itwaria from Lucknow, and her journey from being a “kept woman” to a “public prostitute” in the 1890s. The reforms of the colonial state targeted at native women in nineteenth-century were endowed with a rescue mission: “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1994). Later, these efforts were taken up by Victorian and Edwardian feminists in the West. They assumed the responsibility of uplifting colonized women, especially the native “prostitutes” (as they were called in British records). They blamed the corruption of both white colonial officers and the compliance of native men for the helpless condition of the native sex-workers. Scholars have critically examined the regulation of prostitution in the British empire (Levine, 2003) and the appropriation of imperialist ideology by British feminists (Burton, 1994). However, their focus had been limited to the elite women and the high politics of the metropolis and the colony. My emphasis on the life-story of Itwaria, who approached the missionaries to be rescued from the military brothel, shifts the focus from the dominant narrative and incorporates feminist approaches to retrieving a subaltern voice from the colonial archives.
Through the study of Itwaria’s life, the paper engages in a critical assessment of the role of feminist missionaries in the colonies and the agency of a colonized subject in her encounter with
white feminists. It also reflects on the methodological challenges involved in reconstructing a biography of a nineteenth-century sex-worker, representing an important segment of colonized women in the margins.
Laureencia Morice (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Currently a 2nd-year Ph.D. in the History program, my field is early modern Caribbean and Jewish history. Iam interested in theshaping ofthe Jewish communitiesin theearly modern Caribbean colonies - especially the British islands - and how networks of sociability emerge and develop in a region where acquaintances are reduced and where alliances are loose and permanently reshaped. Issues of religion in the colonial environment, interactions with the slave society and biracial children as well as group-building and identity formation process are notions that I am interested in.
The Barbadian Jewish Communities: Solidarity and Transmission in the 18th-century Caribbean
Abstract:TheJewishcommunityofBarbadosstarteddevelopinginthemiddleofthe17thcentury. In an environment far from Europe, where relationships and alliance networks are loose and constantly renegotiated, the group-building process relied heavily on solidarity bonds and developed trust among coreligionists, who formed a closely-knit community by the middle of the 18th century. In an environment where we can suppose newcomers arrive with rare local knowledgeorsupport,how did theJewsbuild acommunity and local sociability?Howisthegroup defined and understood by the external eyes of the local authority? Does the community share this definition and are there any types/modes of transmission among families that can confirm they perceive their group similarly? How were bonds of solidarity formed within the community? This paper will argue that solidarity networks and social interactions among the Jewish community of Barbados were shaped by the individual’s interpersonal relationships. Marriage strategies or legal tools such as letters of attorney were resources that shaped these interactions, strengthened alliances, fostered a sense of belonging, and ultimately, determined the success of the groupbuilding process. Through the study of wills and community records, we can understand notions of economic trust, inheritance, and transmission as tools turned toward the preservation of the community’s boundaries.
Blake McGready (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Blake McGready is a fourth-year PhD Candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY where he studies the environmental legacy of theAmerican Revolution. He has worked at The Gotham Center for New York City and for the National Park Service. His previous work has been published in Pennsylvania History and in the Journal of theAmerican RevolutionAnnual Volume series. Blake has served as a co-chair of the CUNY EarlyAmerican Republic Seminar.
Environment and Nation-Making in the Revolutionary Hudson Valley
Abstract:TheContinentalArmywasoneofthefewnationalinstitutionsinrevolutionaryAmerica; it brought together young men and assorted military personnel from New England, the South, the middle colonies, and other parts of the continent. Scholars continue to debate whether military service and mobilization softened or reinforced the Continentals’local and provincial identities. Environmental history can contribute significantly to this conversation. The revolutionary generation’s lives and livelihoods depended on environmental processes and knowledge. Historians of the Revolution, however, have not considered how wartime engagements with the natural, nonhuman world affected nation-making in the young United States. When rebels encamped in the strategically indispensable Hudson Valley, they encountered flora and fauna that was both strange and familiar.The region’s location between the southern and northern plant zone, positionalongmigratoryflyways,andmore,affectedthewaysPatriotsimaginedtheirnew nation’s environmental endowment and political community. What did rebel soldiers from the across the colonies make of this alien environment? And how did nonhuman nature influence how they thought about their new nation? My paper aims to better understand how encounters with the natural environment in the revolutionary Hudson Valley affected the development of national identities in the new United States.
Panel 5: Organizing Repression and Resistance between Class and Identity
Discussant: Professor Libby Garland (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair:Adam Kocurek (Graduate Center, CUNY)
ArinnAmer (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography:ArinnAmer is a doctoral candidate in history at the CUNY Graduate Center.An early Americanist writing a dissertation on tarring and feathering, Arinn is presenting material from a related project on New Left historians of the American Revolution. She has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the Omohundro Institute, the Northeast Conference on British Studies, CUNY’s Center for the Study of Women and Society, and the John Carter Brown and Huntington libraries. Her writing has been published in such popular outlets as Jacobin and the American HistoricalAssociation’s Perspectives on History.
Antisemitism and Red Scare inAlfred Young’s New York, 1941-1953
Abstract: Available narratives of antisemitism in the twentieth century historical profession fail to incorporate class. By midcentury, we are told, Ivy League history departments had transformed from gentlemen’s clubs to legitimate scholarly bodies, quotas were gone, and the cost of antisemitism was mediocrity a triumph of liberalism.As in contemporary discourse about equity in higher ed, much ink is spilled on the question of who gets to be at Harvard while CUNY is
quietly ravaged off stage. This paper attempts to bridge that gap by looking at the early career of Alfred Young, a Jewish Queens College graduate who was heavily influenced by anticommunist purges that targeted Jewish scholars at the city colleges in the 1940s and 50s and who, despite experiences of early career discrimination, went on to become a leading historian of theAmerican Revolution. Young’s biography provides vital context for the clash that would unfold in the 1960s between an older generation of Jewish historians associated with consensus school postwar liberalism and a younger generation of politically radical New Left historians who wore unapologetic Jewish identities on their sleeves.
Jack Devine (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Jack Devine’s research is focused on the legacy of emancipation within the labor and civil rights movements.
Classroom Struggle for the Common Good
Abstract: In the aftermath of the Great Recession a bipartisan consensus waged war against teachers all across the country. Chicago was not an exception. The Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel targeted teachers as the source of educational woes in the city in campaign ads leading up to his election. The mayor escalated the decades-long campaign to overburden teachers with all the problems of neoliberal society and continued to blame them for failing to find all the answers through their undercompensated labor. Under the new leadership of the Caucus of Rank-and-file Educators, the Chicago Teachers Union proposed an alternative solution. An active membership ready to fight back offered the potential of both empowering teachers and beginning to address the root causes of the educational crisis in the city. Teachers prepared to take action to transform their demands into a reality in Chicago. Following the 2012 CTU strike, organizing for the common good proliferated geographically and deepened into a more comprehensive fight against neoliberal hegemony.
MarkAndrew Hamilton (Concordia University)
Biography: MarkAndrew Hamilton is an MAstudent under the advisement of Dr. Peter Gossage at Concordia University, Montréal.
TheAestheticActivism ofACT UP Montréal: Posters, Pamphlets, Placards, and Performance as Protest
Abstract: Much of the historical record on HIV/AIDS activism focuses on the efforts of ACT UP/NY while silencing the work and achievements of other chapters and organizations also operating at the height of the crisis. Following their well-documented protest at the 5th Annual AIDS Conference in Montréal, a local chapter ofACT UP was founded in 1990.
Despite for the most part adhering to the overarchingACT UP/NY company line, the graphic ephemera ofACT UP Montréal including posters, protest signs, pamphlets,
manifestation documentation and T-shirts demonstrates an equally vibrant and activist voice deserving of similar in-depth analysis. These differences are particularly striking when compared and contrasted to the ACT UP/NY mothership organization (often referred to as “the Vatican” in interviews collected for this work). What emerges through analysis of these items is not only a distinctly québécois framework, but an entirely different set of reference points and goals for HIV/AIDS activist work. Through oral history, object analysis and direct comparison with better known HIV/AIDS activist imagery, this paper compares and contrasts the stark graphic, referential and foundational differences betweenACT UP Montréal and other activist groups by which it has been left largely overshadowed and under explored.
This work has also been the basis for an exhibition at the Archives gaies du Québec in summer 2023 entitled L’activisime esthétique d’ACT UP MONTRÉAL : une histoire en photos et en affiches and included as part of the programming for Fierté Montréal 2023 and the National Trust for Canada’s Historic Places 2023.
Panel 6: Intersecting Area and Discipline in Latin American Historiography
Discussant: Professor Mary Roldán (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair: OscarAponte (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Gloria Caminha (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Gloria Caminha is a second-year Ph.D. student in History at CUNY-The Graduate Center. She received a bachelor’s degree in history from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and a master’s from CUNY-Brooklyn College. Her research revolves around relations between the U.S. and SouthAmerican countries in the late 20th century.
‘Love-Hate - A Marriage with no Possibility of Divorce’: An Analysis of U.S.-Venezuela Relations During the Venezuelan Nationalization Plan of Oil and Iron Ore in the 1970s
Abstract: “On April 29, 1974, the newly inaugurated Venezuelan President Carlos Pérez announced his plan to nationalize Venezuela’s economy. Pérez would concretize an enduring Venezuelan wish to have domain over its natural resources. The plan included transferring the oil and iron ore industries to the Venezuelan state within two years. American companies dominated those two industries. The companies’ concessions to exploit Venezuela’s natural resources would expire in the 1980s (oil) and 2000s (iron ore). Pérez’s plan to reverse the concessions ten / fifteen years earlier reverberated immediately in the United States. It raised concerns about the future of American investments in Venezuela. This paper analyzes the U.S. Foreign Relations Series from 1973 to 1976 and other documents from presidential libraries to study the U.S. government’s responses to Venezuela’s nationalization plan. It demonstrates that the American government, although not participating directly in the negotiations for compensation which was conducted by the affected companies and the Venezuelan government, the U.S. Department of State played an
active role in pressuring Venezuelan officials to ensure compensation to American expropriated firms and the continuation of oil supply toAmerica.”
Iker Suárez (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Iker Suárez is a second-year Anthropology PhD student at the Graduate Center. Her research interests revolve around early modern Spain, Spanish colonialism and the genesis of new forms of modern power and subjection. Particularly, her PhD project revolves around the emergence of early modern forms of racial differentiation and sexual normativity via the intervention of the state. Her work is generally informed by theories of carcerality, political economy and gender, and interested in decolonial and Black thought and world-systems and feminist theory.
Conquest and difference. Early modern theology, war and pacification in the Spanish Empire
Abstract: How did the material, practical experience of colonial pacification inform early modern forms of producing racial difference? In this piece, I undertake a close analysis of conquistador
Bernardo de Vargas Machuca’s 1599 Milicia Indiana y Descripción de las Indias [Indian Militia and Description of the Indies] to answer this question.
After discursively contextualizing the theological debates on human difference in the emerging Spanish imperial space, I turn to an in-depth reading of the text. I first analyze the production of the “Indian” as enemy in the practical activity of war and pacification. Then, I parse the telling and explicit demarcation of the conquistador’s Self, which is expressed in markedly racialized, gendered and classed terms. I situate these and other factors in the genealogies of the modern, pointing to incipient economic mentalities, processes of individual subjectivation as conqueror, and nascent biopolitical logics.Moreover, Irelatethesefindings to LatinAmerican critical theories of the colonial and, particularly, Enrique Dussel’s undertheorized notion of the ego conquiro as precedent of the cartesian ego cogito.
Then, I examine how the text operationalizes itself in what its most known for: the particular techniques for waging “small war” or counterinsurgency warfare, or, in early modern terms, pacification. Analyzing this in the context of evolving forms of warfare and subjection, I attempt to give a glimpse into the articulation of racialization processes, military techniques, and emerging historical subjectivities in theAtlantic space.
Panel 7: Producing Life, Death, and Memory through Middle East Histories
Discussant: Professor Simon Davis (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair: Tamara Maatouk (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Bret Windhauser (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Bret Windhauser is a first-year Ph.D. student in the History department focusing on Middle Eastern history. He received a B.A. in International and Global Studies and French at the University of the South and a M.A. degree at the University of Washington in Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. His work investigates smuggling and the movement of corpses in the Persian Gulf during the period of British occupation.
Funeral Transfers, Corpse Smuggling, and the British Mandate of Iraq
Abstract: The Wadi al-Salam in Najaf, Iraq is the world’s largest cemetery. For centuries, many pious Shi’i Muslims desired burial in this cemetery because of its proximity to the tomb ofAli ibn Abi Talib. The Ottoman Empire attempted to regulate and surveil the importation of such bodies arriving to Najaf from outside the empire’s borders. However, the current literature claims that the corpse trade, also referred to as “funeral transfers,” ended with the arrival of the British to Iraq in World War I. Using materials from the British India Office Archive and the Iraqi National Archives, I argue that corpse smuggling to Najaf did not end during the British period, but rather the British created a new administrative apparatus to tax, record, and medicalize the incoming bodies. This work seeks to question how governments and subjects negotiate power within an imperial context using the dead as a vector of analysis. By centering the analysis on Najaf as well, I analyze the complex dynamic of religious versus imperial power as the city was central to the Shi’a community but peripheral to the British administrative centers in Iraq of Baghdad and Basra.
Chris Harding (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Bayyara/Bustan–Effendi/Fellah: A Marxist
Analysis
of the Means of Production and Class Construction in Mandatory Palestine’s KeyAgricultural Spaces
Abstract: During the years of the British Mandate (1922 – 1948) the citrus trade in Palestine bloomed. Whilst it had been growing steadily through the late Ottoman period, its power peaked during the interwar years making up to 73-83% of the country’s exports between 1933-1939. The success of the trade naturally came hand in hand with the proliferation of groves throughout the countryside and on the fringes of cities along the littoral. The groves however were not simply sites of labour and extraction (although these concepts are key to understanding them). They were also locations in which acts of resistance and celebration occurred. In this sense the groves were key to understanding Palestinian society during this fraught and cataclysmic period, both its ills and its joys. Weddings and parties were commonly held in the groves which were attended by members of all sections of society. During the Great Revolt 1936-1939, when working class and peasant (fellahin) Palestinians rose up against the British occupation and Zionist colonisation, the groves were a key battleground and a target of the thuwwar (revolutionaries) against the Zionist and native bourgeoisie alike. In this paper I will discuss this topic and the relatively unknown social, cultural, and political history of Palestinian citrus groves. It will be based off of research I have done, and will do using theAUB Palestinian Oral HistoryArchive, which contains hundreds of interviews with Palestinians who lived during the Mandate period.
SoheilAsefi (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Soheil Asefi is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the History Department. Following temporary release on bail in Tehran and a ban on further education and employment, he was designated “writer in exile” by the German PEN Center. Asefi completed his master’s degree in political science at the New School for Social Research (NSSR). Currently, he teaches Modern European History at Lehman College, while concurrently serving as an educator and public historian of New York City at the La Guardia and Wagner Archives. He explores queer antiimperialist diaspora solidarity with the Global South/theThirdWorld in Berlin and NewYork City spanning 1970 to 1999, forming the heart of his dissertation on queer diaspora, transnational, oral, and urban history.
Unraveling the Legacy of Iran’s 1988 Mass Political Executions and the HumanRightsization of the Anti-Imperialist Revolutionaries’ Massacre: Communism, AntiImperialism, and the Barren Nostalgia
Abstract: This paper commemorates the 36th anniversary of the 1988 mass political executions in Iran, a period concurrently marked by resistance against the 1988 IMF and World Bank Conference in West Berlin. The discourse within the paper engages with the multifaceted aspects of the politics of memory, incorporating considerations of Marxism, nostalgia, and the aftermath of defeat. In a span of a few weeks, thousands of communist and anti-imperialist revolutionary forces wereexecutedand interredin mass graves.This prompts aninquiryintotheenduring legacy and political-ideological agency of contemporary historiography. Leveraging the publication Voices ofaMassacre: UntoldStories ofLifeandDeath in Iran1988(2020) as afirst comprehensive English-language book on this tragedy, this is an example of the humanrightsization of the antiimperialist revolutionaries’ massacre in Iran. The historian’s narrative portrays communist and anti-imperialist forces primarily as “victims of human rights violations,” casting the State Department and other imperialist states as litigants in the aftermath of the massacre. The plight of the sons and daughters of Iranian communists killed in the 1980s is being commodified in the human rights industry in the West as mothers and fathers die.Asefi’s research delves into intricate inquiries pertaining to agency, communism, ideology, anti-imperialism, and a sanitized form of nostalgia that, rather than nurturing, perpetually replicates itself in retrospective fixation, particularly in the aftermath of defeat.
The paper contends that when dormant nostalgia takes hold, the quest for novel avenues of engagement becomes simultaneously tantalizing and elusive. Often confined to aesthetic preservation, historical narratives, and recollections of past struggles, steeped in retrospective introspection, overlook the nuanced intricacies of tragedy's genesis and evolution. The analysis argues for a renewed examination of collective traumas as potential catalysts for revitalizing the ideological era. This is particularly salient in the contemporary epoch marked by the relinquishment of hegemonic imperialist control. It is also marked by the steadfast ascendancy
ofliberal left/social democracyideology,communicativecapitalism, andmainstream humanrights discourse. Concurrently, there is a notable departure from a robust anti-imperialist perspective.
Panel 8: Contesting Power across U.S. History
Discussant: Professor Michael Pfeifer (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Chair: Melanie Rush (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Bradford Pelletier (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Biography: Bradford Pelletier has an MA in European History and Literature from Columbia University and is currently finishing a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center where he specializes in the History of Colonial Psychiatry. On one hand, he focuses on the impact of race upon the development of somatic treatments and psychiatric care inAmerican mental health institutions. On the other hand, he explores the ways in which the healthcare system in the United States was transformed by Black activism during the long Civil Rights Movement. He has written on interwar Malaria Fever Therapy experimentation programs conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation and the United States Public Health Service. His dissertation examines psychiatric inequity and exploitation - as exposed by Modjeska Simkins, an understudied figure in the struggle for Medical Civil Rights - at the South Carolina State Hospital (1930-1970).
InadequateAppropriations:Disability&RaceatSouthCarolina’sPinelandTrainingSchool, 1930-1970
Abstract: Individuals with physical and cognitive impairments – so-called “mental defectives” –were always members of the patient population at the all-Black State Park Unit (SPU) of the South Carolina State Hospital (SCSH, a psychiatric institution), even though administrators believed that “the most satisfactory manner of caring for these special groups is by segregation and colonization.” While the state of South Carolina funded Whitten Village – an all-white facility dedicated to patients with physical and cognitive impairments – the SPU was overcrowded, much to the detriment of all segments of the patient population. This study explores the experience of disabled African Americans and their relationship to political and medical power during a period of reluctant desegregation at the SCSH’s Pineland Training School. While recent scholarship explores southern approaches to disability during the interwar period through the 1960s, more scholarship is needed to unpack the nature of care for disabledAfricanAmericans. Using extant administrative files from the SCSH and the Office of the Governor of South Carolina, this study examines provisioning for disabledAfricanAmericans from 1930-1970 in a state that is not known for generous public funding. It shows the ways in which provisioning for the disabled became tied up in in the long struggle for Black freedom in South Carolina, while illuminating the ways in which the Civil Rights ofAfricanAmericans and those of the disabled have been intertwined.
Christopher Pascale (Stony Brook University)
Biography: Chris Pascale is a 1st Year Ph.D student at SUNY Stony Brook. Since 2019, he has been working on a biography of Vice President Charles Curtis.
Lasting Legacies of the Exodusters in Topeka
Abstract: Following Reconstruction, many former slaves were offered 4th class tickets to leave the South. Those who did, often did so under the advice of “Come West. Better to starve to death in Kansas than be shot and killed in the South.”
Tens-of-thousands of them stopped at the capitol, Topeka, where the new mayor, facing a sudden migrant crisis, came up with a solution – he printed maps that said “you are here,” and then told them where else there was to go. Alternatively, a 19-year-old Kanza Indian named Charles Curtis, who had inherited a portion of land he was working to develop for a profit, invited the new arrivals to make shelters to get them through the winter. He also donated a quarter-mile stretch of land on which a new neighborhood was formed, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church was built.
144 years later, the church still stands, and Topeka, Kansas’ black population accounts for more than 10% of the city. Among the incredible black leaders who emerged from this time was Lutie Lytle. Ms. Lytle was among the first female lawyers in the United States, and the first woman to become a law faculty member.
Sally Yi (Princeton University)
Biography: My name is SallyYi, and I am a second-year graduate student at Princeton University studying the nexus of labor, urban, and immigration history during the tail end of the so-called “American century” (1970s-1990s). I am currently studying for my general (qualifying) exams with ProfessorsAlison Isenberg and Julian Zelizer (US History from 1866 to Present), Beth LewWilliams(AsianAmericanStudies),andMargotCanaday(Labor:Workand Capitalism).Imajored in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard College before working as a Human Resources generalist in the finance industry. My experience organizing employee resource groups led me to question how and why “diversity” has become “smart business,” how the state is involved in constructing and constricting the available pool of immigrant labor, and when and how corporations removed Asians from their affirmative action programs. My interest in Seattle, Washington, stems from its understated yet massive influence on our consumer and digital culture as the birthplace of Starbucks,Amazon, Microsoft, UPS, Costco, REI, and Getty Images.
‘The Price of ‘Pax Economica’: Seattle’s Use of Martial Law to Secure the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference
Abstract: The 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial provides a geographically and temporally bound event to view the implications of increasingly intertwined military, criminal, and economic policies at the federal, state, and municipal levels. Like its predecessor, the GeneralAgreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the WTO aimed to “enforce the rules of the game in international trade, just as the International Monetary Fund created at the end of World War II managed the global finance system.”
SincePresident Clinton publicly invitedtheWTOtohaveits thirdmeetingintheUS, not aspecific city, private sector organizations submitted bids to the federal government for hosting rights. The Washington Council of International Trade, led by private local business leaders, submitted Seattle’s bid via a proxy organization called the Seattle Host Organization (SHO). The State Department explicitly told the SHO that it “should not look to the US Government for any assistance/relief” as early as October 1998, but the SHO did not share this crucial information with any local government officials until June 1999. The lack of communication devolved into a logistical quagmire, leading law enforcement agencies to have insufficient funds and notice to properly staff the week of events.
An estimated 40,000 protestors took to the streets when the WTO arrived in Seattle in November 1999. Seattle and Washington State leaders acted quickly to “ensure conditions that permitted global business to do business,” undermining the Clinton Administration’s desire to paint a rosy picture of the interlocking missions of democracy and free trade. Washington State Governor Locke called for 300 members of the Washington National Guard to quash the demonstrations, while Mayor Paul Schell declared a state of civil emergency and implemented a curfew in a 25block area around the conference center. The ACLU called the “limited curfew area” the “No Protest Zone,” underscoring the hypocritical exceptions carved out for shoppers. Since the City Council was not called to vote on the emergency orders until after all the orders had expired, police officers interpreted the law however they saw fit.
Rather than asking who “won” the “Battle of Seattle,” this paper aims to understand how protest bolsters or dismantles the ideological images that nation-states hope to achieve. I hope to highlight how all levels of the American state consciously decided to privilege world trade over individual rights guaranteed to citizens under the Constitution.
Second Roundtable Worlds Colliding, Pasts among the Present
Hamilton Craig (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Robert Cleary (Graduate Center, CUNY)
