Graduate Student Updates

Writing the Sex Industry into the Urban Life of Early Modern Venice and Rome

Ph.D. candidate Hannah Johnston received one of the 2023-24 Fulbright Commission Research Awards to conduct research in Italy.

In Autumn 2023, I’ll be heading to Italy through the Fulbright to do archival research for my dissertation. I’m interested in exploring how the sex industries in early modern Rome and Venice unveil the broader socioeconomic fabric of family, neighborhood, trade, parish, and community in these two important cities. Rather than focusing exclusively on sex workers, however, my research primarily studies the people (mostly women) who worked with them, that is, the procurers who managed transactions between sex workers and their clients and negotiated the exchange of money and information for these transactions. Focusing on procurement raises new kinds of questions about how this industry functioned, and also offers a wider perspective on the relationships that characterized it. By looking at criminal records, census documents, and notarial documents like wills, I hope to identify procurers and connect them to the communities, industries, and individuals with whom they engaged. This will allow me to reconstruct the networks of often poor, working class individuals in exploring the role and centrality of sex industry in early modern European cities.

Read more about Hannah Johnston’s Fulbright Scholarship here

Sites of Memory and Recovery: A Black San Francisco Story in Dance

A film created & produced by Ph.D. candidate Aliyah Dunn-Salahuddin.

“In the 2023 Winter Quarter, I took Professor J.P. Daughton’s Reimagining History, a project-based class that explored non-traditional forms of historical expression. It was within this space that I conceptualized, produced, and created the short film, Sites of Memory and Recovery: A Black San Francisco Story in Dance.”

Read more about Sites of Memory and Recovery here