Month: June 2016

2016 Commencement: Four Graduate with History PhDs

Posted on June 28, 2016July 22, 2016 by Parker, Heather A

Doctoral dissertations must offer original contributions to knowledge and understanding. For historians this involves not only identifying fresh topics and source materials but exercising the diligence and imagination to reconstruct past lives and circumstances from necessarily fragmentary evidence. Their reward is to uncover unknown or forgotten aspects of the past, or to offer new and surprising perspectives on familiar subjects.

This past May, four scholars were awarded PhDs by the History Department, a number that should make a small liberal arts department very proud.

Two of these graduate students shed light on a pair of women who broke tradition and forged new paths personally and politically, another focused on the revelations of character and piety in the diary of an 18^th century Congregational minister who despite inner doubts, brought peace to his flock. The dissertation of the fourth student examines the political, economic and cultural relationship between the United States and a region of Southern Italy over several centuries.

In her dissertation titled, “Janet Minot Sedgwick II and the World of American Catholic Converts, 1820-1890,” Erin Bartram traces the history of the controversial conversion to Catholicism of Sedgwick. Raised by an elite New England Unitarian family. Sedgwick, who was born in New York City, found friendship and emotional support through her association with other female converts. Despite her family’s indifference (they eventually accepted her conversion) and what Bartram said were priests whose ideas “about gender and authority” conflicted with her own, Sedgwick found happiness and comfort with other converts and eventually worked to establish a Catholic school.

The woman studied by graduate student Allison B. Horrocks had a different, though equally groundbreaking life. Flemmie Kittrell (1904-1980) was a pioneer in the effort to establish the legitimacy of the study of home economics. The first African American woman to earn a PhD in that field, Kittrell taught the subject at many black institutions. But her work, according to Horrocks’ research, did not begin and end on college campuses. Kittrell developed home economics programs abroad. As the dissertation, titled “”Good Will Ambassador with a Cookbook,” points out, because of Kittrell’s accomplishments, her work should be viewed as providing a new understanding of women’s activism, gender politics and the legitimacy of the field of home economics in higher education and politics.

Anthony Antonucci’s dissertation examines the evolution of the relationship between the Mezzogiorno region of southern Italy (centered around the city of Naples) and the United State, dating back to 1785 when Thomas Jefferson was U.S. Minister to France, through author Herman Melville’s visit to Italy in 1857, six years after the publication of “Moby Dick.” The exchange of goods and ideas between the two regions “exerted a substantive influence on the economic and cultural development of both countries,” he writes of his thesis titled in part, “Americans and the Mezzogiorno: United States Relations with the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” Though largely overlooked, the examination of how Americans and southern Italians viewed and related to each other “offers a larger understanding of both cultures” of the late 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The depth and breadth of historical research becomes even clearer when one considers the dissertation of Linda Meditz who chose to do a close examination of the life of Stephen Williams, through his own words. Titled “Captive: Piety and Ministry in the Diary and Life of Stephen Williams,” Meditz provides a close reading and analysis of Williams’ 4,000 page diary, which starts in1715 when he had just graduated from Harvard and ends in 1782, a week prior to his death. Though other scholars have concentrated on Williams’ comments on events of the period, Meditz focuses on the personal aspects of his inner piety and his belief that he was inadequate for the spiritual life. The diary, which Meditz calls “a hybrid literary form,” because of its mix of styles and materials, served as a “spiritual discipline,” through which the pastor looked into his soul and dealt with his self-doubts.

So there you have it: Four commendable scholarly works that take readers from international cities to the innermost workings of an individual’s soul. The results represent years of study, research, writing and rewriting by the four new PhDs, who have brought pride to their department and faculty mentors, and enlightenment to the field of history.

by Terese Karmel
Department of Journalism

Elena Boushée (’17) Recipient of Summer Research Funding

Posted on June 15, 2016September 15, 2016 by Parker, Heather A

Distance view of Paris, featuring Eiffel Tower — By Wladyslaw (Taxiarchos228) – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia

Elena Boushée has been awarded funding to pursue research in France in support of her honors thesis, tentatively titled “The Path to Legalized Abortion in France: A History of Reproductive Rights in French Political, Cultural and Social Life from 1967-1975.”

From Elena:

“I plan to go to France in the summer of 2016 to research my senior honors thesis, which will focus on the events leading up to the 1975 legalization of abortion in France. Between the legalization of contraceptive methods in 1967 and the enactment of the Veil laws of 1975, the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes was born out of the May 1968 revolutions, and second-wave feminism in France began. This research will look at the ways in which these movements, in combination with the events that unfolded in the late 1960s and 1970s, shaped French understandings of women’s bodies’ and women’s participation in the public sphere, and how these attitudes and understandings led to the 1975 legislation. I will also be examining the significance of class on the enactment, enforcement, and eventual destruction of the pre-1975 laws restricting reproductive rights.

This research will consider a few events in particular, including the highly publicized and controversial court case in Bobigny, in the northeast suburbs of Paris, in 1972. The case garnered widespread attention as existentialist feminist Simone de Beauvoir took to the stand for the defense, claiming that she had had an abortion but had not been prosecuted because of her wealth and social status. I plan to investigate how abortion policy in France previous to 1975 disproportionately may have targeted underprivileged women whose voices did not hold political, economic or social sway.

To research this project fully, I need to go to Paris in order to access a number of collections uniquely available at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand and the Bibliothèque Nationale. I also plan to go to the Université d’Angers, which has a renowned feminist archive. I plan to stay for one week, to photocopy and photograph these materials. These archives are not digitized and so the collections are not available in the United States. I spent the last full academic year (2014-2015) studying in Paris. I reached a high level of proficiency in the French language while abroad. This will allow me to conduct in-depth research in the French-language archival materials in Paris and Angers. This research project will be a valuable contribution to the humanities. It works at the intersection of a number of fields, including women’s history, the history of the body, the history of post-war France and the history of reproductive rights. I will examine how reproductive rights in France came to be so important not only politically, but also culturally and socially. I will explore the allegedly discriminatory abortion laws in France, and how these became a public concern with the “Manifeste de 343” and the trial at Bobigny. In order to create a more comprehensive understanding of how these and previous events such as the May 1968 revolutions lead to the legalization of abortion, I will study a variety of primary and secondary sources in order to understand the relationship between women’s bodies’ and French life and politics at the time.”