Month: September 2017

Speaker Spotlight: Alastair Bellany by Alexandra Borkowski

Dr. Alastair Bellany will take part in the upcoming conference at UCHI “Re-Reading the Revolution”: A conference launching Léamh: Learn Early Modern Irish http://history.uconn.edu/2017/09/25/uchi-re-reading-the-revolution-a-conference-launching-leamh-learn-early-modern-irish/

 

Historian Alastair Bellany has devoted his academic career to studying the politics and culture of the early Stuart court. Bellany earned his B.A. from Oxford University, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been teaching at Rutgers University since 1996, and is on the executive board of Rutgers British Studies Center. As an early modernist, he focuses on popular politics and the development of media in and around the Stuart court. He is particularly interested in political intrigues and libelous literature surrounding the reign of King James VI and I.

Bellany published his first book, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603-1660, in 2002 through Cambridge University Press. The book examines the political rise and fall of Sir Thomas Overbury, whose murder in 1613 scandalized the Stuart court. By carefully analyzing the creation and dissemination of news concerning the scandal, Bellany argues that images depicting the scandal had dangerous political significance for the court.

Furthering his research into the early Stuarts, Bellany coauthored The Murder of King James I, which was published by Yale University Press in 2015. The book examines the accusation made in a pamphlet in 1625 that the Duke of Buckingham murdered the king, and shows how this allegation influenced court politics leading up to the English Civil War. By examining the effects of the story of King James I’s murder, Bellany and co-author Thomas Cogswell investigate the political factors that weakened and eventually overthrew the Stuart dynasty.

Bellany’s expertise in court scandal, as well as the defamatory literature these scandals engendered, is also apparent in his work as co-editor of the online database “Early Stuart Libels: an Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources.” This impressive contribution to digital humanities features more than 350 poems spanning the reign of King James I to the beginning of the English Civil War. The collection is intended to help scholars view the political culture of the Stuart court through a unique literary lens.

Besides distinguishing himself through his books and work as editor of an online poetry collection, Bellany has been a frequent contributor to a variety of edited volumes. He is currently at work on a textbook for Oxford University Press on the history of Britain to 1715, and is also writing a history on the Stuart hanging ballad.

Speaker Spotlight: Bianca Premo by Susan O’Hara

On October 9th, historian Bianca Premo will be at the University of Connecticut as part of the Gender and History Visiting Scholars program. http://history.uconn.edu/about-the-department/visiting-scholars-in-gender-and-history/

 

Dr. Premo, an associate professor in history at Florida International University, will be presenting a lecture related to her recently published monograph, The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire. Dr. Premo’s lecture will focus on women, civil law, and writing during the Spanish Imperial Enlightenment. While at the University of Connecticut, Dr. Premo will be also be leading a workshop entitled, “Little Mothers: Looking at Precocious Puberty in Mid Century Peru.”

Whereas much of the existing scholarship in the field treats the Spanish Enlightenment as a distinctly European movement, Dr. Premo argues that the Enlightenment also existed within the Spanish Empire. In The Enlightenment on Trial, Premo challenges the dominant narrative through looking at the lawsuits of the time. These lawsuits were brought to court by women, indigenous peoples, and the enslaved. Whereas previous scholarship has dismissed these populations as illiterate, Premo uses their lawsuits to demonstrate how colonized populations in the Spanish Empire were able to push for legal changes.

This text is in keeping with Dr. Premo’s previous scholarship. In Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima, Premo dives into Peruvian history and sheds light on how age, class, and race operated within the patriarchy. Just as Premo looks at the primary sources from previously silenced groups in The Enlightenment on Trial, much of Children of the Father King focuses on another silenced group: the youth. For Children of the Father King, Premo was awarded the 2007 Murdu MacLeod Prize from the Southern Historical Association and the 2006 Thomas F. McGann Award from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies.

Dr. Premo’s work has been featured in The Hispanic American Historical Review, Slavery and Abolition, and The William and Mary Quarterly. Her prior scholarship on civil litigation in the Spanish Empire has earned two fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies. Dr. Premo’s contributions to the field have also been supported by the NEH and the National Science Foundation.

When asked about future projects, Dr. Premo has indicated that she will be looking at Lima, Peru, and investigate topics such as Roman Catholic sacraments and US Latino history within the 20th century.

Speaker Spotlight: Sarah Covington by Kristen Vitale

Dr. Sarah Covington will take part in the research roundtable discussion “Ideas, Religion and Memory” at “Re-Reading the Revolution”: A conference launching Léamh: Learn Early Modern Irish http://history.uconn.edu/2017/09/25/uchi-re-reading-the-revolution-a-conference-launching-leamh-learn-early-modern-irish/

 

Dr. Sarah Covington is a historian of early modern England and Irish studies at Queens College/ CUNY Graduate Center. She is the director of the Queens College Irish Studies program, a professor of History at Queens College, as well as professor of History at the Queens Graduate Center. Dr. Covington teaches on crime and punishment in early modern Europe, history of religious violence, the history of the devil, the history of Christianity, memory and history in Ireland, popular culture in early modern Europe, the history of Scotland, Tudor and Stuart England, and more. Author of over twenty-five journal articles and book chapters, she is also the Book Review Editor of the Renaissance Quarterly.

Her first book, published in 2004, The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England, explores the religious persecutions by the Tudor monarchs from the reign of Henry VIII through Elizabeth I. This work ultimately investigates obedience, disobedience, religious enforcement and martyrdom in sixteenth century England. Her second work, Wounds, Flesh, and Metaphor in Seventeenth-Century England, published in 2009, studies “the theme of physical and symbolic woundedness in mid-seventeenth century English literature.” In this work, Dr. Covington highlights writers from sixteenth century England and their desperate attempt to “represent the politically and religiously fractured state of the time and re-imagined the nation through language and metaphor in the process.” Dr. Covington is currently writing two new works. The Black-Billed Birds and the Battling Seas: Oliver Cromwell, Memory, and the Dislocations of Ireland channels her knowledge of Irish history. This book “traces Oliver Cromwell and memory in the Irish historical, literary and folkloric imagination over three centuries.” Her second book will observe the “theological and literary reinterpretations of problematic biblical characters…in the wake of the sixteenth-century reformation.”

While Dr. Covington’s historical concentration is deeply rooted in the persistently awesome world of early modern England and Ireland, her thematic approaches to teaching and her own research include memory, the use of literature assimilated with history, as well as the Reformation and martyrdom. Her original use of methodologies attest to her sophistication as a historian. It is vitalizing, if not inspiring, to see that the assimilation of literature with history can be accomplished with great intellect and grace, while producing original and stimulating scholarship on a relatively studied area of history. Indeed, her thought-provoking research on Thomas Cromwell and memory, and her examinations of religious disobedience in Tudor England, in particular, will prove Dr. Covington to be a brilliant contribution to her roundtable discussion and to the conference as a whole.

UCHI “Re-Reading the Revolution”: A Conference Launching Léamh: Learn Early Modern Irish

“Re-Reading the Revolution”: A Conference Launching Léamh: Learn Early Modern Irish (Leamh.org)

October 3-5, 2017
University of Connecticut
UConn Humanities Center, 4th Floor, Homer Babbidge Library, 369 Fairfield Way, Storrs
The “Re-Reading the Revolution” conference marks the launch of the website, Léamh: Learn Early Modern Irish, a web-based tutorial and resource for learning how to read and translate Early Modern Irish. This is a “working” launch consisting of three complementary sections: a workshop to produce a new text selection for the website www.leamh.org, research panels consisting of leading scholars in Celtic languages speaking to recent research on the “revolutionary” years 1630-1660, and roundtables that explore the ways by which the Celtic languages can be used to reorient our thinking about major historical events.

 

Conference Registration, program, and additional information may be found at www.regonline.com/leamhlaunchconference

 

Speaker Spotlight: Mimi Sheller by Megan Fountain

On Tuesday, 26 September, at 330pm, Professor Mimi Sheller of Drexel University will give the annual Robert G. Mead Lecture on the theme “Caribbean Futures: Surviving the Anthropocene” http://dailydigest.uconn.edu/publicEmailSingleStoryView.php?id=85861&cid=24&iid=2752

First-year El Instituto student Megan Fountain offers a survey of Professor Sheller’s work and a glimpse of what she’ll cover in this talk.

 

As our society is increasingly shaped by the mobility of people, goods, ideas and capital around the globe, the inequalities in our society are increasingly shaped by “uneven mobilities.” In the case of travel and migration, for example, some people are more mobile than ever, while others are immobilized by militarized borders, and still others are displaced by forced migrations. These uneven mobilities have changed over time, and they are in no way permanent or inevitable. It is this fascination with past and future mobilities that drives the scholarship of Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University.

Sheller began her career studying the “public sphere,” democracy formation, and civic participation, so it is not surprising that today she is a scholar who is deeply engaged in public policy debates. Sheller earned her PhD in history and sociology at the New School for Social Research. Her dissertation and first book, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (2000), examined how “black publics” in post-emancipation Haiti and Jamaica labored to build radical democratic societies before they were ultimately stunted by liberal and then authoritarian governments.  Mining the archives of peasant organizations and popular religious organizations, including meeting minutes, mass petitions, and newspapers, Sheller studied how these black publics organized collectively and demanded land reform and political rights not only by reimagining liberal, European ideas of citizenship but also by drawing on transnational black abolitionist thought and critiquing white domination and planter oligarchy. Sheller’s future scholarship would continue to probe this question of how “publics” form and how they participate politically.

When Sheller joined the Sociology Department at Lancaster University in England, she began a collaboration with sociologist John Urry that would last nearly two decades until Urry’s untimely death in 2017.  In their first of many co-authored articles, “The City and the Car” (2000), they examined how the automobile was changing public space, public life, and democratic participation. Government projects of urban and suburban planning together with fossil fuel interests had created a “car culture” and car landscape that gave automobile owners access to a public sphere, while marginalizing pedestrians and public transit users and excluding them from civic life.

Sheller continued to examine public life in an article about “Mobile Publics” in 2004. While neoliberalism was extinguishing public goods and public spaces, and traditional modes of public debate such as newspapers were dying out, Sheller argued that other forms of public debate, democratic participation, and connectivity were emerging thanks to the increased mobility of information and people. Still, Sheller did not see these “mobile publics” as “some kind of democratic cybertopia.” Who was included in these new mobile publics? Who was excluded, and how could those exclusions be corrected?

In the coming years, Sheller and Urry would bring together a vast number of scholars across numerous disciplines to explore these questions together under the banner of “mobility studies.” In 2003, Sheller and Urry established the Centre for Mobilities Research at Lancaster University, and soon after, they convened the first Alternative Mobility Futures Conference and inaugurated the Mobilities journal. This “mobilities paradigm” was necessary, they insisted, because it was impossible to understand social inequalities without considering the uneven distribution of mobilities. “Mobilities are tracked, controlled, governed, under surveillance and unequal,” wrote Sheller, inviting scholars to play a role in creating “mobility justice.”

In her second book, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (2003), Sheller began to explore the problem of mobilities and immobilities in the Caribbean. In a sweeping indictment of the ways that the Global North has consumed Caribbean land, sugar and bodies from the colonial era to the present, Sheller also pointed to the free mobility of white tourists, contrasted with the immobility of black laborers trapped in the Caribbean.

Several years later, in the article “Virtual Islands,” Sheller revisited this problem in a case study of the Turks and Caicos Islands. She examined how cruise ships, tourist resorts, off-shore tax havens, and free trade zones were “part and parcel of the same process of spatial restructuring that is simultaneously producing enclaves of intense violence, withdrawal of governance, and collapse of civic life.”  The same forces that were connecting global travelers to the islands were also disconnecting island residents from each other.

In 2010, Sheller again analyzed uneven Caribbean mobilities in the article “Air Mobilities on the U.S.–Caribbean Border: Open Skies and Closed Gates.” Here she argued that tourist rhetoric about Caribbean “open skies” and political rhetoric about free trade “claim to increase mobility, but are in fact associated with material practices of border securitization and increased immobility, including refugee interception, migrant detention, and the militarization of air space.”

In 2012, Sheller again examined the nineteenth century history of Caribbean public life and civic participation in her book Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom.  Here Sheller examined the ways that the post-slavery state tried to “control and discipline sexuality, fertility, and labor relations,’’ while at the same time black women and men resisted that control in a variety of ways. Such resistance is not necessarily found in the written archive, but it can be found in “embodied” practices. For example, the withdrawal of women from field labor was an act of resistance to exert control over their time and their reproductive lives.

Sheller’s latest book, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (2015), looks at environmental history in the Caribbean. Part one, “The Bright Side,” tells how architects, advertisers, and mining companies helped us imagine aluminum as an environmentally-friendly, “light” metal, that would increase our mobility and allow us to travel at high speed. In part two, “The Dark Side,” we learn how bauxite mining and aluminum refining have strip mined Caribbean lands into toxic sludge and further disrupted Caribbean communities with hydroelectric projects, all backed by military force.

Since moving back to her native Philadelphia to found the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel, Sheller has convened social science researchers with diverse actors including engineers, artists, designers, governments, and non-governmental organizations to co-create alternative mobility futures.

Following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Sheller began facilitating “participatory engineering” projects in Haiti to make infrastructure projects more responsive to local voices and local needs for water and sanitation. In 2015, she interviewed Haitian and Dominican farmers, fishers, and other community members about the impacts of flooding due to climate change and sea level rise. In both projects, she paid close attention to uneven mobilities, and she presented the findings and recommendations to government and civil society organizations.

In 2011, Sheller joined the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute to evaluate post-earthquake efforts in Japan, and she used the findings to produce guidelines for the World Bank about disaster preparedness.

Through the Center for Mobilities Research, Sheller also fosters efforts to study and transform US cities, such as the creation of “Smart Cities” and “eco-cities” that use technologies such as “embedded sensors, open data systems and more community participation in planning and policy.”

In 2012, Sheller and colleagues from the Center co-curated LA Re.Play, an exhibit of “mobile art” in Los Angeles. The many participating artists used video, audio and other media to make visible social structures, histories, and injustices that typically remain invisible in the Los Angeles landscape. As viewers walked through the city following a digital map, they accessed the art through their smart phones.

It is hard to imagine another scholar who has crossed so many disciplinary boundaries and collaborated with such a wide range of practitioners in the public sphere, from creative artists to engineers. While Sheller’s work travels across hundreds of years and multiple continents, she seems to return again and again to the same question of uneven mobilities in the Caribbean, each time refining, deepening, and expanding her analysis. As climate change continues to intensify hurricanes in the Caribbean and no-so-natural inequalities continue to intensify natural disasters, there is no doubt that Sheller’s work is more relevant than ever.

Speaker Spotlight: Daniel Immerwahr by Megan Streit

At 4:30 PM on Friday, September 22, in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge, Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University will be inaugurating this year’s US Foreign Policy Seminar with a lecture entitled “No One Knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America.”

First-year doctoral student Megan Streit here offers a brief and compelling introduction to the work of this innovative scholar.

 

Daniel Immerwahr is an historian who focuses on twentieth-century US through a global lens. Additional research interests include the history of capitalism and intellectual history. Though born near Philadelphia, Immerwahr’s research and scholarship have taken him abroad to India and the Philippines and he has lectured and taught at elite universities such as Berkeley and Columbia as well as at San Quentin State Prison. The son of a philosophy professor and theater director, Immerwahr began his academic career at Columbia University hoping New York City would kickstart a career as a jazz musician. Though originally immersed in the Columbia Architectural School, his coursework there introduced Immerwahr to Hawaii’s complicated history with the US government and this inspired him to explore US power and nation building. Immerwahr’s architecture professor, Gwendolyn Wright, advised him to go down to NYU and speak with her husband about the topic and soon enough Immerwahr found himself in conversation with Thomas Bender, a leading scholar on the historiography of the United States. Bender’s anthology, Rethinking American History in a Global Age, indicates the overlap in interest that the two shared. With these interactions we see how Immerwahr’s undergrad experience and academic influences evolve toward a focus on the US as a global force. Immerwahr earned a second B.A. as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge and then a PhD at Berkeley. After a postdoctoral post at Columbia in 2011, he has taught at Northwestern as an assistant professor since 2012.

 

The organic evolution of Immerwahr’s research interests, from architecture to intellectual history and capitalism, serves as a testament to the journey of a historian. Embarking on his first book, Thinking Small, Immerwahr combines these interests to posit a resounding critique of community development as a political tool.  Critical of US pursuit of grassroots development at home and abroad, Immerwahr’s focus ranges from the micro to macro and flawlessly weaves the two realms into a cohesive narrative on US empire and power. Thinking Small takes its reader on an exploratory examination of development as a tool both in the foreign and domestic arenas. Development is no simple topic nor endeavor. Affected by every political and sociological factor imaginable, development is an ongoing issue with no clear, blanket solution in sight. From climate, to demographics, to political structures, there are too many variables by country and region to impose a magical solution to poverty and wealth disparity. Historically, the American approach to catalyzing development at home and abroad has largely been the top-down structure, a “trickle-down” development theory if you will. While this approach has been well-intentioned, there have been several examples of unforeseen consequences that have actually hindered the communities they aimed to help. Large dams displace people, foreign donations can disrupt local economies, and new problems replace the previous ones. Immerwahr’s transnational approach shifts the focus from the elected elite to the everyday villager who understands the problem in a day to day lens.

 

Furthermore, there are additional issues seen in top-down development, one of formidable importance is that of corruption. With corruption we begin to see the political impact that social programs can elicit, a point which Immerwahr discusses at length in attacking the efficacy of government initiated development programs. Unfortunately, lesser developed countries often tend to also have less legitimate governments and less adherence to strict rule of law. Whether cause or effect, the lackluster economy incentives corruption and corruption dissuades investment in economy and the cycle spirals. This being said, foreign aid will not reach those it is intended to reach but instead, when the presence of poverty elicits continued donations from rich countries, the corrupt government is further incentivized to keep the people poor. Microloans and similar grassroots economic programs are prime examples of the bottom-up development that Immerwahr discusses for empowering the people to create the development of their local communities.

 

Scholarship

Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (2015)  is Immerwahr’s primary piece of scholarship though his second major work, How to Hide an Empire: Geography and Power in the Greater United States, focusing on overseas territories of the US is forthcoming. Thinking Small is a masterful work that brings Immerwahr’s 2011 dissertation “Quests for Community: The United States, Community Development, and the World, 1935-1965” to a wider audience. The clear thread of evolution from dissertation to the expanded version of a book publication is that of community development. A buzzword over the last decade, the history of community involvement goes back much further in American history than this recent uptick in popularity suggests. As Immerwahr defines community development, “It’s a way of dealing with poverty by drawing on the participation of poor people. The idea is that the poor could improve their own conditions if only they could be brought together.”[1] The concept of grassroots societal improvement resonates strongly with foundational American values of mobility though occasionally at odds with America’s avid individualism.

 

While most narratives of communal development focus on their reach and impact within American society, Immerwahr’s Thinking Small adds the previously absent dimension of the international expression of this idea. Particularly as the Cold War began to ramp up, America took community building and refashioned it as a tool for containment via food aid in the 1950’s and 60’s. Immerwahr centers his work around India and the Philippines as his case studies. Immerwahr found there to be a lack in scholarship particularly around the relationship between the Philippines and the US and, apart from the attention it receives in Thinking Small, he did additional research and produced a piece titled, “Everything You Wanted to Know About the Philippines But Were Afraid to Ask.” The Philippines is featured further in his How to Hide an Empire work in which Immerwahr challenges the discourse on the murky status and history of the Philippines. Immerwahr describes this shift in thinking saying, ““What if, instead of writing about the Philippines as part of the history of foreign relations, we instead considered it part of national history? And what if, when we talked about the United States, we didn’t just talk about the contiguous part, but all of the land under US jurisdiction?”Here we see what an interesting new take on US empire we can look forward to in Immerwahr’s second book. Given the well reception Thinking Small has received, How to Hide an Empire should surely be a riveting examination of the sprawl of US imperialism and the nuanced politics that shade this discourse on empire building.

 

Immerwahr’s message in Thinking Small is not that community development is futile or inherently misappropriated but that these current challenges that America faces now that community development has turned stateside again are not new. Immerwahr stresses that community development is not the pleasant hand-holding slogan but rather, hard choices on far-reaching issues. Real change and improvement, the primary goals of community development, are not going to come without facing the critical issues of its motives and implementation that Immerwahr underscores. A concise book, Thinking Small creates constructive push back to the prevailing scholarship that is often enamored with community development. Immerwahr emphatically exposes the political band-aid that both the Left and Right have used community development as and criticizes the illusion of empowerment that this constructs. HIs approach and scholarship runs counter to the bulk of existing scholarship on this transnational topic and thus provides a fresh interpretation in the discourse of grassroots development.

 

In a show of true concern for his topic matter, Immerwahr has designated that all proceeds from the sale of Thinking Small go toward the NGO 350.org that aims to raise awareness of climate change, an issue in which human development efforts have played no small role and which grassroots development is directly impacted by. Finally, to ensure fascinating and lively dinner conversations, please treat yourself to Daniel’s thorough research on guano by watching his lecture on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/TnI4l6rFuHI

 

 

Bibliography

 

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/587535

http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/daniel-immerwahr/dissertation.html

http://toynbeeprize.org/interviews/thinking-big-and-small-about-u-s-history-in-a-global-context-with-daniel-immerwahr/

 

[1] https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/booked-1-whats-wrong-with-community-development

 

UConn Scholars at the Boston Seminar on the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

The Boston Seminar on the History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality is a collaboration of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and the Massachusetts Historical Society. This series, whose five meetings in 2017-2018 will alternate between the Radcliffe Institute and the MHS, aims to seed fresh conversations on the history of women, gender, and sexuality in America without chronological limitations. Some sessions will offer the opportunity to discuss new scholarship presented in pre-circulated essays. This fall, two sessions will include members of the UConn History department:

 

October 17, 2017
Tuesday, 5:30PM – 7:45PM
Location: Fay House, Radcliffe Institute

 

Discussion: Gender, Sexuality, and the New Labor History

Anne G. Balay, Haverford College; Aimee Loiselle, University of Connecticut; Traci L. Parker, UMass-Amherst
Moderator: Seth Rockman, Brown University

The “New Labor History” is highly gendered, global, and often situated in spaces that are transitory or obscured. This session will consider the new directions that the path-breaking work of these three scholars indicates: on female, trans, and intersex truck drivers and state surveillance (Balay), on Puerto Rican needleworkers and the global working class (Loiselle), and on African American women workers in the post-Civil Rights Era (Parker). Note: There are no pre-circulated essays for this session.

 

December 19, 2017
Tuesday, 5:30PM – 7:45PM
Location: Massachusetts Historical Society

 

Miss America’s Politics: Beauty and the Development of the New Right since 1968

Micki McElya, University of Connecticut
Comment: Genevieve A. Clutario, Harvard University

Drawn from McElya’s larger book project, this essay examines the centrality of the Miss America pageant, its local networks, and individual contestants to the rise of activist conservative women and the New Right in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyzes the celebration, power, and political effects of normative beauty, steeped in heterosexual gender norms and white supremacy, and argues for the transformative effect of putting diverse women’s voices at the center of political history and inquiry.

Seminars are free and open to the public; RSVP required. To RSVP: email seminars@masshist.org or call (617) 646-0579.