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.

 

First Foreign Policy Seminar of Fall 2017

Assoc. Professor Daniel Immerwahr, Northwestern UniversityPlease join us for the first Foreign Policy Seminar of Fall 2017!

The guest speaker is Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University. The title of his talk is “Nobody Knows in America, Puerto Rico’s in America: Colonial Medicine, Militant Nationalism, and the U.S. Empire.”

The talk will be held on Friday, September 22 in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge. A reception with refreshments will start at 4:30pm and the talk will begin at 5pm.

Professor Immerwahr is an historian of the United States and the world, serving in the history department at Northwestern University. His first book, Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015), offers a critical account of the United States’ pursuit of grassroots development at home and abroad in the middle of the twentieth century. He is currently working on another book, How to Hide an Empire, about the United States’ overseas territory.

8/28 – 11th Annual History Graduate Student Research Conference

Conference Schedule – Monday, August 28, 207

All sessions held in the Class of ’47 Room in the Homer Babbidge Library


Session A: 1:15-2:45 pm

Panel One: Governance, Institutions, and Movements in New England
Chair: Danielle Dumaine

Nicole Breault, “Peace and Good Order in the Streets”: The Work of the Constable’s Watch in Eighteenth-Century Boston

Abdullah Alhatem, “The Domestic Slave Trade in New England”

Britney Murphy, “The Fall of Mount Trashmore and the Rise of Community Activism: Environmental Justice and the Politics of Inclusion, Bridgeport, CT (1991-Present)”

Commentator: Matthew Guariglia


Coffee Break – 2:45-3:00

Coffee, tea, assorted cookies


Session B: 3:00-4:45 pm

Panel Two: Power and Influence in World Affairs
Chair: Maggie Stack

Erik Freeman, “‘True Christianity’: The Flowering and Fading of Mormonism and Romantic Socialism in Nineteenth-Century France”

Frances Martin, “Who’s Watching the Clock? Rise of the Doomsday Clock as a Pop Culture Phenomenon”

David Evans, “False Harvest: U.S. Foreign Relations and the Dream of Agricultural Power during the 1970s”

Lauren Stauffer, “From the North to the South Atlantic: NATO and the Falklands War”

Commentator: Gabrielle Westcott

 

Keynote Address:  5:00 pm

Jonathan Chu
Professor of History, University of Massachusetts-Boston
Editor, New England Quarterly

“Wrestling with the Devil: An Historian Becomes an Editor”

 

4/26 Wednesday Workshop with Nathan Braccio

“Describing English/Algonquian Space/Place: Using Historical Maps, GIS, and Spatial Theory”

Nathan’s workshop will consider the challenges and rewards of a spatial approach to the history of 17th-century New England through the discussion of three different kinds of maps: English maps, Algonquian maps, and Historians’ maps. While all important, each of the maps lend themselves to different kinds of analysis and different pitfalls.

Please plan on attending and joining in the conversation with Nathan. We will meet as usual in the Wood Hall basement lounge. We will get started at our customary time of 12:15 p.m.

4/7 Foreign Policy Seminar

David Mayers
Boston University

“After Armageddon: International Society and the United States, 1945-1956”
 

Reception 4:30pm, Presentation 5:00pm

Contact Frank Costigliola (frank.costigliola@uconn.edu) if you wish to stay for the dinner following the talk ($12 for students, $20 for faculty)

Library Workshops 3/7 and 3/8

Omeka Workshop
March 7 at 11am in EC-1
This workshop will provide an overview of the Omeka tool.  Omeka allows users to build digital exhibitions and create simple web pages.  We will cover the basics of creating an Omeka account and adding items, collections, and exhibits.  This workshop is designed for the beginner and does not require any previous knowledge of Omeka.

 

GIS Workshop

March 8 at 3pm in EC-1
This workshop will introduce the basics of interactive web mapping using CartoDB, an open platform for data visualization.  It is a great tool for those who are interested in web mapping, but have no experience in web programming. You will learn how to upload various types of data, use filters, customize your map symbols and share a final online map. Perfect for beginners – no specific experience required.

 

If you’re interested in attending one of these workshops, please register at the following link: http://workshops.lib.uconn.edu/

3/8 Humanities in Action Panel and Discussion

HUMANITIES IN ACTION
Panel & Discussion with the Initiative on Campus Dialogues (ICD)
Wednesday, March 8, 2:00-3:30
Humanities Institute (4th floor, Babbidge Library)

We have three History Department faculty!
This panel gathers scholars who have brought their knowledge and humanities perspectives to collaborative community activities. Such public opportunities bring scholars and community members together with research and popular practices, and open new questions both in and out of the academy. They are important avenues for engaging, disseminating, and enriching all our knowledge.

Panelists:
Shayla Nunnally, Associate Professor, Political Science & Africana Studies
She will discuss her work with others to expand research about and education opportunities for women and girls of color.

Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Associate Professor, History and Director of El Instituto
He will be speaking on detention and deportation activism.

Fiona Vernal, Associate Professor, History
She will discuss her local public history projects with Caribbean communities in the greater Hartford area.

Chris Vials, Associate Professor, English and Director of American Studies
He will speak about labor organizing in and out of the academy.

Manuela Wagner, Associate Professor, Literatures, Cultures & Languages and Director of German Language and Culture Program
She will discuss her collaborations with K-12 teachers and graduate students.

Mark Kohan, Assistant Clinical Professor, Neag School of Education and English Language Arts
He will speak about community collaborations for multicultural education.

Melanie Newport, Assistant Professor, History
She will speak about her efforts regarding prison education.

Facilitator:
Aimee Loiselle, Ph.D. Candidate, History
She has worked in alternative and community education for many years, bringing an intersectional approach to teaching and mentoring in programs with low-income, underrepresented, and adult basic education (ABE) students.

3/6 Career Pathways Event

In the latest event in our Career Pathways series, Marla Miller of UMass will be speaking on “Artisans and Entrepreneurs in the 21st Century Humanities: Graduate Education as Maker-Space” on Monday, 6 March, 12pm-1:15pm, UCHI Conference Room, 4th Floor, Babbidge Library.

At 4pm, we will have a Career Pathways roundtable on “Public History at Multiple Scales”, featuring Marla Miller, Bea Gurwitz of the National Humanities Alliance, and our own Nick Hurley in the Wood Hall Basement Lounge.

Both these events are co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Humanities Institute, and a Career Diversity Grant from the American Historical Association.

Encounters, A New Discussion Series

The Hartford History Center at Hartford Public Library, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute, are launching a community engagement partnership with a new discussion series called Encounters. The partners will provide discussion leaders to engage in topics aimed at strengthening our ability to know ourselves and one another through respectful and challenging dialogue. This February and March, Encounters will focus on the fundamental documents that define our democracy.

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