Department of History Senior Thesis Conference

DAY 1: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9

10–11:30 AM
Panel 1: Organization’s Effects: Belonging and Transformation at Home and Abroad
Moderator: Prof. Lizabeth Cohen
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room

Cara Chang: “Organizing the Union Teacher: Examining Race Within the Boston Teachers Union, circa 1963–1983”

Dekyi Tsotsong: “Persecuted in their Motherland: The History and Politics of the 2008 Uprising in Tibet and its Effect on the Diaspora”

Walter Goldberg: “Brownstone Frontier: Pioneers, Homesteaders, and the Growth Machine in the Battle for Pre-Gentrification Brooklyn”

1–3 PM
Panel 2: Knowledge Creation: Educational Institutions and Political Change
Moderator: Prof. Ann Blair
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room

Tobias Benn: “Scholars in the Nation’s Service: The Rise and Fall of Academic Engagement with Strategic Intelligence”

Aldo Aragon: “A Twentieth-Century Intellectual History of the Polynesian Question, 1916–1976”

Grace Coolidge: “Unveiling Harvard: Navigating Change and Student Activism in the Campaign Against the Vietnam War (1968–1970)”

Henry Haimo: “Rewriting History: Education, Publishing, and Mass Media in Ghana, 1945–1966”
 

3–5 PM
Panel 3: Science as Historical Subject, Science as Historical Method
Moderator: Prof. Michael McCormick
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room

Anna Farronay: “State of Aesthetics: Pathologized Prosthetics during the Argentine Great Depression (1998–2002)”

Sophia Charles: “Ice Cores, Tree Rings, and Early Slavs: Climate and Migration in Sixth- to NinthCentury Central Europe”

Mira-Rose Kingsbury Lee: “The Forgotten Microbes and Their Environmental Agency: Pasteur’s Turn to Pathogens and Microbiology’s Long Winter”

Charlotte Nickerson: “The Licit Drug Trade: Regulating Secret Remedies in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean”

DAY 2: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10
 

10:30 AM–12 PM
Panel 4: Interests Abroad: Domestic Priorities in a Global Context
Moderator: Prof. Arunabh Ghosh
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room

Duncan Edwards: “Power, Prejudice, and Politics: Human Rights Concerns and Cold War Geopolitics with South Africa During the JFK Administration”

William Goldsmith: “The Greatest Decision in [US] History:” George Marshall & Postwar Public Discourse Surrounding the European Recovery Program”

Gabrielle Pesantez: “Preserving the Imperial Family: Queen Elizabeth II’s Early Guardianship Over the Commonwealth of Nations”


10 AM–12 PM
Panel 5: Economic and Spatial Histories of the Modern U.S.
Moderator: Prof. Lisa McGirr
Location: Robinson Hall, Basement Seminar Room

Cooper Wolff: “From Boom to Bust: Unraveling the Real Estate Bubble of the Roaring Twenties and Its Impact on the Great Depression Housing Crisis”

Augustus Richards: “Selling Glyphosate: The Evolution of Pesticide Marketing in the Twentieth Century”

Madison Barkate: “Prime Time: Why, How, and How Much NFL Players Were Paid”

Zing Gee: “From the Tavern to the Biergarten: German Immigration’s Impact on Drinking Spaces and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America”


~~~~~~ LUNCH ~~~~~~


1–3 PM
Panel 6: Power and Control? Twentieth-Century Military Histories
Moderator: Prof. Derek Penslar
Location: Robinson Hall Conference

Room Ruby Huang: “The New Harvard Man: The Department of Military and Naval Science and Tactics at Harvard”

Brendan Kiely: “The Harvard Volunteers of World War I, 1914–1917”

Oscar Berry: “Drowning in the Embers of Defeat: The Strategic Mentality of Loss, Fear, and Ambition in the Power Struggle for French Collaboration in 1941”

Collin Bergstrom: “The U.S. Atomic Monopoly: Attitudes and Arguments for an International Approach to the Issue of Atomic Weapons”
 

1–3 PM
Panel 7: Libel and Lacunae: Narratives of U.S.
History Moderator: Prof. Jane Kamensky
Location: Robinson Hall, Basement Seminar Room

Meimei Xu: “Largely Unknown, Not Forgotten: The Lives of Enslaved Individuals Connected to Boston’s King’s Chapel in the Eighteenth Century”

Andrew DeGennaro: “A Complicated Legacy: Yellowstone National Park & the Displacement of Indigenous Peoples”

Marbella Marlo: “A Provocative Press: Libel and Sensationalism in New York City Newspapers, 1880–1920”

Emmy Cho: “Walt Whitman: Man of Letters”
 

3–5 PM
Panel 8: Studies in Solidarity: The Impacts of Organization
Moderator: Prof. Rosie Bsheer
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room

Simon J. Levien: “Rogue Foot Soldiers of Civil Rights: How SNCC Recruited White Northerners, 1959–1965”

Madison Stein: “Reinforcing Revolutions: The Dhofar Rebellion and Global Solidarity Networks, 1965–76”

William Marsh: “Rust-Belt Resentment Gone Rogue: Concepts of Citizenship and the Ideological Underpinnings of Michigan's Far-Right Militia Movements, 1968–2012” J

Justin Hu: “Studying with Césaire: Caribbean Counter-Pedagogies in Martinique during the French Third Republic”
 

3–4:30 PM
Panel 9: Rebuilding Communities after Change
Moderator: TBA
Location: Robinson Hall, Basement Seminar Room

Matylda Urbaniak: “To kaszebska stolëca: The Creation of a Kashubian Identity in Reclaimed Poland, 1945–1957”

Julia Tellides: “Reform and Resistance: The Jewish Community and Greek Government in Interwar Thessaloniki”

Ryan Goldfarb: TBA


Please join us afterwards for a celebratory reception honoring this year’s cohort of thesis writers! In the Robinson Hall Great Space, Friday, November 10, at 5PM.