Department of History: Senior Thesis Conference

**Please note, this event is limited to Harvard affiliates only.**

SENIOR THESIS CONFERENCE
NOVEMBER 3 & 4, 2022

DAY 1: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3

1–3 PM
Panel 1: Law, Politics, and Migration in North America
Moderator: Prof. David Spreen
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room (#125)

Julian Habermann: “Stamped Out: Ineligibility in the Origins of the Immigration System, 1880–1920”
Sam Lowry: “Courts, Commerce, and Child Labor: The Creation of a New Constitutional Order”
Michael Vassallo: “A Clash of Three Governors: White Backlash, Southern Conservatism, and the Long Death of Georgia’s White Primary”
Nithyani Anandakugan: “Turning Tides: The 1986 Sri Lankan Boat Migration to Newfoundland and Questions of Rescue in International Law”


3–5 PM
Panel 2: Society, Economics, and Culture in the Global Postwar
Moderator: Dr. Aaron Bekemeyer
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room (#125)

Mary Julia Koch: “Going Nuclear: The American Family in the Cold War”
A.J. Dilts: “‘Separate Sovereignty’: W. Averell Harriman and the Kennedy Administration's Intervention in Vietnam”
Dash Wasserstein: “A Match Made in Heaven: Reconciling Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Reagan Era”
Hannah Thurlby: “‘All Our Children’: The Impact of China’s One-Child-Policy on the American Family in the 1990s”

Please join us for a celebratory reception honoring this year’s cohort of thesis writers!
Robinson Hall Great Space
Thursday, November 3, at 5PM

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DAY 2: FRIDAY,NOVEMBER 4

10 AM–12 PM
Panel 3: Capital, Energy, and the State in the Making of the Anthropocene
Moderator: Prof. Ian Miller
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room (#125)

Paige Proctor: “Stewards of a Nation: The Political Significance of Agrarian Communities in Industrializing England”
Ua Alencastre-Galimba: “‘Guano Land’: Native Hawaiian Interactions with the Guano Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century”
Michael Wallace: “‘Davy Crockett in Yellowstone’: Mission 66, the National Park Service, and the Creation of Modern Environmentalism, 1954–1966”
Kailas Amin: “Historical Perspective on the Development of the American Power Market, 1996 to the Present”


Panel 4: National Ideals, Conflicts, and Struggles in the 20th Century
Moderator: Prof. Terry Martin
Location: Robinson Hall, Basement Seminar Room (#B21)

Henry Bellew: “The Impact of Political Violence and International Fascism on the Electoral Failure of the British Union of Fascists”
Andres Mendoza: “Otherness, Isolation, Autonomy: Dissident Spanish Clergy, 1931–1939”
Charlotte Sack: “‘An organ of social democracy’: The Rise of the Public Library in Postwar America”
Alexander Lee: “‘We the Soviet People’: Civic Belonging and Sovetskii Narod Discourse under the Conditions of Late Socialism”


~~LUNCH~~~


1–3 PM
Panel 5: Citizenship, Legal Personhood, and Demography
Moderator: Prof. Daniel Smail
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room (#125)

Alaina Harris: “‘What’s in a name?’: An Analysis of Personal Names in Post-Conquest England, 1066–1216”
Kevin Wang: “The Roman Law of Slavery in Late Medieval Europe”
Enrique Sanchez: “‘Why Fear Sterilization?’: Population Control and Family Planning in Puerto Rico during the Mid-Twentieth Century”
Alexander Tam: “To Be a Citizen: Rights, Obligation, and Belonging at the Social Margins of the Confederacy”

Panel 6: Knowledge, Education, and Art in North America and Asia
Moderator: Prof. Lisa McGirr
Location:Robinson Hall, Basement Seminar Room (#B21)

Katherine Enright: “From Natural History to National Heritage: The History and Politics of Displaying Colonial-Era Natural History in Singapore Museums”
Emily Axelsen: “‘You Are Involved Unless You Stop It!’: Museum Response to Artist Mobilization in the 1970s New York City Feminist Art Movement”
Ibrahim Mammadov: “Book Virgins: How America Came to Forget Reading and Writing”
Aiyana White: “What was Given and What was Owed: Foreign Influence and Intervention in Japanese Women’s Education, 1930–1955”


3–4:30 PM
Panel 7: Spatial and Environmental Histories of Land, Movement, and Industry
Moderator: Prof. Emma Rothschild
Location: Robinson Hall Conference Room (#125)

Oliver Riskin-Kutz: “Feral Cattle, Wild Swamps, and Ungovernable People: An Environmental History of the French and Spanish Settlement of Louisiana in the Eighteenth Century”
Tadhg Larabee: “Sublime Histories, Historical Sublimes: Landscape, Technology, and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Ireland”
Uday Schultz: “Ironbound: Freight Transport, Industrial Change, and the Urban Roots of the Logistics Economy in Newark, New Jersey”


3–5 PM
Panel 8: Empire and Diplomacy: Four Case Studies
Moderator: Prof. Erez Manela
Location: Robinson Hall, Basement Seminar Room (#B21)
Joseph Kester: “Presentation versus Reality: Comparing Portrayals of the Emperor in Rome and Byzantium”
Karina Halevy: “Woven into War: A Computationally Augmented History of Sephardi Jewish Women in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1877–2000”
Rom Blanco: “Philippines-China Diplomatic Relations: Lessons from the Immediate Post-War Era (1946–1986)”
Ryan Santos: “‘The outsourcing of freedom’: Filipino Operatives in the Origins of the American War in Indochina, 1954-1962”