Summer is also an exciting season for History graduate students. Work on research projects, travel to archives, presenting their papers at conferences: these are just some of the activities that were undertaken by Fordham’s industrious graduate students this past summer. Included below are some postcards detailing their activities.
Fordham history PhD Student Louie Dean Valencia-Garcia interviewed on Al-Jazeera English
Louie Dean Valencia Garcia spent two and a half months in Madrid doing research in the Spanish National Library and the Archivo General de la Administración. He was a featured guest on the internationally acclaimed The Stream on Al Jazeera English and was also featured in the Brazilian magazine IstoÉ talking about the abdication of Spanish King Juan Carlos and a referendum calling for the end of the Spanish monarchy. Louie, whose research concerns comic books and other expressions of youth culture also presented on two panels at the WizardCon Comic Book Convention in San Antonio on 2-3 August. In addition, Louie attended the Digital Humanities 2014 Conference in Lausanne, Switzerland thanks to funding provided by the department. Back in New York, Louie also participated in the planning for a collaborative project between Fordham and the New York Botanical Gardens at the Humanities Institute at the New York Botanical Garden.
Medievalist Alisa Beer writes to say that she attended the DHSI (the Digital Humanities Summer Institute) at the University of Victoria, BC, where she learned TEI (the Text Encoding Initiative). Crossing the Atlantic with the help of the Fordham-York bursary which she won jointly with English student Boyda Johnstone, Alisa first attended the York University Manuscripts Conference and then began an sweeping tour of European archives including collections in London, Paris, and Saint-Omer (in northeastern France). Her research was in preparation for a conference paper she will be giving in September in Antwerp. Upon her return to the US, Alisa worked for the Rare Book School in New Haven CT for one week, following a class on collecting law books and acting as a site-coordinator for catering.
The bicycle and bag of Lucy Barnhouse on a picturesque street outside the archives in Mainz, Germany
Lucy Barnhouse, who spent the academic year 2013-4 on a Fulbright Fellowship in Germany reports that she spent June and July finishing up her archival work in Mainz. The summer also brought breaks in routine, and she journeyed to Florence with a fellow Fulbrighter to attend a 1-day conference (“Practicing Public Health: Europe 1300-1700”). “Papers and conversations were stimulating,” she says, “and seeing more medieval and early modern hospitals was great too.” In early July she attended and presented at a 2-day conference in Munich, where she enjoyed very good discussions on “(In)Visibility, (In)Security), and Gender in Historical Perspective.”
Site of the Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference, St. Anne’s College, Oxford
Lucy also attended the biennial conference of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, held at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University. A half-day workshop for graduate students and early career researchers preceded the conference held at the Radcliffe Observatory Complex.
Christopher Rose, ready for the manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris
Since early July, Christopher Rose has been doing pre-dissertation research with thirteenth-century crusader manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. When not struggling to decipher strange abbreviations, he has been cycling about Paris to work off the comps-studying weight.
The reading rooms at the Richelieu Site, Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Thanks for the updates and pictures everybody. See you soon!