Tag Archives: Gender and History

“Unsettled Feeling & Critical Insight”! Graduate Class on Race and Gender

A group of graduate students studying at Fordham University has come together to analyze and provide insight into complex issues of both race and gender. Graduate students, in a course entitled, “Race and Gender” in the fall of 2019, led by Professor Kirsten Swinth, discussed race and gender in modern America.

As a final project, they each wrote several blogs, original pieces, and a comprehensive lesson plan that discusses a specific issue related to race and gender and/or a key historical insight that they obtained after completing the course.

Their publications are available on their student-designed public website (https://ufci2019.ace.fordham.edu ). Each blog post (written by one of the class members) tackles either race or gender through the incorporation of both secondary and primary sources.

It was their mission to use the knowledge obtained through spending a semester studying these social constructions in great detail to provide valuable insight into each discussion. In each blog post or lesson plan, the students selected a particular topic and offered their research and insights based on the knowledge they had accumulated over the course of the semester.

Students of all levels of higher education, professors, and history enthusiasts are welcome to interact with the information presented within each post. They are invited to consider questions that arise in handling these topics, and consider how their own insights could expand upon these ideas.

List of Contributors:

William Hogue 

William Hogue is a PhD student in History at Fordham University interested in the international intellectual and political history of US imperialism and its relationship to American Christianity. His research examines the history of multinational organizations, religious institutions and policy institutes, the politics of international order, and the connections between foreign and domestic policy. In particular, he focuses on the influence of liberation theology in Latin American revolutions and the US domestic human rights reaction to US foreign policy in Central America. 

Benjamin Van Dyne 

Benjamin Van Dyne is a PhD student in theology at Fordham University, where his work focuses on white and Christian supremacy and social solidarity in the face of violence and suffering. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia and worked as a community organizer in Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, New York City and Long Island before attending Union Theological Seminary, where he graduated in with his Master of Divinity. He lives in the Bronx with his two children.

Katie Shine 

Katie Shine is a first-year doctoral candidate in modern history at Fordham University. Her academic interests include the First and Second World Wars, 20th century Italy, U.S.-Italy foreign relations, memory studies, race and nationalism, and Fascist society in western Europe. Having previously worked in higher education, tutoring, and program management in the career development and financial services spaces, she has had many valuable (and treasured) learning and teaching moments.

Grace Campagna 

Grace Campagna is an undergraduate Senior at Fordham University studying History, Anthropology, and Medieval Studies. She will graduate in May 2020 with a Bachelor’s degree in History. Her academic interests include medieval England and women’s history. She has enjoyed tackling new topics and time periods during this course on Race and Gender in Modern America.

David Marchionni 

David Marchionni will complete his Masters’ degree in History from Fordham University in August 2020. His MA Thesis will focus on the Stonewall Riots, and its impact upon lesbian and gender non-conforming people of color.

Megan Stevens 
Owen Griffis Clow

Owen Griffis Clow is a doctoral student in the Fordham University Department of History. He researches modern American history with a focus on the late twentieth century (1970-2000), violence, and the American South. He is a graduate of Lawrence University (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.A.).

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Ph.D. Candidate Louisa Foroughi receives the National Conference of British Studies 2019 Dissertation Fellowship – Many Congratulations!

Louisa Foroughi, a Ph.D. candidate in medieval history, was awarded the 2019 Dissertation Fellowship by the National Conference of British Studies (NACBS), a competition open to all those doing dissertation research in the British Isles on any topic of British (including Scottish, Irish and Imperial) history or British Studies. Fordham University). The citation at the annual meeting of the NACBS in November 2019 in Vancouver reads as follows.

Foroughi’s dissertation, “What Makes a Yeoman? Status, Religion, and Material Culture in Later Medieval England,” examines the English yeomanry from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. Yeoman, she explains, occupied a middling rank in late-medieval England, above the peasantry but beneath the gentry, and its numbers and significance rose throughout the fifteenth century. Through the examination of court records, wills and testaments, and case studies, Foroughi reveals the role of both material culture and religious belief in the making of this social group previously more familiar to early modernists.

Most importantly, Foroughi has developed a series of questions – and ways to go about answering them – that recover the role of women and gender in the yeomanry’s making – something that was not high on the list of historians’ priorities in 1942, the last time the yeomanry figured as the subject of a comparable monograph. Yet the yeomanry’s position, Foroughi shows, was only made possible through the dowries brought by wives and daughters, the values transmitted from mothers to children, and the maintenance of households that partly depended upon women’s labor. To recover these aspects of late medieval and early modern social history, Foroughi’s dissertation ingeniously draws upon literary studies, religious studies, and anthropology, in order to make visible the role of women and of gender in the making of the English yeoman class.  

Louisa Foroughi

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Exploring race and racism, gender and misogyny: History 5410 Race and Gender in Modern America

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is an exploratory, experimental history of the lives of young black women in northern cities in the early twentieth century. Its author, Saidiya Hartmann, had just won a MacArthur “genius” grant for her innovative scholarship when we sat down to discuss the book earlier this month. I think that it was at this moment that the seven students in History 5410 Race and Gender in Modern America really gelled. The day’s student seminar-leaders guided us through a provocative, wide-ranging discussion about how Hartmann’s method beautifully evoked the inner worlds of women largely invisible in the historical record where they mostly appear as statistics in sociologies of the ghetto, names on police blotters, or case files of detention centers. We considered what Hartmann taught us about these young women’s lives with her method that we might not have understood otherwise and discussed whether or not this was a method that graduate students in history might want to embrace.

Hartmann’s book is among a set of histories of race and gender in the U.S. since 1877 that the course includes. We have read about miscegenation, farmworkers and migrants, and women’s employment and “economic citizenship” and are moving on to civil rights, conservative politics of the family, and mass incarceration. Katie, a first-year doctoral student in the department, comments that “I have never explored race and gender exclusively in a course and the well-selected readings and discussions have forced me to re-evaluate my preconceived notions of both of these concepts. This class has challenged me to really understand how race and gender construct one another in today’s world.” Grace Campagna, a senior history major, echoes the point, observing that “The biggest takeaway from the class so far has been seeing the range of ways that those in power have used race and gender to construct and uphold social, political, and economic systems.”

The seminar is based in a student-centered pedagogy. Will Hogue, a second-year doctoral student, says that “Dr. Swinth’s commitment to experimenting with new and more democratic pedagogical methods has been very rewarding.” He adds, “The collaborative syllabus model gives the students not only the chance to tailor the course to their personal needs and goals, but also the chance to practice some lesson planning and course construction. In all, it has been helpful for our development both as scholars and teachers.” In fact, the class just completed a collaborative process to set the topics for the last four weeks of the seminar, all chosen by students to reflect their interests and to pursue questions that have arisen in the first part of the course.

At its most basic, this course investigates the ways that race and gender have shaped what it is like to live in the United States today. It draws upon the field of history and the skills, talents, and creativity of committed graduate students (and an accompanying professor) to explore the key categories and mechanisms that have made race and gender “tick” in American culture and society since Reconstruction. In many it is a traditional graduate readings seminar. Course readings analyze how these key, intersecting categories shaped American politics, economy, culture, state, and criminal justice system. But beyond that, the seminar’s deeper goal is to follow the class’s collective interests. What do class members, as individuals, and the class, as a group, want to understand better and more deeply about the history of race and gender in the U.S.? This course is as an opportunity to figure out why learning about this topic matters to comprehending U.S. history, why it matters to students (personally, professionally, as citizens/contributors), and why it matters to the larger world, future students, and other audiences we have yet to identify.

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Graduate Student Publications

Christine Kelly, a PhD candidate in History, recently published an article titled “Folk as the Sound of Self-Liberation: The Career and Performance Identity of Odetta,” based on her dissertation research. Christine shared with us the abstract for the article:

 

Odetta Felious Gordon Holmes – commonly known by her stage name, “Odetta” – played an instrumental role in the rise of American folk music as a mouthpiece for dissent during the social movements of the post-war era. She abandoned a life she planned in opera and oratorio for a career as an interpreter of African American slave songs and spirituals, material originally recorded by song collectors John and Alan Lomax in travels through the Mississippi Delta region. Odetta has claimed that while a life in oratorio would have enriched her vocally, its musical lineage had “nothing to do” with her experience. In contrast, a new repertoire of songs she gathered – songs derived from slave laborers, prison chain gangs, longshoremen, and church congregations – allowed her to shape her identity as a performing artist in crucial ways throughout her fifty year career. As a folk singer, Odetta co-constructed a cultural movement which drew inspiration from song writers of the past – composers of “freedom hymns” – to seek liberation in the present. For Odetta, such liberation was, at first, primarily for herself. As an African American woman who suffered the indignities of segregation, she felt she carried a “dragon” inside, one that hated herself and others. With a broad, black body of which she was ashamed, on stage Odetta tried to conceal and neutralize herself as a racial and gendered subject as she donned long, dark clothing, and threw herself fully into the material she performed. Through an act of self-abnegation, she performed the music, often of black men, who insisted on affirming their existence, the validity of their subjectivity, despite the oppressions that came with circumstances they faced involving humiliation and forced confinement. As an arbiter of the folk tradition, Odetta offered her body as bridge to connect a new generation of listeners with marginalized experiences of the past. As such, Odetta became a cultural broker of a folk tradition of dissent. She relied on a common method among performing artists – benefit concerts – to raise substantial funds for civil rights causes. Odetta’s life in music became a site of self-emancipation as she transformed from a suffering artist who often behaved subserviently to one who invented an identity which insisted on her own personal dignity. Furthermore, the exposure she gave her listeners to a nearly forgotten black cultural heritage enabled them to empathize with the experience of past singer-songwriters, seeing injustice in the present as more pressing than before. Odetta’s appeal to the idiom of folk and the benefit concerts she held directly supported the civil rights movement and related social mobilizations through the 1960s and 1970s as she helped to inspire not only political and legal change, but freedom in the arena of culture and emotion.

 

 

 

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Medieval England Conference at Fordham!

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Student Perspectives: Second Annual Women’s Liberation Teach-In

On November 7, 2017, Fordham students gathered for the second annual women’s liberation teach-in at Rodrigue’s Coffee House, on the Rose Hill campus. Part of Professor Kirsten Swinth’s Modern U.S. Women’s History, students in the teach-in emulated women’s liberation groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The teach-in is a valuable tool Dr. Swinth has used to move students from the pages of their textbooks into the lived experience of the subjects they study. Here’s what some of the students had to say about that experience. Continue reading

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Dr. Kirsten Swinth Discusses “Having It All”

Dr. Kirsten Swinth enjoyed a packed crowd earlier this month as she spoke about her upcoming book, “Having it All:” Feminist Struggles over Work and Family, 1963 – 1978 (Harvard University Press, 2018). The book comments on the challenges that working professionals have faced as they have sought to build a career while raising a family from the 1970s through the present. She also discussed Continue reading

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WEDNESDAY: Dr. Kirsten Swinth Discusses the History of Sexual Assault in America

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New Directions in Early Modern and Modern History: The 2015 Fordham Graduate Colloquium Conference, May 8 4PM

The History Department is pleased to announce the schedule for the 2015 Graduate Colloquium Conference “New Directions in Early Modern and Modern History”. The conference will take place on Friday May 8 at 4PM in Walsh Library 040.Presentations cover evenly almost the whole period from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with presenters addressing topics as diverse as royal succession and government in Tudor England, torture and public disorder in Colonial America, and mass consumption, labor justice, and education in the modern US. Read on for the conference schedule and paper abstracts…

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Critiquing a Memorial to a Medical Legacy, in Central Park

Doctor StatueProfessor Durba Mitra‘s graduate class, Gender and History, had a discussion about gender and sexuality in the landscape of New York City next to the statue of J. Marion Sims, the so-called “Father of Gynecology” in Harlem. From 1845-1949, Sims carried out experimental surgeries on slave women to address the issue of persistent fistula after protracted labor in childbirth. He conducted these procedures on slave women without the use of anesthetics, believing that slave women did not need anesthesia for pain relief. While he is memorialized in a statue at 103rd Street and 5th Avenue for his innovative surgical techniques and his contribution to NYC medical institutions, his commitment to slavery and his use of slave women for experimentation is less well known. The memorial bears no marks of this history.
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