GRADUATE STUDENT WORKSHOP 2007-2008
scheduled talks
Fall 2007 Term
Benjamin Pottruff
The Anarchist Peril: Propaganda by Deed and Race Making in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto
Thursday, October 18th 2009, 2-3 pm
Munk Centre, room 108N
Abstract: Narratives of anarchist violence were uncomfortably common in the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For a very small minority within radical movements Propaganda by Deed was above all a class critique, and these violent acts repeatedly occurred within the context of industrial unrest. However, a generation middle class professionals, captivated by the ideas of racial fitness suggested by social Darwinism and a criminal system much inflected by the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, scrutinized the bodies of assassins as the site at which counter claims over the meaning of anarchist violence could be authenticated. Popular conceptions of insanity articulated by the press were refined and validated in scientific circles as medical professionals and criminologists, through psychological assessments, photographs, and autopsy reports, developed a system of classification that legitimated racial and pathological constructions. In doing so, reporters, police officials, and medical professionals looked past the critiques and focused instead on their bodies, particularly for signs of racial and mental degeneration.
Bio: Benjamin Pottruff’s dissertation investigates a violent series of assassinations and bombings at the turn of the century in the United States. Ben is a graduate of the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor and Masters Degree in History and Peace and Conflict Studies.
Tom Young
Limited Access: Understanding shifts in the disposition of land and resources in northern Vermont
Doctoral Candidate in Geography at the University of Toronto
Thursday, November 15th 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N
Abstract: This project looks at how people experience and respond to changes in access to land and natural resources. “Access” in this sense refers to the distribution of benefits that are derived from the land. Land and the organisms that it sustains supply an incredible variety of benefits, both tangible and intangible, and these benefits are assigned different values by different people. This lack of agreement about what aspects of the land are most valuable is one of the factors leading to conflicts over land use. Another factor relates to institutional design rather than differing values; here disagreements stem from differences over how recognized benefits should be distributed among various constituencies. This research seeks to tease out the various threads knotted together in the conflicts over land use in Vermont.
Bio: Tom Young’s research investigates the interaction between discourses relating to land in environmental decision-making. His dissertation builds from field research in Vermont following two pieces of legislation: one focusing on a program that taxes land as its use value rather than its market value, the other trying to set up a new program that fosters housing development by exempting designated areas from environmental review and permitting. Tom is a recipient of the 2007-2008 Graduate Research Grant in American Studies and/or the Study of the United States.
Winter 2010 Term
Jodie Boyer
Murder, Madness, and the Mind: Reason and Will in Cayuga
and Oneida Counties
Doctoral Candidate in Religion at the University of Toronto
Thursday, February 14th 2010, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N
Abstract: Religious historians have explored the ways in which psychiatry shaped the emergence of a “therapeutic culture” in the 20th century. However, less attention has been paid to the part the Asylum and asylum superintendents played in shaping the religious ethos of the 19th century. In their attempts to discover the aetiology of insanity in modern social structures, asylum heads helped to introduce a robust concept of social sin, a concept crucial to the advent of the social gospel. Later, in their attempts to find the source of insanity in human physiology, they participated in a religious conversation about the relationship between mind and body. In both cases, their attempts to understand the extent to which the insane could be held responsible for their actions contributed simultaneously to understandings of the relationship between free-will and determinism and to the structure of modern North American criminal jurisprudence.
Bio: Jodie Boyer’s dissertation, “Sin and Sanity in Nineteenth Century America: From the Second Great Awakening to the Assassination of President Garfield,” explores the legal, medical and theological understandings of personal responsibility and social causality. Jodie is a recipient of the 2007-2008 Graduate Research Grant in American Studies and/or the Study of the United States.
Paul Lawrie
The Degenerate Hybrid of a Vanishing Race: Vital Statistics, the Mulatto and the Production of Race in Progressive America 1890-1900
Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto
Thursday, April 4th 2009, 12-2 pm
Munk centre, room 108N
Abstract: This work explores the role of race in the discourse and practice of the science of rehabilitation as it developed in America during and after the First World War. This presentation focuses on the ways in which contemporary concerns over labor and racial degeneracy informed philanthropic and state efforts to reconstitute maimed and diseased African American soldiers into efficient worker citizens. Analysis of wartime refashioning of black bodies via occupational therapy will allow for a greater understanding of the fundamental relationship between race-specifically blackness- and the early 20th century political economy. A study of vocational rehabilitation can reveal not only the realities of the era’s labor economy but also the forms which reformers wished it to resemble. This project seeks to determine, from the ‘ground up’ how racial identity became not merely synonymous with the work on did but also with the work one was capable of doing.
Bio: Paul Lawrie's research focuses on the ways in which racial difference and notions of labor fitness were constructed via the early 20th century social sciences. Through an examination of the disciplines of; statistics, sociology, psychology and anthropology, and their respective practitioners, his thesis attempts to locate the shifting nature of blackness within a specific historical and intellectual context. Paul is a recipient of the 2007-2008 Graduate Research Grant in American Studies and/or the Study of the United States.
Patricia Carter
Echoes of Empire: Eurocentrism in Canadian and American
Gentrification Discourses
Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto
Thursday, May 1st 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N
Abstract: ?
Bio: ?
