Summer 2010
Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS) Graduate Student Workshop
The CSUS Graduate Student Workshop, initially launched in 2007-08, is designed for graduate students pursuing research relating to American society and culture broadly conceived. The workshop is a forum for graduate students to present work in progress before a group of peers, and may include dissertation proposals or chapters, articles, conference papers, or MA theses. The workshop also provides a venue to showcase the emerging scholarship of the winners of the Graduate Research Grants in American Studies and/or the Study of the United States. The overall goal of the workshop is to receive friendly, but critical feedback from scholars coming from an array of disciplinary backgrounds.
The CSUS Graduate Student Workshop will be a monthly, academic-year, daytime seminar presentation. Our aim is to include graduate students and interested faculty from many academic institutions in the surrounding area. Students at any area universities, or those dissertating in the GTA, are warmly welcomed to join the proceedings. Inclusion in the workshop is to be broadly defined; students working on transnational, hemispheric, or comparative projects are encouraged to participate. For the upcoming academic year, the CSUS Graduate Student Workshop will be held near the end of the month on Wednesdays from 4-6 pm in the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. The Workshop is sponsored by the interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS).
We are currently seeking graduate students who would be interested in presenting their work in the 2010-11 academic year. Interested applicants should submit a paper title, brief abstract, one paragraph biography, and up-to-date C.V. The deadline for submissions is July 23th, 2010, if you are interested in presenting or serving as a commentator, please contact:
Benjamin Pottruff
Academic Advisor, American Studies Program Doctoral Candidate, Department of History University of Toronto, csus.advisor@utoronto.ca.
GRADUATE STUDENT WORKSHOP 2009-2010
scheduled talks
Fall 2009 Term
Welcome Coffee Social
Wednesday, September 30th 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N
Camille Bégin
The Intimacy of Taste: Food Practices and the Colour Line in 1930s America
Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto
Wednesday, October 28th 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk Centre, room 108N
Abstract: This presentation draws from a dissertation focused on taste and the colour line, showing how the sense of taste was used to authenticate, explain and justify the strengthening of the colour line during the Depression. A specific African-American food taste was defined- both imposed by the white world and, in reaction, from inside the community. This renewed sensory difference cut across regional cultures and cuisines and was an element toward the national unification of the American concept of race. This presentation will thus have a national frame of reference but will highlight the circular relationship between North and South, and between rural and urban areas. Indeed, defining a naturalized African-American taste by implication pointed to what those who claimed to be “white” should or should not eat. Yet, this presentation will also unwrap this sensory duality by showing how class relationships underlined this sensory mode of racial construction.
Bio: Camille Bégin is doctoral candidate in History at the University of Toronto; her dissertation uses the methodology and findings of sensory and cultural history in order to study the redefinition of race and ethnicity in the nineteen thirties. Tentatively titled “‘America Eats’: Taste and Identity in the New Deal Era” her work analyses how food tastes and preferences were used to delineate communities, symbolize group belonging, and ultimately define American identity. Such a process of sensory differentiation accelerated in the interwar period in order to answer to the challenge of industrial modernity, economic depression, and changes in the American taxonomy of race and ethnicity due to immigration restriction and internal mobility. Using sources from the Federal Writers’ Project, a unit of the New Deal makeshift work of the Work Progress Administration, Camille is interested in the rhetoric surrounding authenticity and exoticism in matter of food and its relationship to the making of a national sensory economy in 1930s America.
Jared Toney
Locating Diaspora: Afro-Caribbean Narratives of Migration and Settlement in North America, 1914-1939
Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto
Wednesday, November 25th 2009, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N
Abstract: This research examines the relationship between local places and diasporic spaces in the configuration of immigrant identities. In this presentation, I focus on the experiences of Afro-Caribbeans in Toronto in the first half of the twentieth century, linking them through migration networks to those of other North American cities of Halifax, Montreal, and New York. This discussion is part of a larger project in which I analyze the effects of migration and settlement on racial, ethnic, national, and imperial identifications, and evaluate how local circumstances informed migrants’ positions in and relationships to the diaspora. I argue that diaspora (both as process and condition) was forged in trans-local and trans-national dialectics, realized through the negotiation and reconciliation of myriad experiences and identifications within and across borders. Ultimately, this work seeks to clarify the relationship between the local and the global, the national and the transnational, and the individual and the community in the process of diaspora in early twentieth-century North America.
Bio: Jared Toney earned a B.A. and M.A. in history at the University of South Florida, and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His dissertation work examines transnational migration networks and the process of diaspora among Afro-Caribbeans in early twentieth-century North America. His preliminary research on Toronto is currently being reviewed for publication in a forthcoming special-theme issue of Urban History Review entitled “Immigrant Lives, Contested Cities, New Histories.”
Winter 2010 Term
Alena Papayanis
There’s No Place Like Home: Diagnosing Vietnam and Healing its Veterans in Gulf War Celebrations
Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of London, Birkbeck College, UK
Wednesday, January 27th 2010, 2-4 pm
Munk centre, room 108N
Abstract: This paper examines the immediate post-Gulf War period (considered here as February 1991 to August 1991) in order to understand how the Gulf War helped to further define the place of the Vietnam War in American mythology, and conversely, how public narratives about the Vietnam War shaped the discourse of victory in the Gulf. Various questions will be addressed in considering this relationship. In what ways did the Gulf War homecoming both propagate and limit discussion of the Vietnam War? What version of “Vietnam” was being invoked and with what effects? How was the different homecoming experience of Gulf and Vietnam War veterans framed as representative of a change in American culture?
Bio: Alena Papayanis is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of London, Birkbeck College. She received B.A. and M.A. degrees in Media, Information, and Technoculture from the University of Western Ontario before beginning her postgraduate career in history. Alena’s research interests have focused on the contemporary cultural history of war within the United States, in particular, from the Vietnam War to the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. Her PhD examines how the Vietnam War was inflected in the Gulf War, specifically through constructions of the U.S. soldier figure, gender, and national identity. She plans to defend her dissertation in winter 2009 and, following graduation, to pursue research on Gulf War soldier literature, as well as cases of post-war domestic violence amongst America’s veteran population.
Nathan Cardon
Race, Empire, and Modernity at a Southern Fair: The Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition, 1897
Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Toronto
Wednesday, February 24th 2010, 2-4 pm
Munk Centre room 108N
Abstract: In a region often thought of as dissonant with the larger trends of American modernization, the South's international expositions of the 1890s became symbolic opportunities for the region to demonstrate its embrace of the North’s discourse of industrial, cultural, and racial progress. However, southern fairs were far from the 'perfect worlds' intended by their organizers. Instead, multiple performances of modernity disrupted the rhetoric of order and control, making clear its heterogeneous nature. While primarily sites for white expressions of modernity, southern fairs also provided space for African-Americans to present and perform their own modernity. Consequently, southern fairs are critical historical sites to investigate the ways in which the African-American middle-class sought to integrate itself into prevailing scientific and progressive models, while the black working-class challenged racial conceptions by performing its own modernity within and outside the exposition. This paper explores the themes of race and empire through an examination of the performances of modernity at the international exposition held in Nashville. Taken together, the Nashville fair offers a window into the ways in which southerners attempted to embrace the cultural and cognitive changes of the late nineteenth-century, while defining themselves as different from their northern peers.
Bio: Nathan Cardon is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of History, whose dissertation, “‘A Dream of the Future’: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the New South’s International Expositions, 1884-1904,” explores the ways in which southerners simultaneously embraced and critiqued modernization through multiple and divergent performances of cultural modernity. He is a past recipient of the Associates of the University of Toronto Award for Study of the United States.
Zack Taylor
Distant Neighbours: Institutional Explanations for Canadian and American Divergence in Urban and Metropolitan Planning
Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto
Wednesday, March 31st 2010, 2-4 pm
Munk Centre, room 108N
Abstract: American observers have gazed longingly at Canadian metropolitan planning and governing institutions. The conventional explanation for Canada’s different institutions and patterns of urban development is cultural. Historical research, however, suggests that planning ideas and citizen attitudes were similar in both national contexts, and illustrates the importance of institutional factors. Close study of British Columbia, Ontario, Minnesota, and Oregon suggests several preliminary conclusions. First, the Canadian parliamentary system proved more amenable to the creation of municipal comprehensive planning and metropolitan governance than the American separation of powers. Second, the different role of each country’s federal government led to different outcomes. While in Canada the early postwar focus was to promote provincial legislation on planning and municipal affairs, the American New Deal entrenched of a project-funding model that neglected broader planning principles. Ironically, weak Canadian federal action produced strong local and regional planning while its more muscular American counterpart led to weaker local and regional planning systems.
Bio: Zack Taylor is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Prior to returning to school in 2006, he worked full-time as a professional urban planner in the public and private sectors and taught in the University of Toronto’s Dept. of Geography and Program in Planning. Zack has presented papers on planning policy and urban politics at the conferences of the Canadian Political Science Association, the American Political Science Association, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, and the Canadian Institute of Planners. Zack has also won an Excellence in Planning Award from the Canadian Institute of Planners for his co-authorship of a report for the Neptis Foundation, Shaping the Region (2008).
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED TO:
May 26, 2010, 2-4 pm
Munk Centre room 108N
Spencer Morrison
“Rome was in ruins”: Transatlantic Urbanism in Heller’s Catch-22
Doctoral Candidate in English at the University of Toronto
Abstract: Cities—their decay, their reconstruction, the modes of citizenship available within them—occupied a prominent place in America’s postwar public consciousness. Following World War II, a discourse of “urban crisis” arose in America that subsumed beneath a broad narrative of decline numerous social anxieties: for instance, anxieties generated by antagonistic race and class relations, a frayed sense of civic belonging, and an eroded collective memory as embodied in the deteriorating urban environment. This same period, however, produced the 1947-1951 Marshall Plan, a project which, as understood in America’s public imaginary, involved revitalizing Western Europe’s bombed-out cities and shattered economies. This presentation sees Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) as a meditation on American cities as refracted through European WWII urban destruction, with Heller’s novel revealing a transatlantic tint in American notions of postwar urbanism and, ultimately, casting doubt upon the value of American cultural and economic intrusions into Europe through public diplomacy in the postwar period.
Bio: Spencer Morrison is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Toronto, where his work focuses on representations of urban space in postwar American fiction. In addition to twentieth-century American and British fiction, his interests include critical geography, ecocriticism, and theories of repetition in literature.
