Historians have long studied the impacts of German and Italian occupation during World War II. Post-Revisionist historian Eric Alary considers the impact of occupation on Paris and urban cities in his book Les Français Au Quotidien,1939-1949. Likewise, Richard Vinen discusses the consequences of food shortages in Paris in his book, The Unfree French: Life under the Occupation. However, a limitation is that scholars in this field of research have often ignored rural living conditions under occupation and have focused on cities like Paris. My research adds to the narrative of daily life under occupation and fills the gap mentioned above by focusing on the impact of Italian occupation on the fishing villages along the Mediterranean Coast. This essay argues that the lack of food and the subsequent food rations, on the one hand, and the labor associated with food on the other, impacted both social tensions and gender roles in the region of southeast France during World War II. Food caused/heightened tensions between social classes in southeast France, French residents and Italian Occupants, and between French citizens in different regions. Yet, food enabled women in southeast France to gain economic independence through labor opportunities and involvement in the Black Market. Thus, an exploration of food in southeast France illuminates the various effects of war in this region that have been so often overlooked. My paper is split into three sections examining (1) Food rationing and how it was a catalyst for social change in WWII France, (2) how gender roles were altered and food became the vehicle for women to gain economic autonomy, and (3) the aftermath of Italian occupation. Overall, the goal of this research was to examine how using food as a lens could open up avenues of research regarding gender roles and occupation in Southeast France.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 preceded the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans under Executive Order 9066. Multiracial Japanese families posed a problem to the segregation order. War officials attempted to further segregate the population through the Mixed Marriage policy. This policy allowed some multiracial Japanese families to leave Japanese mass incarceration camps. My project argues this policy was both a foreshadowing and facilitation of postwar integration; enabling rather than discontinuing the process of race and empire. The majority of sources were acquired through scanning, email, photocopying, microfilm, and phone interviews. Research initially began with understanding the Mixed marriage policy as a result of the prewar segregation along gendered and racialized lines. It soon became clear that the treatment of multiracial Japanese families under American occupation was both a result and continuity of the prewar racial logic. The Mixed Marriage policy was an attempt to reconcile the question: Who did the U.S. government and the Japanese American community consider Japanese? Japanese Americans emigrated with the transpacific identity of both Japanese and American. In contrast, the U.S. government rejected the possibility of dual identities by arguing that racial identity was based on biology alone. The existence of mixed race individuals in Japanese mass incarceration camps upset the U.S.’s racial logic that emphasized segregator biology over the possibility of cultural assimilation. The Mixed Marriage policy built upon segregation policies to determine who could integrate into the American identity. Those who passed the appeal process of the Mixed Marriage policy were welcomed back into the categories of Japanese and American. These individuals became symbols for the U.S. government to project an image of benevolence and racial tolerance in the post-war empire. The Mixed Marriage policy helps historians understand how integration is dependent on the categories created by segregation.

Although steam technology opened new avenues of prosperity and pride for the British Empire, the Qing government witnessed the violent impact of the steam engine, when for example, the Nemesis steamship sailed into the port of Canton and killed thousands of Chinese soldiers throughout the course of the Opium Wars. Yet, Chinese narratives tend to reflect optimistic attitutes toward steam technology. So why did British narratives emphasize Chinese suffering more than Chinese narratives? Using the steam engine and opium as technological case studies, this research investigates the ways suffering was associated with each technology and how British and Chinese religious beliefs influenced the technological narrative during the First and Second Opium Wars (1840-1842, 1856-1860). Using methodological frameworks derived by historians and philosophers of technology and contextual research from Science, Technology, and Society scholars, Asian Studies scholars, and Religious scholars, this project offers an interdisciplinary perspective on technological narrative during the Opium Wars. These case studies encourage conscientious reflection on technological values across cultures.

This project is an examination of the Chevalière d'Éon (1728-1810) and the body of academic work that has been written about her. While her life is well-documented, her remarkable gender transition in 1777 has largely been viewed as a mere curiosity or at best a political maneuver. The growing field of transgender history, however, provides a new analytical framework with which to examine her story. Drawing on a wealth of secondary sources for historiographical analysis as well as contemporary letters, memoirs, and articles, the paper looks at d'Éon's feminism, her political career, and her personal life to put forward the argument that her gender was a matter of self-determination rather than external motivation, a notion that becomes clearer when her narrative is viewed as that of a transgender person navigating her gender nonconformity in a time when constructions of gender were quite different. The research presented shows that by branching out of modern narrow definitions of transsexuality and instead considering a broader range of experiences under the transgender umbrella, historians can use gender nonconformity in the past both to analyze contemporary constructions of gender and to help establish a historical transgender continuity rather than describing it as a modern movement without a presence in the past.

This paper seeks to demonstrate the role played by faulty (often intentionally faulty) historical memory on the development of the British constitutional narrative in the late Middle Ages. This narrative, which has been characterized as the de facto constitution, was defined in the English Bill of Rights in 1689 in terms of a struggle between royal, particularly Norman, tyranny and a revival of a limited, representative monarchy imagined to have existed in the Anglo-Saxon period. The overwhelming majority of scholarship on the development of the unwritten constitution has focused on pin-pointing the moment in history when the constitution began to exist in political reality. This scholarly agenda began in the wake of the Glorious Revolution as an attempt to justify and understand the events of 1688, and has been steeped in political bias. This paper reexamines the two historical periods most often identified with the foundations of constitutionality: the reigns of Edward IV (r.1461-1470, 1471-1483) and Henry VII (1485-1509). A reassessment of these reigns finds little evidence of the long-alleged constitutional revolution; rather, it is clear that contemporary propaganda and historical practices played an important role in formulating a precedential pattern erected on creating a shaky foundation on which the constitutional precent rests.

Under the Merovingian Dynasty (481 AD-751 AD) in early medieval France, royal political assemblies were used to fulfill a wide variety of functions of state. More importantly, however, they served as the primary venue for interaction between the king and the noble class he ruled over. Throughout the period, kings and nobles used assemblies to shift the balance of power in their own favor. Sometimes, by using regencies of young kings for instance, aristocrats managed to gain power over their rulers. Others, kings managed to shift the balance back and reassert their full authority. The Merovingian kingdoms moved through cycles of waxing and waning levels of centralization. When a king died with multiple potential heirs, the kingdom was often split into three or four separate political units. At these moments, the kingdoms were divided and decentralized. When a king’s brothers and his heirs died, however, the kingdom reconsolidated into a single unit, requiring greater centralization to govern. In these moments of centralization, the power struggles of assemblies offered more permanent gains, which the aristocratic class exploited to gradually increase their relative status, until the distribution of power reached a point where the forbears of the great king Charlemagne managed to replace the Merovingians and become kings themselves. The effects of assemblies on Merovingian government and kingship allowed and led to the birth of the Carolingian dynasty. More even than this, the very fact that the Carolingian's used assembly politics to attain power affected how they in turn governed, thus shaping the history of Europe for centuries to come. Using close readings of narrative, legal, and formulary evidence, I argue both that Merovingian assemblies functioned as an outlet for royal-aristocratic competition, as well as the increased impact this competition had during centralized moments in Merovingian history. 

This presentation focuses on the question of how mythic vengeful mothers in Medieval Europe were percieved with special attention paid to Grendel's Mother from Beowulf. The first portion of the presentation will be dedicated to a historiography of Grendel's mother, including articles from scholars such as JRR Tolkien, Jane Chance, and Christine Alfano. This provides context for the body of the presentation, which focuses on the question of why Grendel's mother is percieved as so terrifying to both the author of Beowulf, and Beowulf scholars. In order to answer this questions, Grendel's mother is analyzed next to other revenge-seeking women in Icelandic epics in order to demonstrate how unusual she is. Using these works, we can see that ultimately Grendel's mother is terrifying not because she is a monster, but because she posses and uses a kind of power that cannot be mascuinized: the power that comes from maternal love. Unlike other Valkyrie figures, Grendel's mother cannot be temporarily made masculine in order to enact vengence, because she is already defined by motherhood, which is inherenly feminine, while other more accepted Valkyrie tend to be young maidens, who then return to womanhood by getting married when their task is complete. Grendel's mother assumes a power which is inherently feminine, which directly threatans the assumption on which patriarchal society is based: power is masculine. It is for this reason that she is portrayed and considered to be so frightening by scholars and the author alike.