My research focused on the question: What can be learned about 19th century Middle Eastern and European medical practices from the personal diaries of Joseph Mattia Svoboda, a European resident in Iraq from 1860 to 1908? Joseph Mattia Svoboda’s diaries document a very detailed account of daily life and information in the Basra and Baghdad regions of modern day Iraq. Joseph himself suffered from a chronic gastrointestinal disease and frequently wrote about the medication prescribed to him by doctors and self-selected which he then self-administered. I used this information as a basis to piece together common medical practices and medications utilized in the 19th century. Using digital transcriptions of the diaries, I used data-mining techniques to extract references to medicines, doses, and usages. Then, using contemporary European newspapers, medical journals, advertisements, and historical records I traced these medicines and their ingredients back to their origin. I examined modern research on these medicines’ ingredients to look at the effect these medicines had on the body compared to the expected results of the time period. I found the medicinal practices of the time, especially in relation to patent medicines generally stem from Europe with many medications being produced and sold there. This allowed me to identify some of the ingredients and usages. However, some of the ingredients and medications were not native to Europe, indicating a larger trade system and medical practices from around the globe influencing medicine in Iraq. Future projects stemming from my research could look into the influence of Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native American herbalism and indigenous practices on 19th century medical practices and medicine trade. Regardless, I hope my work encourages others to explore beyond the eurocentric narrative of developing medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries.

My research began with a discovery of manuscripts in the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, British Columbia. These manuscripts were written at Fort Nisqually during the 1840s. A series of journals and ledgers detailing the arrival of Americans into the Oregon Country in 1845 have been missing for over 150 years. They were taken to Victoria, BC in 1865 to provide evidence for the claims of the Hudson’s Bay Company and Puget Sound Agricultural Company in the joint commission hearings between Great Britain and the United States. Through letter books and other writings detailing events around the same time of the missing journals, I am piecing together some of this early 1840s history by working with the curators at the BC Archives. While the journals are yet to be found, my research at the Royal BC Museum has uncovered new leads to follow. The discovery of the journals will reveal farming practices employed by the fort and add detail to what is already known and would answer the unending questions regarding breeds of cattle and sheep arriving at Fort Nisqually, as well as specific cultivars of potatoes, grain, and other food stuffs grown at the fort. The discovery is not the last step in writing Fort Nisqually and the Puget Sound Agricultural Company history. After locating, transcribing and publishing the journals comes the true historiography. These journals hold the keys to a lifetime of research. By uncovering these stories, a box of knowledge will be opened which local historians will dig through for the rest of time. These manuscripts will be the keys to that box, and give future generations a chance to fully understand a history lost for 152 years.

My paper focuses on the life of Rose McGrory to address broader shifts in identities across the Atlantic and throughout the United States. From a British colonial subject to an American colonial settler, Rose McGrory’s life illustrates how individuals refashioned their identities to confront and exploit the contradictions of race, gender, religion, and nation, revealing how they simultaneously challenged and conformed to societal norms in the process. Rose was born in 1884 in desolate Dunree, Ireland. Though Ireland and Britain were theoretically equals after their unionization in 1800, Rose lived in Ireland as a British colonial subject. For centuries, the British had represented the Irish as racially backwards to justify their colonization. In the decades after the Great Famine, females like Rose gained greater access to educational opportunities, but their socioeconomic prospects did not improve likewise. In this historical context, Rose immigrated to Boston in February 1905. Here, racial and gendered hierarchies confined Irish women like Rose to abject jobs like domestic servants. Although many Irish on the East Coast succeeded in their crusade to become perceived and treated as white, in part by distancing themselves from black people, Rose found Boston restrictive. Rose moved to Hood River, Oregon in 1910. In the west, the Irish had already associated their racial identity with whiteness by leading the racialization of the Chinese and Japanese as non-white. In this new racial landscape, Irish immigrants could transform themselves into “settlers”, an identity associated with whiteness and increased socioeconomic opportunity for Rose and her family. Rose’s life reveals the intricacies of her various identities and the complexities of the Irish-American immigrant experience. Integrating primary sources like censuses and newspapers with various scholarly literatures, my paper unveils Rose’s arduous journey and provocative story.

The years between 1889 and 1922 saw great archaeological activity in Egypt, a period known as the 'Golden Age' of Egyptology. Our research seeks to answer the question: “What were women’s experiences during the ‘Golden Age’ and what impact did their work have?” Mrs. Emma B. Andrews and Mrs. Helen Winlock are unique characters, choosing to escape the rigidity of Victorian society and pave their own way on the dusty roads of Egypt. Their letters and diaries bear witness to an exciting period of history. Our survey begins with the record of travel and excavation kept by Mrs. Emma B. Andrews and Helen Winlock, wife of Herbert Winlock, Director of the Metropolitan Museum Egyptian Expedition. They describe challenges of archaeological missions in Egypt, recounting issues of site and workforce management, as well as their interactions with diverse explorers and adventure. From scans of original handwritten letters, we transcribe frequently challenging handwriting and record Andrews’ and Winlock’s unique observations. These include descriptions of difficulties of daily life on site, of managing large groups of workers, and offer insights into the personalities and characters of eminent archaeologists. The results of our work are open source and offer important insights into the lives of the foremost Egyptologists and their families. We utilize technology such as iPads, Basecamp project management, and collaborative software to facilitate transcription. Ultimately, we will produce output that is accessible online to encourage collaborative engagement with others researching this ‘Golden Era’ of excavation. This information is stored in a database and will be freely available on our project website, to encourage collaborative engagement with others researching this ‘Golden Era’ of excavation. In doing this, we aim to recreate the world of archaeology from a bygone era, seen and described through the eyes of women who were ahead of their time.

This paper analyzes a collection of letters and postcards hand written during World War II, authored by German crystallographer and volcanologists Ferdinand Bernauer to his son. The analysis draws on aspects of critical theory of the epistolary genre, while keeping in mind that the collection is a set of artifacts, not a fiction, as they were never published or intended as a work of literature. Their analysis provides a unique insight into the decisions and repercussions of a strong refutation of Nazism by a distinguished man of science residing in Hitler’s Germany. His greatest contributions to the academic world – proof of Continental Drift through his studies in Iceland and a crystal growing method now lost to mankind – attest to his considerable intellect and dedication. Yet it is his letters that uncover a life worthy of investigation for what they illuminate about the human psychological faculty of weighing the risk of death with the ethical reward of fighting for one’s values. The epistolary lens allows the reader to grasp aspects of the text not explicitly written such as intentional self-censorship, introspection upon one’s choices and moral stance, and stylistic choices made because the intended recipient was his son. The letters, unlike actual epistolary novels, need no omniscient narrator to provide a historical backbone upon which the narrative may play out, because it has been provided largely by World War II records. Therefore, this work facilitates a strong identification between Ferdinand Bernauer and the reader in an absorptive reading experience typical of an epistolary novel, without vast holes in historical perspective. This analysis explores a method of reading letters written under political oppression that enables one to understand the real difficulty in making the choice between standing against an immense malevolent power, and portraying one’s resistance quietly among the chaos.

This presentation examines emperor Nero’s use of food and dining practices as a way to invert social class in public and private life. Through an examination of accounts by the ancient authors, secondary scholarship, and archeological evidence of the Domus Aurea, it is evident that Nero had a complicated reign, but his actions related to dining practices and public life made an intentional effort to equalize Roman social class while including the common Romans in aspects of life to which they were not previously privy. The investigation is separated into three sections: the first examines the history and basis of the ancient authors with respect to their relationship with Nero; the second looks at the public spectacle and how that contributed to the change in public and private life; and finally the third demonstrates the scale of the gestures in which Nero partook, thus illustrating how he was courting the non-elite and simultaneously debasing the elite. Each section is supported with overlapping evidence; however, certain aspects are highlighted within each section. The first focuses primarily on examining the perspective of the elite authors with some support from secondary arguments. The second uses some archeological evidence but mostly uses secondary analysis with some support from the contemporary authors. Lastly, the third uses a combination of the three, but it mostly focuses on the Domus Aurea and the impact of this space. With these three clearly identified points of examination, the complex reign of Nero is emphasized while further discussing his intentional use of food and dining to promote his agenda. Nero worked to change public and private life in order to put himself forward as the sole ruler of Rome. Most important, all of his actions were intentional and calculated in order to create his new empire through food and dining.

A century of U.S. government-backed, anti-Asian discrimination culminated in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite U.S. government insistence that anyone with up to 1/16th Japanese blood had to be incarcerated, the existence of white-looking children in concentration camps presented a segregation crisis. Race was segregation’s litmus test: if white was assumed loyal, Japanese was assumed disloyal. My paper uses original archival research to study attempts to reconcile this monoracial logic with the multiracial reality that exposed it - the U.S. government’s Mixed Marriage Policy (MMP). The MMP permitted some multiracial Japanese Americans to escape or avoid mass incarceration. My project argued that U.S. treatment of multiracial Japanese Americans rewarded the disavowal of Japanese identity with “integration” to project an image of liberal inclusion whilst allowing a reality of surveillance and segregation. When attempts to quantify racial mixtures became impossible, the MMP attempted to strip the trait of race from multiracial subjects in a policy of institutional “colorblindness” by evaluating loyalty on “objective” criteria alone. Individuals eligible for integration became symbols for the U.S. government to project an image of inclusive humanitarianism and racial tolerance in the post-war empire. However, these seemingly neutral criteria upheld U.S. imperial practices of racial segregation. The perceived disavowal of the racism behind incarceration sanitized the image of the U.S. government while quietly reproducing racial hierarchies through new domestic surveillance policies. Shifting segregation policies to subtler forms of institutional colorblindness strengthened the United States as an empire of white supremacy. Racism was at its most intractable and pervasive when acknowledging the existence of race became taboo. As the title “It Must be Odd to be a Minority” (Spanish translation) alludes, this research is significant to Asian American Studies because the current literature rarely address inter-sectional struggles with the greater community of color.

The Duino Elegies is a collection of ten elegiac poems written by Austrian-Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). At turns mournful and ecstatic, sardonic and visionary, the Elegies were composed from 1912-1922, a period marked by the so-called “language crisis” (Sprachkrise) in German-speaking modernist circles and the entirety of the First World War. The poems’ major themes include this crisis, the role of divinity in a secularizing society, and the ways in which the mass production of commodities threatens human relationships with things and with other humans. The latter point will be the focus of my presentation. Drawing on scholar Teresa Brennan’s interdisciplinary studies of the energetic, psychic, social, and economic aspects of modernity, I read the Elegies as presenting a theory of energy that is at once an affective, poetic experience of modernity in Western Europe. More specifically, I show how the Elegies map out and respond to a collective psychic exhaustion. Alongside Brennan, I argue that capitalist production in modernity—and the attendant accelerations in transportation and communication—is the main culprit. Collective psychic exhaustion finds its correlate in natural exhaustion—the depletion of natural resources extracted for commodity production—which, if not yet catastrophic in Rilke’s time, certainly is now. It should be noted that Rilke is a western, middle-class poet, and his work can by no means be read as speaking for all of ‘humanity.’ Yet with capitalism having only become more global, pervasive, and hegemonic since Rilke’s time, the Elegies offer illuminating insight into our own heterogeneous, global experiences—social, psychic, and energetic—of capitalism as it unevenly and differentially entangles, exploits, and mangles various parts of the world.