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.

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.

Every nation state has its foundational stories and Afghanistan is no exception. Classical historiography and national myth contend that the Durrani Empire, founded in 1747 by Ahmad Shah Durrani, marked the beginning of the modern Afghan nation-state. As the fledgling polity subsumed all of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan in addition to parts of Iran and the Central Asian republics, it found itself the object of ‘The Great Game’ in which the expanding Russian and British empires sought to control the region. I assert that, while it is certain that 'The Great Game' and Ahmad Shah influenced the growth of Afghan nationalism, traditional historiography fails to account for the deliberate, ruler-driven work that went into the Afghan centralization project. Rather than playing pieces propelled through their early centuries on a vast geopolitical Great Game board, the Shahs of the Durrani Empire and the Emirs of the Emirate of Afghanistan determinedly enacted policies furthering their goals and visions for the state. Concurrently, British India, governed by the Council of India, sought to shape the Afghan state to suit its own needs vis-a-vis Russia and Persia. I also maintain that while the early stages of the nation building project were a response to the political and military needs of Ahmad Shah, the relative power of each state shaped the later phases. The Durrani Empire initially had a military advantage, but later British territorial annexations in India facilitated power projection further into Central Asia, thereby imposing their image of Afghanistan over its local population. I argue fundamentally that Afghan national identity was shaped through a shifting relationship with Britain as a consequence of successful as well as abortive policy decisions from both parties which, when combined with the framework established by early Durrani rulers, coalesced to give form to Afghan nationalism.

Before the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, the Republic of Venice’s relations with the Ottoman Empire were tumultuous and tentative. As the most powerful Mediterranean maritime force in the 16th century, it was Venice’s mission to protect Christendom from Ottoman Islamic armies. To fight this maritime crusade Venice employed privateers and corsairs, individuals who, in exchange for payments, supplied their own vessels to police the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean in search of Ottoman vessels. Since Venice relied on trade for basic provisions, Venetian authorities approached naval aggression as a necessary defensive measure. Venice’s lack of self-sustainability meant that protecting its imperial holdings was critical to the longevity of the city itself. As Venice won the Battle of Lepanto, destroying the Ottoman fleet, Venetians regained their sense of naval supremacy. Although Venice lost the larger Ottoman-Venetian war, as in the three previous was, the Battle of Lepanto marked a pivotal moment in Mediterranean history, driving Venetians to recapture some of what they had lost and to rebuild their once vast merchant empire. Confident in their naval prowess, Venice’s merchant galleys spread far and wide across the Eastern Mediterranean to forge new trade relations with the Ottoman Empire. Through these relations, Venice portrayed themselves as the gateway to the East by supplying themselves and Western Europe with exotic goods. I argue that The Battle of Lepanto ushered in a new era of economic expansionism grounded in a Venetian sense of naval superiority that allowed Venice to end its reliance on privateering and corsairing to protect its empire.

Rather than assuming the transhistorical existence of Kurdish nationalism, this paper identifies and explains the material motivations behind the formation of the short-lived Mahabad Republic in 1946. I argue both the tribal chiefs and urban elites of Kurdish society felt compelled to break from Tehran as they, along with the rest of Kurdish society, became more connected to a wider economy than ever before. Previous political movements within Kurdish society against unjust treatment from the Iranian central government had been led by the tribal chiefs whose hegemony over the rural areas had made them powerful forces to be reckoned with. In 1946, with the tribal chiefs undermined by anti-tribal policy from Tehran, and the urban population and wealth in Kurdish society growing at a rapid rate, the Mahabad separatist movement emerged as the first Kurdish rebellion to be directed and inspired by the urban elite. Yet the success of the movement still necessitated the cooperation of the landholding tribal elite, as they provided the military organization crucial for victory. Both groups, who held the bulk of power within Kurdish Iran, were motivated by adverse treatment associated with the Iranian state, including manifest corruption, cultural oppression, and economic recession. In that context, I argue, the landholding tribal chiefs and the emergent urban elite forged a secession movement away from Iran to establish the first successful Kurdish ethno-state.

Insights from the study of biosonar (echolocation) in mammals such as bats have applications in developing coordinated autonomous manoeuvres in a variety of environments. However, limited research has studied bat echolocation and flight behaviour in natural habitats, which involves multiple bats competing for a shared prey resource. In a confined space, bats have been observed to emit calls with lower intensity, shorter duration, and broader bandwidth compared to when echolocating in the open. Bats foraging in the wild also experience more complex echo-acoustic scenes created by sounds of all sources in the landscape, such as calls from other bats and echoes from vegetation and obstacles in the environment. Evidence from previous field studies suggest that solo bats engage in stereotypic flight path behaviour to minimise the cost of sensory processing required for spatial orientation, making those resources available for prey localisation. Other studies have observed leader-follower behaviour in pairs of bats, where they coordinate manoeuvres by copying the others’ trajectory through active echolocation. We propose to investigate flight and echolocation behaviour of an even larger number of simultaneously foraging bats over the Central Pond in the Union Bay Natural Area. This 74-acre natural area on the shore of Lake Washington is a prime location for a natural observatory right on the UW campus. We are currently developing an ultrasonic microphone array that is a non-cost-prohibitive alternative to proprietary wildlife recording devices, and we will start data collection when local bats local emerge from winter hibernation. We plan to develop fully automated algorithms for tracking bats and estimating their echolocation directional aim during foraging. These data will serve as a basis for deriving computational principles of coordinated flight and sensing across multiple agents, which can inspire new technology for autonomous vehicles in the air, on the ground, or underwater.