This study examines how Latino migration politics developed in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1970s. Although scholars usually identify the emergence of Latino immigration activism in the 1960s and predominantly in the region of the Southwest with the farm workers movement, this study argues that immigration activism began much...
This dissertation seeks to explain the discursive origin, development, and transformation of “Republican anticommunism,” and how and why this state-originated ideology continues to shape Vietnamese exile communities today. The dissertation focuses on examining mechanisms that allows certain narratives produced by the Republic of Vietnam to persist, despite the regime changes,...
This dissertation argues that silence played a fundamental role in the Victorian novel and in Victorian novel writing, operating as a productive force in service of sympathetic exchange and creative labor. It examines Charles Lamb's and Thomas Carlyle’s foundational roles in detaching silence from its traditional Romantic associations with solitude,...
After the Second World War, two states claimed to represent the same nation: “China.” This work examines how the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) competed to represent China and the international consequences of that competition. The CPC’s victory in the Chinese Civil War (1946-1949) led to...
This dissertation explores the development of public access cable television programming made by and for LGBTQ people in New York City. Through archival research, interviews with the producers of these shows, and analysis of their content and textual features, I argue that LGBTQ public access programming reflected and amplified particular...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
This dissertation, titled “The Rocket’s Red Glare: Global Power and the Rise of American State Technology, 1940-1960,” makes three distinct but interlocking historical interventions. First, it argues that the rise of technology as a central ideological component of global hegemony represents a historical contingency, rather than a reflexive characteristic of...
“Open Tables: Restaurants and Reform in Progressive Chicago” considers restaurants as contentious spaces where larger debates about gender, class, race and ethnicity, public health, and the role of the state were carried out between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the 18th Amendment. Using Chicago as...
This project uses the political and environmental history of maquiladoras—duty-free assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border—to offer new insights into two pivotal moments in the history of the U.S political economy: the poverty eradication plans of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the neoliberal growth models of the late twentieth century....
“Los Grans Mals: Disasters and Civic Life in the Late Medieval Midi” examines the many catastrophes that struck the cities of Marseille and Montpellier during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this era, southern Europe witnessed increasingly frequent episodes of natural disasters due in part to the Little Ice...