“Today’s events are designed for recognition, celebration, and appreciation of the numerous contributors to Fordham’s research accomplishments in the past two years,” said George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs.

Hong said that Fordham has received about $16 million in faculty grants over the past nine months, which is an increase of 50.3% compared to the same period last year.

“As a research university, Fordham is committed to excellence in the creation of knowledge and is in constant pursuit of new lines of inquiry,” said Joseph McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said during the virtual celebration. “Our faculty continue to distinguish themselves in this area. Today, today we highlight the truly extraordinary breadth and depth of their work.”

Earning Honors

Ten faculty members, representing two years of winners due to cancellations last year from the COVID-19 pandemic, were recognized with distinguished research awards.

“The distinguished research awards provide us with an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our most prolific colleagues, give visibility to the research achievements, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps,” Provost Dennis Jacobs said.

Recipients included Yuko Miki, associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work focuses on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century; David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty; and, in the junior faculty category, Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work examines shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics. (See below for a full list of recipients).

Diving Deeper

Eleven other faculty members presented in their recently published work in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies.

Jews and New York: ‘Virtually Identical’

Images of Jewish people and New York are inextricably tied together, according to Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., professor of history and co-author of Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017).

“The popular imagination associated Jews with New York—food names like deli and bagels … attitudes and manner, like speed, brusqueness, irony, and sarcasm; with certain industries—the garment industry, banking, or entertainment,” he said. “

Soyer quoted comedian Lenny Bruce, who joked, “the Jewish and New York essences are virtually identical, right?”

Soyer’s book examines the history of Jewish people in New York and their relationship to the city from 1654 to the current day. Other presentations included S. Elizabeth Penry, Ph.D., associate professor of history, on her book The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, on his book Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now (Lexington Books, 2018).

Focus on Cities: The Reality Beyond the Politics

Annika Hinze, Ph.D, associate professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies Program, talked about her most recent work on the 10th and 11th editions of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America (Routledge, 11th edition forthcoming). She focused on how cities were portrayed by the Trump Administration versus what was happening on the ground.

“The realities of cities are really quite different—we’re not really talking about inner cities anymore,” she said. “Cities are, in many ways, mosaics of rich and poor. And yes, there are stark wealth discrepancies, growing pockets of poverty in cities, but there are also enormous oases of wealth in cities.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hinze’s latest edition will show how urban density did not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, as many people thought, but rather it was overcrowding and concentrated poverty in cities that led to accelerated spread..

Other presentations included Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., professor of political science, on his book Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor and chair of the division of psychological and educational services in the Graduate School of Education on her book Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology on her book America, As Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe (NYU Press, 2018).

A Look into Migration

In her book Migration Crises and the Structure of International Cooperation (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Lockhart, Ph.D. assistant professor of political science, examined how countries often have agreements in place to manage the flow of trade, capital, and communication, but not people. While her work in this book specifically focused on voluntary migration, it also had implications for the impacts on forced migration and the lack of cooperation among nations .

“I actually have really serious concerns about the extent of cooperation … on measures of control, and what that means for the future, when states are better and better at controlling their borders, especially in the developing world,” she said. “And what does that mean for people when there are crises and there needs to be that kind of release valve of movement?”

Other presentations included: Tina Maschi, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate School of Social Service, on her book Forensic Social Work: A Psychosocial Legal Approach to Diverse Criminal Justice Populations and Settings (Springer Publishing Company, 2017), and Tanya Hernández, J.D., professor of law on her book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

Sharing Reflections

The day’s keynote speakers—Daniel Alexander Jones, professor of theatre and 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, head of design and production and assistant professor of design—shared personal reflections on how the year’s events have shaped their lives, particularly their performance and creativity.

For Jones, breathing has always been an essential part of his work after one of his earliest teachers “initiated me into the work of aligning my breath to the cyclone of emotions I felt within.” However, seeing another Black man killed recently, he said, left him unable to “take a deep breath this morning without feeling the knot in my stomach at the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in Minnesota.”

Jones said the work of theatre teachers and performers is affected by their lived experiences and it’s up to them to share genuine stories for their audience.

“Our concern, as theater educators, encompasses whether or not in our real-time lived experiences, we are able to enact our wholeness as human beings, whether or not we are able to breathe fully and freely as independent beings in community and as citizens in a broad and complex society,” he said.

Ramos said that he feels his ability to be fully free has been constrained by his own desire to be accepted and understood, and that’s in addition to feeling like an outsider since he immigrated here.

“I actually don’t know who I am if I don’t anchor my self-identity with being an outsider,” he said. “There isn’t a day where I am not hyper-conscious of my existence in a space that contains me. And what that container looks like. These thoughts preface every single process that informs my actions and my decisions in this country.”

Interdisciplinary Future

Both keynote speakers said that their work is often interdisciplinary, bringing other fields into theatre education. Jones said he brings history into his teaching when he makes his students study the origins of words and phrases, and that they incorporate biology when they talk about emotions and rushes of feelings, like adrenaline.

That message of interdisciplinary connections summed up the day, according to Jonathan Crystal, vice provost.

“Another important purpose was really to hear what one another is working on and what they’re doing research on,” he said. “And it’s really great to have a place to come listen to colleagues talk about their research and find out that there are these points of overlap, and hopefully, it will result in some interdisciplinary activity over the next year.”

Distinguished Research Award Recipients

Humanities
2020: Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, whose work included a project sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation on Shaker art, design, and religion.
2021: Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work is on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century.

Interdisciplinary Studies
2020: Yi Ding, Ph.D., professor of school psychology in the Graduate School of Education, who received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a training program for school psychologists and early childhood special education teachers.
2021: Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of Economics and co-director of the Disability Studies Minor, whose recent work includes documenting and understanding economic insecurity and identifying policies that combat it.

Sciences and Mathematics
2020: Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., professor of computer and information sciences and founder director of Fordham Center of Cybersecurity, whose $3 million grant from the National Security Agency will allow Fordham to help Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions build their own cybersecurity programs.
2021: Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair and professor of chemistry, who highlighted his $7.4 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on perovskites.

Social Sciences
2020: Iftekhar Hasan, Ph.D., university professor and E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance, whose recent work has included the examination of the role of female leadership in mayoral positions and resilience of local societies to crises.
2021: David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty.

Junior Faculty
2020: Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, who published The Politics of Painting, Facism, and Japanese Art During WWII.
2021: Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work focuses on shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics.

When she showed up for class one day at her school in Bellerose, Queens, without gym clothes, she had to sit it out in a room that happened to have a diagram of a heart on the wall.

“Another one of my friends didn’t have gym clothes, so she also had to sit out too, and I was looking at the diagram, and I was like, ‘I’m going to teach you the parts of the heart,’ she said.

“I said, ‘This is the right ventricle, this is the left atrium, this is where the SA node is. My teacher came over and said, ‘How do you know all of this?’”

A Focus on Public Health

For that, she credits her grandfather Osmond Quiah, M.D., a psychiatrist in Brooklyn who was a cardiologist in his native Bangladesh. Quiah schooled her in the intricacies of the heart, and today, Bhuiyan is on the pre-med track and pursuing a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at Fordham College at Lincoln Center. She plans to earns a master’s degree in public health and hopes to earn an MD so she can specialize in cross-cultural psychiatry; she wants to help cultural institutions better respond to mental health crises.

Bhuiyan’s minor in environmental science has allowed her to work on public-health-related research with Guy Robinson, Ph.D., lecturer in biology, on research related to public health. Before the pandemic, she was working on a method to detect microscopic bits of plastic and tire rubber amid the dust particles that get collected at the Lincoln Center aeroallergen station. When the lockdown last spring made that unfeasible, Robinson tasked her with analyzing 20 years of pollen records from the Calder Center to see if the lockdown had any effect on the weed pollen in the air last spring.

“Our reasoning is that mowing of highway verges, ball fields, and parks was much reduced, with a resulting increase in grass and weed pollen,” Robinson said, noting that the research also involves calling municipalities and landscaping companies to find out how much their work was delayed.

An Eye-Opening Trip to New Orleans

Bhuiyan said the fact that a major increase in pollen, which is an allergen, could precipitate a public health emergency, is what drew her to the project. In the spring of 2019, a trip to New Orleans with Global Outreach gave her a first-hand view of how the environment, health, and politics can collide in devastating fashion.

“We learned about how the introduction of the [man made]Mississippi River gulf outlet led to a devastation of cypress trees, which increased the surge during Hurricane Katrina, and how that devastated out the Lower 9th Ward, which predominantly consisted of people of color. I just saw how everything that was going on was so interdisciplinary,” she said.

Robinson said Bhuiyan’s experience as the sports and health editor at The Observer student newspaper has proved invaluable in their research.

“Aiza has been great to do research with; she takes initiative and thinks about her work expansively. Her journalism experience makes her really good at explaining things and knowing the right questions to ask,” he said.

Examining Colorism

As part of her anthropology work, Bhuiyan is also working on a senior thesis, “Navigating Colorism in Bengali Communities in NYC.” She said she was inspired by her own experience growing up in a community that is grappling with ideas of race and ethnicity.

“I am darker in complexion than a lot of people, especially my family. There were things that I had to hear, and that affected my mental health,” she said.

“It made me more cognizant of my own identity, and how I choose to present myself, and I thought it would be something really interesting to research further.”

Yuko Miki, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history who got to know Bhuiyan through her class Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World, called her a force of nature.

“She brought so much positive energy to our class while also dedicating herself to helping others,” she said, citing Bhuiyan’s role as co-coordinator of the Fordham College at Lincoln Center chapter of Peer Health Exchange, a group that offers health education to ninth graders in public schools.

“Students like Aiza have truly enriched my experience as a Fordham professor, and I think she will do great things in the world,” said Miki, who has focused much of her own scholarship on issues of race and ethnicity.

Finding Ways to Maintain Connection

Bhuiyan said the pandemic has made her senior year very difficult, and although she’s had more free time since she only commutes from home in New Hyde Park in Long Island once a week, she’s felt more disorganized and busier than in the past. The silver lining, she said, has come from the ways she was able to maintain relationships from afar. Starting in the fall, for instance, she and her Peer Health Exchange colleagues held weekly workshop group meetings where they were free to discuss any and everything on volunteer’s minds.

“It’s been amazing finding ways to retain my relationships with family, friends, and people I work with, and trying to find a way to keep some sense of normalcy going,” she said.

“They’re from Grenada and some of them were living there during the revolution. Others were living in the diaspora in Toronto,” she said. “And it was always kind of a part of our history that I didn’t always understand. My family would say that the revolution was a good thing. But then I would also hear them say that the U.S. invasion [to end the revolution]was a good thing, and that it had sort of saved the country. So I grew up being interested in those conversations.”

Lambert, now an associate professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham, said that interest stayed with her through graduate school and into her work today, which is why she decided to research and write Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (June 2020, University of Virginia Press).

“I got really into reading the creative literature around this revolution —I was training as a literary scholar—and the major writers of this revolution were women,” she said.

Understanding the Revolution Through Literature

Lambert recalled reading works by Merle Collins, a poet, novelist, and scholar, and Dionne Brand, a poet, novelist, and essayist, who told stories of everyday women during this time through nonfiction, poetry, essays, and novels.

“What an interesting way to understand a political context–by having characters who are everyday folks in their villages, in their towns, and focusing on their relationships, but having the politics play out in the background and showing what kind of effect the politics had on the lives of women,” she said.

However, as she began diving into the official archives of the Grenada Revolution, she noticed “women were absent, in some ways.”

In Comrade Sister, Lambert said, she tried to explore the revolution and the emotions and experiences women faced at the time to provide a detailed look at how gender and sexuality produced different narratives. One theme that came through in many of the works she studied was this feeling of resilience from the women, despite the uncertainties and challenges.

For Women, a Way to Look Beyond

“I found that this was really a literature also about a particular resilience that women had– working class women, rural women—and the fact that they are able to survive this,” she said. “And I think some of it has to do with the fact that even though they saw a lot of the benefits of the revolution, they understood that they were not the target constituents of that revolution because of their gender. So they don’t put all of their hopes into it … whereas with some of the male writers that I looked at, I found that there was either a total refusal of the revolution, or an over identification with it, so that when it ended violently, they are kind of stuck. For the women writers, there was always a way to look beyond it, a way to start again.”

She also was able to highlight the stories of women who made a difference both during and after the revolution, such as Joan Purcell, a Grenadian politician who spared the lives of the revolutionaries who were sentenced to death. Purcell was asked to review the verdicts and decided to commute their sentences to prevent another cycle of political violence, Lambert said.

“She looks at the situation, but she also looks at Grenadian society, and as a member of that society, determines that it would be another experience of trauma all over again if these people were going to be hanged,” Lambert said.

Lambert said this book ties into her classes at Fordham, which include a Black feminism course and a Caribbean literature class.

“It’s actually been really nice to have an ongoing dialogue between my research and my teaching and also to expose my students to some of this literature and some of this history,” she said

Broadening Freedom and Slavery Studies

Lambert participated in a conversation on her book on Monday, October 26, which was sponsored in part by the Fordham Working Group on Freedom and Slavery, a group of faculty and graduate students she helped co-found last year with Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies.

“We’re interested in thinking broadly about the archives and poetics and politics of freedom and slavery. So last year, we were thinking more narrowly about the Transatlantic Slave Trade and freedom, and we had a great opportunity to talk about the 1619 project [from The New York Times],” Lambert said. “This year, we decided we wanted to really kind of expand what we were doing so—the group is still on freedom and slavery—but we really wanted to think about freedom in terms of Black studies more broadly, so we’re not just looking at the period of slavery. It really becomes a space to think about new directions and Black studies, to think about freedom and slavery studies, but also to think about all of the ways in which we define freedoms in Black studies.”

The grants, which are for $60,000 and will last for 12 months, will allow both of them to undertake ambitious new research projects.

Translated Texts of the Church Fathers

Bruce, a professor of history, will use his grant to launch The Lost Patriarchs Project: Recovering the Greek Fathers in the Medieval Latin Tradition, a massive cataloging project that could take as long as a decade to complete.

His research revolves around monastic communities that thrived during the Middle Ages. To understand people who lived then, scholars rely on texts written in medieval Latin. Up until now, texts from that time that are translated from other languages into Latin have been overlooked, he said.

He’s identified over 90 authors who’ve been translated from Greek into Latin. Many were Christian authors who wrote mainly about theology, church doctrine, and heresy. These “patristics,” as they’re known, were considered “church fathers” at the time.

“While there have been studies on the Greek church fathers and the writing they’ve done in Greek, there’s been almost no study of how those works were translated into Latin, and how those Latin texts were read and understood in medieval Europe,” Bruce said.

“People just think ‘Oh well, it’s just a translation, and it can’t be that important. What can it really tell us?’ But the fact that people went to the pains of translating Greek into Latin and continued to read and copy these texts over the course of the Middle Ages is important.”

Since there is currently no centralized catalogue that researchers can use to access these texts, Bruce wants to create one from scratch. He’s already begun the work compiling and writing entries with help from Kasey Fausak, a Fordham Ph.D. candidate in Medieval History, who is supported by a professional development grant from Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The N.E.H. has been really generous in providing funding for this. It’s basically ground work humanities—going into the manuscripts, finding texts, and presenting them in a way that’s legible and will foster future research,” he said.

Slavery in the Atlantic World

For Miki, an associate professor of history, the grant will give her time to write Brazilian Atlantic: Archives and Stories of Illegal Slavery, a book about illegal slavery in the 19th-century Atlantic World that she has been working on for several years. The project, which she described during a 2018 research seminar at the Rose Hill campus, is a narrative history of the slave trade of Brazil in the mid-1800s that punctures the idea that slavery was primarily a United States-based phenomenon that was abandoned by then, with the triumph of abolitionist movements.

“Not only do we mostly hear about the U.S. South instead of Brazil or Cuba, but the U.S. North is often considered the place of liberty, where fugitives traveling on the underground railroad fled to,” she said.

“But if you look at illegal slave trade records, it turns out that a lot of the financing for [the ships that carried slaves]  came from New York City and Boston.”

Dispelling myths about slavery is something Miki has a lot of experience with. Her last book, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), tackled common perceptions of slavery in Brazil. Last year, the American Historical Association awarded it the Wesley-Logan Prize for the best book in African diaspora history.

“I’m interested in questioning these big stories that we take for granted,” she said.

The narrative of Brazilian Atlantic will center around the Mary E. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured in Brazil in 1856, she said. It will be a character-driven book modeled somewhat on Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale, (Vintage, 1994). The challenge, she said, is figuring out a way to weave together stories of characters as disparate as the slave ship’s captain, the financiers, and the enslaved passengers, most of whom were never accurately identified in the manifest of the Mary E. Smith.

As a historian, she said, it is her responsibility to resist the desire to write a story with a satisfying beginning, middle, and end.

“We want a clean arc of a story that’s satisfying. But those of us who work in the history of slavery know we can’t get that. The archives are full of gaps, because the people who sold slaves saw them as merchandise,” she said.

“Rather than glossing over them to try to tell a story that goes from point A to point B in the end, I want to write something that also captures those questions. If you’re making a jacket or a dress, do you only see the outside of the beautiful clothes? What if you actually saw the craftsmanship, the seams and how things are made? Maybe making those things visible is part of the process. These processes are important to understanding slavery itself.”

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article and the works resulting from the grants do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Some of you might be familiar with the joke about Dominicans as those black people who don’t know or think they’re black,” Ramírez said to a group of Fordham students and staff in Lowenstein’s South Lounge. “My book Colonial Phantoms shows both why this has come to be and why there’s a problem that it’s the primary way in which Dominicans are discussed in various conversations with the U.S., the Caribbean, and beyond.” 

Her talk, which took place during National Hispanic Heritage Month, was part of a Fordham lecture series about Hispanic Caribbean women writers who examine the intersection of race, gender, and imperialism in their work. The series is sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences; the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures; the Center on Race, Law, and Justice; the department of African and African American studies; the Latin American and Latinx Studies Institute; and the Comparative Literature program. 

In a presentation that mixed music with academia, Ramírez spoke about her award-winning book, Colonial Phantoms: Belonging and Refusal in the Dominican Americas, from the 19th Century to the Present, published by New York University Press last year. The book details how decades of literature, music, and speech show Dominicans’ ambivalent relationship toward blackness, thanks to its unique racial history: Unlike many nations in the Americas and the Western World, the Dominican Republic, for centuries, had a majority mixed-race and black population that was free. For years, Dominicans have tried to distinguish themselves from the New World narratives that have “ghosted, misunderstood, or acknowledged them only as inferior others” through creative outlets, she said.

One example is the music video “El Tigeraso” by Maluca Mala, an Afro-Dominican artist born and raised in New York City. The song opens with Maluca Mala sitting in “a quintessential Dominican site—the hair salon,”  said Ramírez. To many U.S. scholars, her decision to go to a salon to straighten her hair represents a Dominican’s denial of his or her blackness, said Ramírez. But when Maluca Mala leaves the salon, she keeps the rollers in her hair. In other words, she demonstrates “an ambivalent kind of black performance that is neither outright denial [of blackness]  nor the kind of celebration we expect in the U.S.” 

“She is neither wholeheartedly embracing Dominican women’s hair-straightening practices, rooted of course in the racist notion that black hair is bad, nor is she rejecting the practice of going to the salon by wearing her hair in natural curls. Instead, she stops the process midway,” Ramírez explained. “Her embrace of the rollers is a complicated embodiment of both African diasporic and diasporic Dominican subjectivity.” 

In a Q&A session, Ramírez spoke about what motivated her to study the relationship between race and Dominicans. 

“It might seem like the obvious answer is because I’m Dominican. But actually, my major in college was Japanese literature,” she said, to laughter from the audience. She was born in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, and raised in the Bronx. But it wasn’t until graduate school that she became fascinated by the history of her homeland and the Caribbean. 

Sitting in the audience was Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Fordham, a fellow Brown alumna who studies Brazilian history.

“I’m a historian of slavery, too,” Miki said to Ramírez. “How do you talk about blackness in the D.R. without imposing U.S. or even Haitian categories of blackness onto it?”

Ramírez urged her to feature different narratives of race, especially the ones that are often left in the dark: “The narrative of Dominicans as white nationalists and anti-black is the louder story. So kind of turning down the volume to hear the other stories, which include various forms of black pride,” Ramírez said. 

A student in the audience asked Ramírez a more personal question: how can a person navigate their racial identity, especially for those from a country that experienced colonization. 

“A question that I’ve asked myself my whole life—and also that I know a lot of other people ask—is with this type of history, how can we come to remedy or just find our own narratives and ways of identification?” the student asked. 

Ramírez struggled to address the question. Ultimately, it was the student’s responsibility to find the answer—not another person’s, Ramírez implied. 

“Maybe that’s the answer—that I’m writing against this idea that people with certain backgrounds whose ancestry has been subject to so many layered colonialisms, that … we are given some room to work through those histories without impositions—especially from different spaces of power—in how we define ourselves,” Ramírez said. 

Those were just a few of the suggestions two Fordham history professors shared at a lunch seminar, where they shared preliminary findings from ongoing research projects.

The seminar, which featured Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., and Yuko Miki, Ph.D., both associate professors of history, was held on Dec. 4 in the Walsh Library’s O’Hare Special Collections room at Rose Hill. The informal lunchtime gathering of scholars and doctoral students was sponsored by the O’Connell Initiative for the Global History of Capitalism, which aims to broaden the ways in which capitalism is understood.

The History of U.S. Energy Policy

Dietrich, the author of Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), spoke about a project he’s been working on about U.S. foreign oil policy and domestic culture in the 20th century.

Talking to students about his research on oil policy during that time period, he said the common thread of the era is policymakers’ feelings of vulnerability and insecurity.

He broke the century into three eras. From 1910-45, the United States rose as a global power. The years between 1945-1973, on the other hand, were a period in which temporary measures adopted during World War II became permanent.   

“That permanency of a total economy always being protected by an advanced military posture is something I’m concerned with,” he said.

From 1973 to the present day, he said American power in the Middle East has been less focused on infrastructure, and more focused on finance.

“Within that broad story, there are a million smaller stories, and part of what the O’Connell Initiative allowed me to do was dig in a bunch places for those smaller stories,” he said.

One of the archives he visited was the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. Although he was primarily interested in Bush’s thought process leading up to the 1990 war with Iraq, he also looked at the journal Bush kept when he was ambassador to the United Nations from 1971to 1973.

“I like to do personal history and intellectual and ideological work on the background of actors before they become principal movers in the story, and I was interested just to see if Bush said anything about third-world solidarity, sovereignty at the time,” he said.

The Unspoken Truths of Slavery

Miki, the author of Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2018), shared the ways she is expanding her research into slavery the Iberian Atlantic with visits to archives in Lisbon, Portugal, among other places.

Slavery that took place even after it was outlawed is a good place to center a critique of capitalism, because England and the United States, which were ascendant at the time, could not have made progress without it.

“So many of the narratives about slavery that we study are of the 19th century as the age of emancipation. It’s a very liberal triumphalist narrative where we all seem to be forming a western world where liberty triumphs over slavery,” she said, noting that in fact, a staggering amount of illegal slavery still took place at the time.

The Mary B. Smith, one of the last illegal slave ships to be captured on January 20, 1865, is a perfect example, she said. Brazil had won its independence in 1822, but its legitimacy rested on England’s recognition that it had abolished slavery. The capture of the Mary B. Smith was celebrated in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as proof of this change.

To understand Brazilian slavery, one needs to include its former colonial master, Portugal. When Miki did research there, she found what purported to be a manifest from the Mary B. Smith, with the names, ages, and genders of the 500 slaves who were “liberated” when the ship was captured.

“At first you think, ‘I have a list of the people on the ship. Maybe there’s a potential to write a history of these people.’” she said.

“But then you look at when they died: the 3rd of February, the 4th of February. Every person is dead. What do you do with a list of people who are liberated, but are already dead?”

The list was beautifully crafted, even though it detailed horrific suffering. That was the first clue that there was more to the list than met the eye, she said. Then there was the issue of the timing of the list’s creation, shortly before the slaves all perished.

“If you’re dying, you don’t speak Portuguese, you’re terrified, you’re barely alive, how does someone create this list?” she said.

Miki determined that a Brazilian official made up names and ages for real people who had died on the ship. By doing so, she said, he hoped to demonstrate that the country was serious about ending slavery, even it meant acknowledging those who were already dead.

It shows why scholars of capitalism need be more skeptical of the way they rely on merchant ledgers as a resource, she said. Sometimes, an “archive of liberation,” such as the one she discovered, is merely a mask for unimaginable agony.

“You need to account for the suffering. You can’t just make it a footnote to the success of antislavery,” she said.

The O’Connell Initiative in the Global History of Capitalism, which is supported by a gift Robert J. O’Connell, FCRH ’65, brings together scholars of every aspect of capitalism, from its earliest medieval manifestations to its global reach today. In addition to groundbreaking research, it supports lectures, debates, and workshops.

Grace Yen Shen, Ph.D., associate professor of Chinese history and director of graduate studies in history, said the monthly O’Connell Initiative gatherings have the given members of her department a new way to connect with each other.

The word “global” is often used to reference phenomena such as global warming, she said, or it’s used as a code word for non-western countries. In contrast, the initiative has helped history scholars see how European or American subjects like the Crusades or the American Revolution are very much part of a larger, worldwide system of monetary exchange.

For students, there’s also real value in hearing faculty talk about how they work in archives, she said.

Yuko Miki, PhD, assistant professor of history, wants to vastly expand that understanding of the system—particularly its role in the South American nation of Brazil, which had the distinction of being the last country in the Americas to outlaw slavery in 1888.

An expert in Iberian Atlantic history, Miki has looked at Brazil’s connection to slave trading firms in the United States, to slave traders in West Central Africa, and to British abolitionists.

The picture of slavery as a national institution has been too small, she said. “It’s very exciting to be able to look at the history of slavery in a more transnational way.”

Though she’s originally from Tokyo, Miki became fascinated in college with the performing arts of the African diaspora, and later took classes at the Ailey School. A former practitioner of the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira, Miki went to Brazil and found the country to be ideal for her research.

When she began researching 19th-century slave resistance in Rio in 2006, however, she stumbled upon numerous stories of indigenous rebellions. This was puzzling, she said, because there’s a very strong narrative in Latin American nations with large black populations that indigenous people were wiped out in the 16th and 17th centuries by Columbus, the Conquistadors, disease, and famine.

“I began to realize that in fact, the history of indigenous people in Brazil is very much a missing piece of history,” she said. “They were enslaved and lived and worked alongside slaves of African descent until the eve of the 20th century. For too long we had presumed that African slavery had expanded into ‘empty’ lands, which in fact were indigenous territories.” These histories, long separated, are in fact deeply connected.

Bringing these stories to light now is important, she said, because they challenge enduring popular narratives in Brazil. In The Masters and the Slaves (1946), for instance, sociologist/anthropologist Gilberto Freyre argued that the country is a “racial democracy”—composed of the race mixture between black, Portuguese, and indigenous people—and because of that, there is no racial tension in Brazil.

But just because people are of mixed race doesn’t mean there was or is no conflict, Miki said.

“It’s still important to look at the actual history of Brazil’s black and indigenous peoples. You don’t want to just look at the end result of a mixed society and celebrate it; but also look at how such race mixture might have occurred,” she said.

Her current project, which she worked on during a spring fellowship at Yale University, focuses on the overlapping geographies of the Atlantic World.

“I’m really interested in geography, not just in the physical sense of space or terrain, but also in the ways people conceptualize space and how they give meaning to space,” she said.

One of those geographies—the Middle Passage—can also be defined through narratives, such as that of two West African men whose stories Miki found in crumbling, barely legible scripts written in 19th-century Portuguese. Their stories about their journey from Lagos, Nigeria to Bahia, Brazil, and another set of documents pertaining to a slave ship from Angola bound for Rio de Janeiro, offer a rare glimpse into that horrific experience.

Further complicating their story is the fact that one of the ships was in fact illegal, and its interception before it arrived in Rio caused a diplomatic uproar at the time.

“I want to look at the Atlantic world as a place of overlapping geographies of personal narratives of capture, of slave ships, as well as capital, and this political movement of abolitionism.”

This challenge to think about slavery in new ways extends to Miki’s teaching too, in courses like Rebellion and Revolution in Latin America and the Atlantic World, and Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World. For example, she wants students to understand that the abolition of slavery was not an inevitable outcome; many places, from Cuba and Haiti to Puerto Rico and Brazil, wanted to preserve slavery while speaking of equality. It was the enslaved people themselves who challenged slaveholders’ hypocrisy and fought for their own emancipation.

“History is not about just facts. It’s all about competing narratives, and is very much about the present. If we think about what’s been happening in the United States recently with #blacklivesmatter, it’s very hard to separate it from the past,” she said.

On Oct. 5, in collaboration with the United Nations Remember Slavery Programme, Fordham hosted a moderated discussion of scholars, writers, and historians to honor and commemorate the lives of these enslaved black women.

The event, titled “Truth: Women, Creativity, and Memory of Slavery,” also examined the ways in which contemporary women artists address historical absences and give a voice to the unheard.

Opening the discussion before a capacity audience at the Fordham School of Law, Kimberly Mann, Chief of Education Outreach at the UN Department of Public Information, noted that women throughout the African diaspora used art “to express, endure, survive and liberate both themselves and their people.”

Yuko Miki, PhD, assistant professor of history at Fordham, explained that women’s resistance to slavery is often overlooked, however, as historical narratives focus on larger, more violent uprisings led by men.

“I would also like to recognize that women’s resistance often happens in much more subtle, everyday forms,” she said.

These forms were visible in a series of archival photographs presented by Deborah Willis, a photographer and the chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University.

Through images of enslaved women, runaway slaves, teachers, washerwomen and other workers, as well as famous figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, Willis showed that women were not merely the objects of photography, but played a role in constructing their own identities for the camera.

Nicole Fleetwood, associate professor of American studies at Rutgers University, explored a similar agency expressed in photographs of incarcerated black women today, who use the medium “as a mode of self-representation” and a way “to claim interior lives,” she said.

Puerto Rican writer Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro discussed the inspiration for her own book, Negras: Stories of Puerto Rican Slave Women” (2012).

“I decided that the visibility of slave women needs to be reclaimed by means of fiction. I took in hand the memory of all black women to make them visible and to bring out their contributions to humankind,” she said.

Other panelists included Gabriela Salgado, an African and Latin-American contemporary art curator based in London, who focused on the work of Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, and Iyunolu Osagie, associate professor of English at Pennsylvania State University.

Osagie summed up the evening’s sentiments concisely when she claimed, “Women have always been there. If you look for them you will find them.”

“Truth: Women, Creativity, and Memory of Slavery” was sponsored by the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, Department of African & African-American Studies, the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, the Department of History, and Fordham’s theatre program.

–Nina Heidig