News
Undergraduate Student Happenings
Study Abroad in Prague & Krakow, May 2010
Study Abroad in Istanbul, May 2010
Tony Novosel, History Department Undergraduate Adviser, took 10 University of Pittsburgh students to Northern Ireland for 14 days. There they met community workers, ex-prisoners, and ex-combatants from both sectarian communities, as well as journalists and academics. The trip is chronicled at http://www.flickr.com/ photos/26685303@N07. The Department has an undergraduate blog at http://historyadvising.spaces.live.com, and a Facebook site at "Department of History Majors".
Visions of Latin America, a peer-reviewed academic journal created and administered by students and members of the academic community at the University of Pittsburgh, gives students experience with the publishing process and publishes work by currently enrolled students about Latin America.
Graduate Student Happenings
Summer Research Fellowships and Activities, 2008
Kenyon Zimmer
"This summer the Hays Summer Research Grant enabled me to spend three weeks in Rome, where I did research in the Casellario Politico Centrale (Central Political Files), held at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Central State Archives). I looked through and digitally photographed the contents of dozens of surveillance files on Italian anarchists living in the United States, who the Italian monarchy and then Fascist regime considered threats and monitored thorugh their consular offices. These files provided invaluable information on the background and activities of individual anarchists, anarchist families, and entire anarchist communities, as well as the complex connections between radical individuals and groups both across the country and across the globe.”
Alejandra Boza
The Department of History awarded me with two Summer Research Fellowships in 2008, the C.Y. Hsu Summer Research Fellowship and the A&S Summer Fellowship. I used these funds to survey archival sources useful for my research in Rome, Italy, for two weeks. My PhD dissertation focuses on the interactions between nation-states, Catholic missionaries, and Indians during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I study two indigenous areas: Tierradentro in Colombia and Talamanca in Costa Rica. There the priests of the Congregation of the Mission carried out missionary work among the Indians for many decades. This Congregation has its headquarters and central archive in Rome, and it was at this archive that I worked for two weeks. This survey allowed me to identify and familiarize with sources that I will be using for my research, which will enable me to write a coherent and feasible doctoral overview, and will increase my chance of applying successfully to doctoral research grants.
Roland Clark
During the summer of 2008, I traveled to Hungary and Romania to attend a conference and spent two months carrying out research in government archives and libraries. Unfortunately, unexpected family obligations kept me from being able to attend a summer school program at CEU which I had received a tuition waiver for, and which I had been hoping to learn from.
I attended a interdisciplinary conference in Budapest, Hungary, on May 5-7, 2008, where I presented a paper entitled, “Printing a Pogrom: Violence and Print Communities in the Case of Captain Keller.” (See http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/hhv/vcce/vch7/cfp.html) The paper was received well, and in a reworked form will hopefully constitute part of a chapter of my PhD dissertation. The conference was organized by “Interdisciplinary.net,” and their publishing house will soon be releasing an ISBN e-book containing all of the papers from the conference. The interdisciplinary nature of the conference made it very stimulating, and I was able to discuss several aspects of my project with people who are working on similar topics in different times, places and fields.
Tasha Kimball
The summer fellowship funds were used to support pre-dissertation research on the history of unwanted pregnancy, abortion, infanticide, and child abandonment in Sucre, El Alto, and La Paz, Bolivia. This research focuses on uncovering the experiences of women with unwanted pregnancy through archival work and oral history between 1952 and 2000. The central archival sources for the project include medical records, cemetery records, and court documents, while the oral history component is comprised of interviews with women, medical professionals, traditional Andean healers, and government officials.
Suset L. Laboy Perez
In the summer of 2008, I received an A&S Fellowship for the amount of $2,2000. This grant contributed to defray the cost of traveling to the island of Puerto Rico to conduct preliminary research for my PhD dissertation. My PhD project will focus on juvenile delinquency and the rise of the juvenile justice system in the island of Puerto Rico from the period of 1898-1952. It intends to look at the role discourses on juvenile delinquency and the rise of the juvenile justice system played in the construction of a Puerto Rican subject. My summer research trip would help me determine the project’s feasibility and identify the collections I will be able to access in a future longer research trip.
I spent the months of May through August of 2008 doing research in the main archives in the capital city of San Juan. I visited the Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Centro de Investigaciones Históricas and Colección Puertorriqueña. I was also able to visit some smaller archives in San Juan such as the Archivo de la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. During the month of June, I traveled to the southern and western parts of the island to visit two local archives in the area. There, I perused the collections at the Archivo Municipal Histórico de Ponce, and Archivo Histórico de Mayaguez, two of the cities that housed the juvenile courts during the period I am studying. Through this research trip, I successfully identified various collections in each of the archives that will allow me to complete my dissertation. Finally, I established contact with two historians of Puerto Rico, Fernando Pico and Maritza Maymi-Hernandez. These two academics will provide invaluable help during a lengthier research trip. Overall, the support I received from the A&S Fellowship guaranteed my success during this research trip.