U.S. Intellectual History Blog

New Year, New Voices

Welcome to a new year, #USIH friends! We’re kicking off a new series of spring conference sessions with a FREE plenary showcasing our Henry F. May Fund Fellows. Join us on Tuesday, 18 January 2022, at 7pm EST for a dialogue about the practice of U.S. intellectual history and the methodologies we use (and recreate) along the way. We will explore how these historians draw on oral history, choreographers’ notes, material culture, and more to reframe the past. How do archives present opportunities and limits? What are the challenges that scholars have faced in researching topics that range from the colonial era to now, and how can we make connections across the centuries as scholars?

Learn about the USIH-supported scholarship of our May Fund Fellows, below. Then, join the conversation at our special plenary, “New Voices in U.S. Intellectual History.” Pssst, GRADUATE STUDENTS, stay tuned for our next call for proposals coming this spring. Ideas welcome!

Yasmin Dualeh, University of Cambridge: Yasmin Dualeh is a Ph.D. student in 20th Century U.S. history at the University of Cambridge. Her dissertation explores the political thought of Arab diasporic intellectuals in the US from the First World War through to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. She is primarily interested in their anticolonial/anti-imperial thought, their writings on race, their attempts to influence and critique US foreign policy, and finally their visions of Arab modernity, subjectivity and liberation.

Bobby Cervantes, University of Kansas: Bobby Cervantes is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at the University of Kansas, where he is a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow and the Jefferson Scholars Foundation’s Birdsall National Fellow. His interdisciplinary work explores the transnational nature of racial capitalism, migration, and profit in the contemporary Americas. His dissertation is the first comprehensive history of the thousands of rural and largely unincorporated Texas communities (las colonias) in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where today more than a half-million people live in one of the greatest concentrations of American poverty.

Emily Hawk, Columbia University: Emily Hawk is a Ph.D. candidate in United States history (ABD) at Columbia University who studies mid-20th century modern dance and intellectual history. She earned an M.A. in dance history at the University of Roehampton in London, UK and a B.A. in history and dance from Franklin & Marshall College. Her work has been published by the Journal of American Culture and the Gotham Center for New York City History.

Alison Russell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst: Alison Russell is a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst whose research includes fields of intellectual history, gender studies, indigenous studies and public history in early U.S. history and the Atlantic World. Her dissertation focuses on the ways in which legal documents, particularly the U.S. Constitution, contribute to dialogue about and the formation of a shared national identity in the Early Republic. This current project examines how written constitutionalism impacts gender spheres and national identity in the Cherokee Nation during the same period, particularly in the context of U.S. intellectual and cultural imperialism.