Hats off to all the wonderful new talent in U.S. intellectual history! We had an impressive slate of contenders for our reimagined Henry F. May Fund awards this year. So. Many. Great. Projects. Our deepest thanks to all the scholars who applied, and we encourage you to do so again when the next cycle opens in spring 2024. Here’s a sneak preview of our May Fund fellows’ scholarship-in-progress. Happy researching!
Cam Cannon (George Washington University), “Standard: Making Trans Medical in the United States”: My dissertation is an intellectual and social history of the Standards of Care for the Hormonal and Surgical Sex Reassignment of Gender Dysphoric Persons (SOC), the first and still most widely-cited set of diagnostic criteria and treatment protocols for individuals seeking medical gender transition in the U.S. From its initial publication in 1979 to its eighth revision released in 2022, the SOC has been called upon by a remarkable range of institutions to delineate the parameters of “true” medical transgender status and appropriate treatment protocols for those seeking medical gender transition—from the rights of prisoners to continue hormonal replacement therapy while incarcerated, to the legal obligation of state-provided medical services to facilitate genital gender-affirming surgery, and the question of whether state agencies should allow adults to the change the gender marker on their birth certificates. At stake at each of these legal and institutional crossroads, I argue, has been not only the particularities of transness as a medical diagnosis, but also the meaning of such divisive concepts as sex, gender, identity, and citizenship. In my dissertation, I situate the major revisions of the SOC—in 1979, 1990, 1998, 2005, 2012, and 2022, respectively—as both microcosm and fulcrum in the ongoing intellectual, political, and cultural debate regarding these topics in recent U.S. history.
Ray Dinsmore (University of New Hampshire), “Black Athens: Everyday Intellectuals Redefining the Civil Rights Movement in Boston, 1920-1985”: “Black Athens” is an intellectual history of the long civil rights movement in Boston, Massachusetts from 1920-1980 that interrogates the entangled relationships between intellectuals, ideas, and institutions in freedom struggles. It tentatively argues that knowledge production, dissemination, and safeguarding are emancipatory mechanisms in black freedom struggles that have been under-analyzed due to a devaluation of black intellectual history. The intellectuals in this project are organic and counterhegemonic. They have diverse backgrounds across categories of class, ethnicity, gender, age, and occupation. By adopting an eclectic approach to who can be considered an intellectual and what thought is intellectual, this dissertation aims to open new lines of inquiry for intellectual history and the history of the civil rights movement. This argument will be explored over six chapters set in Boston from 1920-1980 as I cover the racial upheaval that captured the city. The chapters will flow chronologically, and each will give a profile of an understudied intellectual as they grapple with a major issue facing the black community in Boston. Ultimately, this work argues for the reaffirmation of intellectual history in studies of the civil rights movement as equally important to the cultural, social, and political histories that dominate the field.
Holly Taylor (University of Colorado, Boulder): Where the dusty plains rise to meet the Rocky Mountains, eighteenth-century empires clashed. The Spanish and French empires simultaneously guarded their lands, attempted expansion, and extended their influence. The differences between the French and Spanish colonial governance predicted conflict, and the lack of consistent communication with the metropole ensured it. Political self-determination, borne out of cultural and social independence from the metropole, helped hasten the end of these empires. I study how rebellion, inspired by isolation from the cultural center of the empire, influenced the eventual removal of European power from the American Southwest. My hope is to help erase geographical boundaries in American colonial studies by focusing on the influence of ideas on self-determination and independence, as well as exploring the influence of Enlightenment thinking on rebellion, and vice-versa. As part of the fellowship, I will visit the University of New Mexico Center for Southwest Research in Albuquerque to study files from the Archivo General de Indias and the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library at New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe. I will purchase selected books to help further my historiographical knowledge of the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Revolutions, and the American Southwest in the mid-eighteenth century.
Janna Haider (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Legal Legibilities of the Ghadar Party: Aspirations towards American Whiteness and Indian Independence in the Early 20th Century”: In the early 20th century US, the Ghadar Party evolved from a small labor union to an internationally implicated collective of revolutionaries opposed to British imperial rule in the Indian subcontinent. As the Party grew, their vision and methods evolved in a notable way that bears further research. More widely studied is Ghadar’s Communist anti-white supremacy framework, both in terms of the British colonial presence in India and the oppressive racial order of the US. Less well-known is Ghadar’s movement through the US legal system. Here, they argued that South Asians were, if not white, still deserving of an elevated position in the US racial hierarchy. This conflicted directly with the rhetoric about anti-colonial struggle which dominated their public-facing activities. Ghadar’s conflicting goals and ideals further complicated their interactions with the US state and the home rule movement in India. I argue that the Ghadar Party adopted this legal strategy in the hopes that recognition as white in the US would bolster their claims to the right of self-governance and independence in India. Litigation reveals Party members’ aspiration for whiteness and legal recognition as US citizens. This project will investigate the reasons for that difference and the goals behind the seemingly opposing strategies by studying the US Supreme Court case US v. Thind and the denaturalizations of South Asians that followed it; the first Lahore Conspiracy Trial in which Ghadarites were charged in a mutiny against the British Army in India; and the perceived alignment between a high-class, high caste position in British India, and whiteness in the United States.
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