Abstract: In the 1930s and early 1940s, China was at war with Japan and China’s Nationalist government moved to Sichuan Province in the Southwest. An ideal location in many ways, Southwest China was also an ethnically diverse place, a crucible for the idea of a modern, unified Chinese nation held together by its constituents. The […]

Abstract: This dissertation examines a series of catalogues for Inuit art exhibitions held at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG), spanning from 1967 to 2017. I argue that the discursive conventions of settler-Canadian art appreciation, especially those geared towards Inuit creative production, have resonances with the political strategies that Canada uses to prove effective occupation—a term […]

Abstract: This project uses the framework of mobility to understand how settler colonialism functioned in a tri-racial southern borderland in the nineteenth-century. Nineteenth-century Florida constituted a borderland characterized by competition for land and resources among Seminole Indians, African Americans, and white Americans. White Americans regulated mobility, i.e. the physical movement of peoples, in order to […]

Abstract: Immigration detention and criminal deportation have both formed central concerns in a growing body of scholarship on the interrelationship between criminal and immigration law regimes: a field known as “crimmigration”. Given the integral role that “race” has played in social stratification, it is no surprise that as this field of research has developed, scholars […]

Abstract: Settler responsibility is a worldview grounded in profound relationships, exchanges, and solidarities between Indigenous and non-native communities. When put into practice, settler responsibility requires constant collaboration, articulation, and radical care to support a rich re-envisioning of peace and justice. Through a critique of white settler colonial discourse, I demonstrate that shared histories of US […]

Abstract: Our reconsideration of domesticity comes at a time when empire and colonial and postcolonial categories of analysis are informing many fields of historical study. This essay traces the historiographic origins of the intersection of domesticity and empire, focusing on domesticity’s usefulness as a window on cross-cultural intimacy and conflict. It also offers an example […]

Abstract: The placement of Indigenous girls and young women in white homes to work as servants was a key strategy of official policy and practice in both the United States and Australia. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, under the outing programs in the U.S. and various apprenticeship and indenturing schemes in Australia, […]

Abstract: This dissertation explores representations of the captivity narrative of Cynthia Ann Parker, an Anglo woman captured as a child by Comanche, with whom she lived in a kinship relationship until her forced return to Anglo society twenty-four years later. The project draws upon trauma theory to explain the persistent appeal of Parker’s narrative. Interpretations […]

Abstract: Billions of people around the globe are well-acquainted with SpongeBob Squarepants and the antics of the title character and his friends on Bikini Bottom. By the same token, there is an absence of public discourse about the whitewashing of violent American military activities through SpongeBob’s occupation and reclaiming of the bottom of Bikini Atoll’s lagoon. SpongeBob Squarepants […]

Abstract: Focusing on punishment and imprisonment across three time periods, this essay explores the two-pronged attack on Palestinian politics that has characterized the settler-colonial project in Palestine over the past one hundred years. This double move entails an attempt to deny or destroy Palestinian political community, while simultaneously identifying Palestinians as political actors, specifically as […]