2019: A Year of Students
Compiled by: Carla Joubert
Welcome to Day 2 of A Year in a Week. This week we will explore the SHCY’s first full year of content since shifting to our new website in the winter of 2018. On Day 2 we look back at the PhD students who have placed childhood and youth history at the centre of their dissertations.
We received a range of submissions, including scholars from across North America, and whose topics span the globe. We are so impressed by these scholars and are excited to continue to highlight early-stage historians in 2020.
Each student's name is hyperlinked to the original post - click and explore!
Lisa Rose Lamson
Our first student feature of 2019 was Lisa Rose Lamson, a PhD candidate in American History at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Lisa works under the supervision of Dr. James Marten, a former editor for the JHCY. Our feature of Lisa included an exploration of her research into Baltimore City’s educational system in the nineteenth century.
Publications
“Al Jarreau,” “Curling,” “Hockey,” “Les Paul,” “Liberace,” “Parades,” and “Performance Venues.” Encyclopedia of Milwaukee History, eds. Amanda Seligman and Margo Anderson.
Review of Andrew K. Diemer, The Politics of Black Citizenship: Free African Americans in the Mid-Atlantic Borderland, 1817-1863. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Maryland Historical Magazine Fall/Winter 2017.
Presentations
"'Great good may proceed from the education of these poor colored children:' the Mobility of African American Boarding School Students, 1850-1880.” June 21-23, 2018 Children's History Society Biennial Conference, University of Greenwich.
"'A good many other people assisted:' The Oblate Sisters of Providence” panel entitled, History and Heritage: Historic Black Communities III. April 25th, 2018 Institute for African American Research and NC Growth: Black Communities, a Conference for Collaboration, Durham, NC.
"'A good many other people assisted’: The Oblate Sisters of Providence, Community Networks, and Saint Dominique Emigrés” panel entitled, Reframing the Family. October 5, 2017.
Edgar Liao
Edgar, our second student feature of 2019, is based at the University of British Columbia in their History Department and a recipient of the Vanier Graduate Scholarship. In addition to a captivating interview, Edgar wrote about his research contextualised institutions and discourses of youth within the variant processes of politics, decolonization, post-colonial nation building and the Cold War in Singapore.
Publications 
Loh Kah Seng, Edgar Liao, Lim Cheng Tju and Seng Guoquan. Tangled Strands of Modernity: The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya. Netherlands; Singapore: Amsterdam University Press; National University of Singapore Press 2012.
Liao, Edgar. “Other Kinds of Amnesia – Young Singaporeans and the Internet” in William Lim, Sharon Siddique and Tan Dan Feng (eds), Singapore Shifting Boundaries: Social Change in the Early 21st Century. Singapore: Asia Urban Lab 2011.
Leanna Duncan
Leanna Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in US disability and children’s history. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “Changing Bodies and Minds: The Experiences of ‘Crippled Children,’ 1890-1960.”
Leanna’s work seeks to centre the voices of ‘crippled children’ in the United States in the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century.
Many thanks to Leanna for designing a thoughtful paper and presentation for her student feature submission. In addition to a video presentation to accompany her post, Leanna took the time and effort to provide us with a video transcript and image description, in order to increase the accessibility of her submission.
You can read Leanna’s blog at Lesson Spotted.
Yukako Otori
Our third student feature of 2019 was Yukako Otori, a PhD candidate in the History Department at Harvard University. Yukako studies the intersection of childhood, Christianity, and human rights, with a geographic and chronological emphasis on the modern United States. Her dissertation title is “Disposable Subjects: Child Migration, International Law, and U.S. Immigration Policy, 1900s-1920s.”
Selected Publications
“Faith-Based Relief and Postwar U.S. Foreign Policy: Quäkerspeisung as a Case Study,” Pacific and American Studies 12 (March 2012): 97-113.
“Jizen [Philanthropy,]” in Amerika bunka jiten [Encyclopedia of American Culture], edited by the Japanese Association for American Studies. Tokyo: Maruzen, 2018.
Selected Presentations
“Disposable Subjects Child Migration, International Law, and U.S. Immigration Policy, 1900s-1920,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities Graduate Student Workshop, Georgetown University Law School, Washington DC (March 2018).
“Child Labor and Post-WWI Humanitarianism,” The Conference of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, Rutgers University of New Jersey, Camden (June 2017).
Tugce Kayaal
Our fourth and final student feature of 2019 was Tugce Kayaal. Tugce is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in the Middle East Studies Department, and the Turkish and Armenian Studies Programs. She is also completing the Women’s Studies Certificate Program. Tugce researches war orphans and youth sexuality in the late Ottoman Empire, 1912-1923.
Tugce’s post included insight into her archival research experiences in Istanbul, the archival research process, and the moral complexities of historical research into sensitive research areas. She taught us about the often harrowing experiences of orphaned children in the late Ottoman Empire and the state’s management of their maturation into adulthood.
We look forward to Tugce’s future publications.
Thank-you so much to all of these accomplished PhD candidates for their submissions to the SHCY. If you are interested in being a featured student on our website, please e-mail us at shcyhome@gmail.com or review our Student Feature CFP. We’d love to hear from you.
About Carla Joubert
Carla Joubert is a PhD Candidate at the University of Western Ontario. This is her third year as the Digital Fellow for the SHCY. She is also a digital research assistant for London's Hear, Here public history coordinators. Her research is centred on the role of white women in the settler colonization of the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and Alberta in the nineteenth century as comparative case studies. You can follow her on Twitter. She has presented at the European Conference on African Studies on the relationship between Groot Trek leader Louis Trichardt, his trek party, and the Dzanani Venda in the Transvaal region. That presentation will be included in a workshop at Africa 2020, celebrating 60 years of independence for 17 countries on the African continent at the University of Leiden, which is slated for publication. She has also submitted an article to the South African Historical Journal, "'Tradition Falsifies': The Mfecane and the Groot Trek as Settler Colonial Origin Myths in South Africa." In 2020 she will present “Hunting on the Frontier: The Relationship between Gendered Roles and the Environment in Percy Fitzpatrick's Jock of the Bushveld” in a workshop that she organized for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. She will also present on "The Women of Wetaskiwin: Gender and Empire in Wetaskiwin, Alberta from 1892-1905" at the Canadian Historical Association Annual Meeting.
