Our faculty and graduate students are digging into their research this summer (and at least one is literally digging). We asked our resident historians about what they're working on and where in the world it's taking them.
Pablo Sierra Silva, Associate Professor - Aix-en-Provence and Paris, France; and Mexico City, Mexico
"This summer I will be conducting research at the Archives Nationales d'Outre-mer in Aix-en-Provence, France. I will also spend some time in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, searching for references to pirates and their captives in seventeenth-century documents. Later on, I will shift my research to the other side of the Atlantic. In Mexico City, I will study the manuscript records of the Archivo General de la Nación and the Biblioteca Nacional de México. All this is for my ongoing book project on the 1683 raid on Veracruz."
Dan Gorman, Jr., PhD candidate - Rochester, NY
"I will be here in Rochester, turning the second half of my dissertation outline into proper pages, so my research will largely consist of archival PDFs about Spiritualism from Harvard University and U. Mass Amherst."
Daniel McDermott, PhD student - Magedeburg and Neubrandenburg, Germany
"My research this summer is taking me to Magdeburg and Neubrandenburg, both former East German cities to begin my dissertation research investigating the environmental history of the Harz Mountains. During this trip, I will be visiting a state archive, a research institute, and meeting with staff from the Harz National Park. These visits will help me begin my project by examining post-WWII archival records from the Soviet-occupied forces as the Soviet administrated and managed German forests in the Harz Mountains and tracing roots of conservation efforts in the region beginning with hiking clubs in the 1910s until the establishment of the Harz National Park in 1990."
Jean Pedersen, Associate Professor of History - Rochester, NY
"My research this summer is keeping me in my study, where I am working to finish the manuscript of my current book, The Gender of Truth: Men and Women as Public Intellectuals in France. There are chapters about the public debates around women’s labor issues, marriage and divorce, the sexual double standard, and – the one I am finishing up now – women’s fight for the right to vote."
Michael Jarvis, Associate Professor of History - Smith's Island, Bermuda
"I am very excited to be restarting my archaeological excavations on Smith’s Island, Bermuda, after a COVID-induced suspension of work. A UR Pump Primer II grant made it possible to undertake the first ground-penetrating radar survey in Bermuda in April, which revealed incredibly high-resolution identification of buried historical sites at five locations. In July and August, I will be leading a team of 15 archaeology students from UR and other universities to uncover evidence of the colony’s first town, dating to 1612. Near contemporary with Jamestown, Virginia, this internationally important site will provide a window into England’s first attempts to colonize America and expand globally. Excavating sites and teaching archaeology in the field is my 'happy place' and I am so fortunate that UR funding and the relaxation of COVID travel restrictions has enabled field research to resume."
Laura Ackerman Smoller, Professor of History - Rochester, NY, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland
"My research this summer will consist of writing a chapter on astrology and apocalyptic predictions, and of finishing revisions on two book chapters based on talks about my work with Wolfgang Aytinger’s commentary on the Revelations of pseudo-Methodius, an important medieval prophetic text. I’m planning a research trip to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in September, to look at manuscripts related to my NEH-funded book project, tentatively titled Astrology and the Sibyls: Routes to Religious Truth in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. (But I am just back from a real vacation in Spain.)"
Joan Rubin, Dexter Perkins Professor in History - Rochester, NY
"I will be carrying out my research on the intersection of print and musical cultures in modern America from home, but I have piles of documents to read about the concerts at Lewisohn Stadium in New York City from just after World War I to the mid-1960s. If any of our older alums remember going to those concerts as children and have memories to share, I hope that they will contact me. I will be traveling to the Library of Congress to work on this project in the fall."
Thomas Slaughter, Arthur R. Miller Professor of History - Rochester, NY
"I am at home writing The Sewards in Peace and at War: A Family Biography, having written an Introduction and five chapter drafts since mid-December. I hope to write another chapter this summer and the rest of the book over the coming year. Next summer, I hope to begin writing Founding Grandfather: Thomas Jefferson in Retirement. I am also editing transcriptions and annotations of nineteenth-century family correspondence that students and volunteers have completed over the past six months for our digital humanities project (sewardproject.org), which we will complete by the end of 2022."
Jeff Baron, PhD candidate - Seville, Spain
"I will be doing archival research in the General Archive of the Indies, housed in a beautiful sixteenth-century palace in Seville, Spain. This archive holds colonial records from all across Latin America, and I will be looking at treasure-hunting and grave-robbing excavation licenses and legal documents from Peru, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic."
Stewart Weaver, Professor of History, and Tanya Bakhmetyeva, Associate Professor of Instruction in History - France and Switzerland
"We are collaborating on a new project on the cultural history of glaciers. Together with colleagues in Switzerland, we have joined an international project on climate change and glacial history in the Central Asian Pamirs. We will be travelling this summer to France and Switzerland to meet with colleagues and visit historically significant alpine glaciers."