-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

 I have studied at the University of Connecticut since 2005, first as an undergraduate and presently as a PhD. Candidate in the History Department. My dissertation research has brought me to archives all around southern New England, and my work has been supported by the Graduate School of the University of Connecticut, the Massachusetts Historical Society and, currently, the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

At present, I am writing my dissertation, which is entitled: Watershed Decisions: The Environmental History of Boston’s Quabbin Reservoir, 1880-1940. My project studies the expansion of the Boston metropolitan waterworks and the building of the largest reservoir in the northeastern United States. To create this artificial lake, the state of Massachusetts decided to eliminate four towns and expel over 2,000 people from their homes in the Swift River Valley. The dissertation tells the human story of these valley residents building their communities during the late-nineteenth century, grappling with the threat of eviction during the 1920s, and memorializing their former towns after construction was complete. To this I add the environmental story of a landscape transformed, first by rural farmers and mill owners and then by engineers tasked with permanently altering the valley to satisfy Boston’s ever-growing demand for water.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

I arrived at this subject a few years ago, after my advisor, Robert Gross, gave me an overview of this curious story. He had heard the popular retelling of the building of the Quabbin Reservoir while living in western Massachusetts during the 1970s, and he wondered if an academic study of this event would make for a suitable dissertation. After a preliminary investigation, I found that my work could add to the ongoing academic conversations about the meaning of rural land use, urbanization, conservation, and scientific land management during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. When environmental historians consider the meaning of conservation and displacement, they usually tell stories about the development of the American West, such as the decline of the bison or the eviction of Native Americans from federal lands. Opposing visions of how humans should relate to their environments are typically found at the heart of these dramatic episodes. Yet, my historical evidence suggests that implementing conservationist policies and scientific land management schemes played out differently in rural Massachusetts. Here protestors used conservationist logic to defend their claims to the land, suggesting that these natural resources belonged to the people of the valley and that Boston was mismanaging its own water supply. When this complaint of waste and inefficiency proved unfounded, the residents of the Swift River Valley acquiesced to the logic that their sacrifice would serve the greater good of the Commonwealth state. The environmental thought of people in this rural section of Massachusetts had much more in common with that of Boston’s urban planners than the available academic literature allows.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

The story of the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir is one of broad interest in Massachusetts. Several novels, children’s books, and local histories have been written on the subject, and the newspapers and magazines in the state have rediscovered this human and environmental drama every two or three years since construction began during the 1930s. In western Massachusetts, where Daniel Shays raised his insurrection at the dawn of the American republic, this story of Boston “abusing” and “dispossessing” the people of the rural Swift River Valley looms especially large in the popular imagination. I hope that my thorough and rigorously researched study can give the people of Massachusetts an historically accurate and well-written account of this event. People living outside of this region might look to my study for insights into the meaning of rural life at the turn of the century and the human and environmental change brought about by the growth of cities during the twentieth century.

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

Trained as a specialist in twentieth century history and race, I am interested in examining the intersection of social, legal, and political history, African American and Chicano/a history, and the study of civil rights and social justice. I received my PhD in 2009 and my dissertation won the University of Maryland’s EB and Jean Smith award for best dissertation in political history. Previously, I was the public historian for the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, where I organized a large conference on Black Power. I am currently an assistant professor in the Department of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) where I am completing revisions on my book manuscript, Civil Rights on the Cell Block: Prisoners’ Rights Movements and the Construction of Carceral States (UNC, Chapel Hill). I am also presently co-editing an anthology entitled Sunbelt Prisons and Carceral States: New Histories of Immigration Detention/Deportation, Incarceration, and Resistance (UNC, Chapel Hill).

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

My forthcoming manuscript, Civil Rights on the Cell Block: The Prisoners’ Rights Movement and the Construction of Carceral States (UNC, Chapel Hill), addresses the contemporary crisis over criminal justice reform by posing three historical questions: 1) how did the United States come to have the world’s largest carceral state; 2) what have been the sources of resistance to America’s carceral state in the post-civil rights era (1965 to present); 3) what is the political relationship between the two?

My book will be the first study of the southern prisoners’ rights movements of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s and the subsequent construction of what many historians now call the era of mass incarceration. This project is therefore a regional study of civil rights cases across the American South, but the book’s narrative is centered on the social movement that resulted in the landmark case Ruiz v. Estelle, which was a massive omnibus lawsuit that demanded that Texas outlaw the practice of having inmates act as openly armed guards. This southern trustee/guard system was a hierarchical racial regime that constituted a vicious sex trade in which convict guards were given the tacit approval from the prison administration to use their power to rape other inmates and engage in the buying and selling of inmate bodies as a sexual commodity that signified cultural standing and societal power. As a regional model, the Ruiz case inspired prisoners across the South to wage a historically mindful public campaign for visibility that sought to convince the courts and the wider public that southern prisoners suffered terrible abuses as twentieth century “slaves of the state.”

My manuscript shows that this inmate civil rights rebellion, while successfully ending the existing system, failed to make conditions in Texas prisons more humane. As a result, the new Texas prison regime — one that utilized paramilitary practices, promoted privatized prisons, endorsed massive prison building programs and tolerated gang-related warfare — established a new prison system that reaffirmed its law and order focus while sublimating the legal and human rights of prisons. This new “Sunbelt” carceral approach, I conclude, became exemplary of national prison trends.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

When I started this research in the early 2000s, there were relatively few historical studies of twentieth-century prisons and almost none of the prisoners’ rights movement. Despite the development of a “long civil rights movement” historiography, I found that the literature simply did not discuss the ways in which what we now call mass incarceration has turned the gains of the civil rights revolution into another age of racial disparity.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

First, historians need to explain how and why the vast expansion of state power as expressed in the massive prison buildup of the 1980s and 1990s occurred without much public debate. Conservative backlash theories have provided one such explanation, but locating the growth of the prison simply in reactionary “law and order” politics fails to adequately explain how it is that the places where the prisoners’ rights movement scored the most victories, namely the South and Sunbelt states, have come to dominate the major trends of the modern-day carceral state. The question of legal success for prisoners’ rights in the South, on the one hand, and yet nearly simultaneous massive prison build-up in Sunbelt states, on the other, is a major historical problem that my forthcoming book will address.

Second, the history of resistance to carceral states reveals that regional, state, and local histories are integral to the shape of mass incarceration. By demonstrating how a variety of prisoners’ rights movement resisted mass incarceration, I make the argument that regional histories and different state prison practices constructed not a single carceral state but a variety of carceral states across the American prison landscape.

When activists, policy makers, and reformers attempt to curb mass incarceration, they must seek redress not only at the federal level through national legislation but perhaps more importantly they must encounter the ways in which policing and mass incarceration are governed at the local and state level where the American state is indeed strong. One suggestion that my forthcoming book offer is that social justice movements against mass incarceration should continue to focus as much attention on changes in local and state government as the civil rights movement once did when it sought civil rights as a matter of national and federal intervention. To dismantle this encompassing thicket, we must utilize the spade of history to reveal just how deep we must cut to reach the roots of intertwining carceral states.

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-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a PhD candidate in Italian Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut, and a dissertation fellow at UCHI. I received my MA in Italian from UConn and my BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures, with a major in American Studies and a minor in German, from the University of Florence, Italy.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am currently writing my PhD dissertation entitled The Sale of Parga in 19^th Century Italian Imagery:1815-1856. In my dissertation, I examine the impact of an episode of the Greek War of Independence – the sale of the Greek city of Parga to the Ottoman Turks by the English government in 1819 – on the cultural work of Romantic Italian intellectuals and artists. I place the sale of Parga at the intersection of cultural, political, and historical discourses, and argue that this minor historical event is a prism to chart the major leading forces, tensions, and ideas that coalesced in the formation of Italian cultural nationalism. With this research project, I intend to extend the boundaries of the Italian national movement – also known as Risorgimento – to another national cause (the Greek one) and, by implication, to the larger European geo-political and geo-cultural space, thus shedding light on the transnational aspects of 19^th century Italian nationalist culture.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

The idea of this project is a shared effort between my advisor, Professor Norma Bouchard, and myself. We were discussing possible topics for my dissertation and I expressed my desire to work on 19^th century Italian literature. She suggested that I start by studying what has been defined as “the new historiography of the Risorgimento,” which has re-conceptualized the Italian national movement in transnational terms. The concept of transnationalism fascinated me, and I found particularly stimulating the idea of applying a new theoretical perspective to a topic that, at least in Italy, has been canonized as a foundational moment in the formation of the Italian nation and national identity. We identified in the cession of Parga a case study to analyze Risorgimento literature from this new perspective, thus contributing to the on-going research in this field.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

My hopes for this research are to reach scholars of the Risorgimento both in Europe and the US, who are engaged in questions of nations and national identity, Mediterranean studies, transnationalism, and their intersection with personal and collective emotional concerns. The Italian Risorgimento will continue to stimulate a remarkable critical dialogue among scholars, for its peculiar intersection of a number of fields of research relevant to the humanities, such as history, politics, literature, visual arts, social sciences, ethics, and religion. This research project, in particular, due to its interdisciplinary nature that calls forth the core of the humanities and discusses some universal principles, such as nationality, freedom, and political hospitality, could represent a case study to further investigate the development of a Mediterranean identity in the modern era. This issue is particularly relevant to contemporary Italy – and Europe – due to the massive waves of migrants reaching the shores of Italy every day. As a consequence of this phenomenon, contemporary Italy is struggling to redefine and rethink that concept of Italianness created by the intellectuals who promoted the national movement at the beginning of the 19th century.

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Connecticut and a dissertation fellow at UCHI. I received my masters in English from UConn and my bachelor’s degree in English at Southern Connecticut State University.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

I am writing a dissertation titled “The Return of Dagon: Failed Iconoclasm in Early Modern English Literature.” The dissertation explores the intersection between English Renaissance literature and the iconoclastic movements of the post-Reformation period. It argues that early modern writers were often interested in the ways in which idolatrous artifacts might survive, resist, or even undermine the actions and intentions of their assailants. I maintain that this archive of failed iconoclasm calls into question theories of disenchantment applied to the Reformation. Iconoclasm, I show, ironically provoked a broad cultural interest in the agency of material artifacts.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

During my reading of English literature and polemical pamphlets, I became increasingly interested in the deep-seated fear among radical Protestants about the dangers of idolatry. Why were these radicals so fearful of idolatry, if, as they claimed, idolatrous objects and images were merely “dumb,” lifeless, or inert?

My interest is probably also driven by my Roman Catholic upbringing. Having once been an altar boy, I had close proximity to the kinds of ritual artifacts—incense, candles, bells, liturgical vestments, crucifixes, stained glass windows—that radical Puritans of the early modern period would find abominable.

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

Public discourse surrounding iconoclasm typically presents it as absolute loss: We deplore iconoclasm because it violently erases our access to the past. My dissertation shows that early modern people often thought about iconoclastic incidents much differently. They did not automatically equate iconoclasm with erasure. Rather, they were often attentive to how certain artifacts might survive or resist the process, thus calling the efficacy of iconoclasm into question. Iconoclasm, in other words, elevated early modern interest in the capacity of material artifacts to transform human actions and intentions. In the twenty-first century, our closest analogue to this might be our increasing recognition of how digital technologies transform our consciousness and behaviors in ways we cannot fully control for.

-What is your academic background and what is your current position in UCHI/at UConn/Your Home Institution?

I’m Leo Garofalo and I am associate professor of history at Connecticut College, and I teach Latin American history. My research is on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for not only colonial Latin America, in particular the Andes, but also the African Diaspora, particularly how it touches Europe and how it connects Europe to Africa and the Americas.

-What is the project you’re currently working on?

At the Humanities Institute, I have the great privilege of working on a book project that I’ve been doing research for for a couple of years now, and it’s on Afro-Iberian, that is Black no comma European slaves, sailors, soldiers, freed people, travelers who traveled back and forth between Europe and the Americas, particularly Portugal and Spain which had a large African-descent population. They had, by the begining of the sixteenth century, achieved the status of sailors, soldiers, slaves, artisans, domestics, and traders, and had a big presence in terms of participation in the colonization of the Americas carried out by the Portuguese and the Spanish. In fact, up until 1700, more people from Africa and of African descent arrived in the Americas than they did from Portugal and Spain. So, Black Europeans are a small group within that larger African diaspora–it’s a chapter that’s not as well know. So my book is trying to elucidate the importance of the position of these Black Europeans within the colonial and colonizing enterprise.

-How did you arrive at this topic?

This project began in many ways as a question that emerged when I was working in the archives in Peru, looking at how different groups of Europeans, different indigenous groups of many ethnicities, and West and Central Africans came together in large cities such as Lima, cities that were markets, that were colonial creations that had never existed in this format before with large resident populations with fish markets and taverns and breweries and so forth. My goal was to set out to understand who did this kind of work and how were they able to negotiate it when you had different groups coming together. Among the people who appear as very dynamic cultural mediators and people skilled at crossing different cultural zones and bringing together different practices were people of African descent who originated in Portugal and Spain. And so I was wondering, who are these Black Europeans, these people of African descent who appear to be playing such an important roll in daily life within the Americas in this formative colonial period? And so, once I finished that project, my goal was to try to trace these people back to Europe, to try to understand who they were, where they came from, what neighborhoods they lived in, how they made it to the Americas, and did they retain those connections once they got there?

-What impact might your work have on a larger public understanding of your topic?

Once of the things we’re learning when we look more closely at African diaspora is not only the tremendous impact of people coming directly from Africa, but also the impact of people who are traveling through Europe and acquiring a knowledge of Portuguese and Spanish ways whether that’s language or Christianity, ways to carry out different artisan practices. They are becoming then, in a sense, settlers and colonists, whether they are enslaved or free, whether they are forced migrants or people who are volunteers, like soldiers, sailors, and traders on these ships. They are coming to the Americas in this very formative time, and they are coming over at a time that is much earlier than when we usually think of as being the important period for Africans in reshaping the Caribbean and Brazil. We usually think that happens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the emergence of the sugar complex. At that period of time, we’re well aware that Africans are playing a very important role. What we’re finding with this kind of research is that they also play a very important role in shaping and cementing Spanish colonialism in the Americas, where they are fully half of the migrant communities in these urban areas. And this happens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.