RIAS International PhD Seminar (Fall 2024 Edition) – Report
From Wednesday, November 27, until Friday, November 29, the fall edition of our biannual International PhD Seminar took place. After the participants arrived at their hotel, they were welcomed in Middelburg with a dinner on Wednesday evening. The program on Thursday morning started with the first session on Women’s Struggles For Rights and Representation, chaired by Jeanine Quené (RIAS). During this session, PhD candidates Jeanne Baudon, Hend Ayari, and Natascha Kröcker presented their research on women’s activism for political rights during the American Revolution, decolonizing Indigenous Americans’ literary trauma, and the picturing of American First Ladies on magazine covers, respectively.
After lunch at the RIAS and a Middelburg city tour, the second session on US Power and Imperial Networks took place. During this session, chaired by Olivier Burtin (Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens), Fritz Kusch discussed with us his dissertation on the rise of protectionism in the 1880s, followed by Jelle Bruinsma’s presentation on his PhD project on U.S. Dollar Diplomacy between 1898 and 1915, after which the session was concluded with a discussion of Tiphaine Calcoen’s topic of Psychedelic Spirituality and the Native American Church. The second day of the seminar ended with a joint dinner at La Piccola Italia.
The third and final session on Friday morning, chaired by Damian Pargas (RIAS/Leiden University), featured discussions of the research themes of Pearce Magee and Mara Fiorentini, focusing on anti-lynching campaigns in the early twentieth century and transnational black power between 1969 and 1977, respectively. Hereafter, an open discussion was held with Damian Pargas about publishing during your PhD. This edition of the International PhD Seminar concluded with a tour of the RIAS and a lunch.
The RIAS would like to thank all the participants and session chairs for this successful PhD Seminar. We wish the PhD candidates the best of luck with their research and look forward to the next edition of the seminar, which will take place in June 2025!
The following is a full list of all participants and their PhD research topics:
- Jeanne Baudon (University of Paris 7 Vincennes – Saint-Denis) Women’s Struggle for Political Rights during the American Revolution: A Missed Turning Point? (1776-1807)
- Hend Ayari (University of Debrecen) “Tribalographic” Acts: Methodolog(ies) for Decolonizing Literary Trauma and Indigenizing Healing
- Natascha Kröcker (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz) Picturing Power: A Cultural History of the American First Lady on Magazine Covers, 1933-2024
- Fritz Kusch (University of Bremen) Preparing the Great Debate: The Rise of Popularist Protectionism in the 1880s
- Jelle Bruinsma (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) From Manifest to Managed Destiny: Charles Conant’s Ideological Underpinnings of U.S. Dollar Diplomacy, 1898-1915
- Tiphaine Calcoen (Université Bordeaux Montaigne) The Sixties Counterculture and the Peyote Religion: Psychedelic Spirituality and the Native American Church
- Pearce Magee (Queen’s University Belfast) Anti-lynching Campaigns: Popular Support, Opposition, and the Historic Failure of the U.S. Government to Enact Legislation to Curb Lynching
- Mara Fiorentini (University of Rome Tor Vergata)Transnational Black Power: Gendered Struggles and Ethno-Identitarian Mobilization
A link to the full program can be found here.
