Congratulations to doctoral candidate Georgia Brunner on being awarded a Fulbright to support her dissertation fieldwork in Rwanda. Brunner’s project is titled “Building a Nation: Gender, Colonialism, and the Struggle for a National Identity.” Her adviser is Dr. Clifton Crais, Professor of History. Read an abstract of Brunner’s project, as well as her plan of research and service activities for the year ahead, below.

At the intersection of gender studies, the history of empire, and the history of labor, this project elucidates the ways in which gender informed divergent nationalisms in late colonial and early postcolonial Rwanda. As migratory Rwandan men looked on from neighboring Uganda and Tanzania, women still in Rwanda were left with colonial forced labor obligations, building infrastructure and commercial coffee farms. Both conservative men abroad and liberal women at home thought of forced labor as an oppressive colonial regime but they had different visions for Rwanda’s future. While liberals, and liberal women in particular, hoped for reforms in education and voting rights, conservative men hoped to reinstate what they viewed as traditional norms — patriarchal nuclear families with women confined to the domestic sphere. These new nationalisms reveal the possibilities of late colonialism and the constraints of newly independent states. By investigating the gendered dynamics of labor and nationalism in late colonial Rwanda, this project adds crucial knowledge to the history of women in the formal economy, the creation of multiple nationalisms during decolonization processes, and the gendered politics of empires and postcolonial states.

Because of a close relationship with my host university, I have been planning a number of ways to engage with undergraduate and masters students. In talking with Father Balthazar Ntivuguruswa, the Vice Chancellor of my host institution The Catholic Institute of Kabayi, I have plans to work with social science masters students to create an oral history project and bank housed at the university based both on my own research and the interests of the students. Similarly, I have plans to work with undergraduate students at the university on English writing skills that will help them in finding internationally oriented jobs after graduating.

Congratulations to doctoral candidates Alexander Cors and Camille J. Goldmon on being named 2021 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows. Cors and Goldmon are among 72 graduate students nationwide to receive the fellowship, which supports the next generation of humanistic scholars in their final year of dissertation research and writing. Cors’s project, titled “Newcomers and New Borders: Migration, Property Formation, and Conflict over Land along the Mississippi River, 1750-1820,” offers a new perspective on the “periodization and geographies of North American history by viewing colonial expansion, Indigenous dispossession, and the rise of the slave-plantation economy as interconnected processes that spanned across national and imperial boundaries.” Goldmon’s project, “On the Right Side of Radicalism: African American Farmers, Tuskegee Institute, and Agrarian Radicalism in the Alabama Black Belt, 1881–1940,” reexamines “historical figures typically dismissed as conservative, unprogressive, or even apathetic and positions them instead as harbingers of change responsive to the needs of local Black farmers.” Read more about their exciting work in the links above and browse the projects of the other fellows in the 2021 ACLS cohort.