Ph.D students

Binghamton University, State University of New York
BA History, 2008
MA History, 2010

Fields: Modern Russian & Soviet History, Eastern & Central Europe, America & the World

Dissertation: “Burning Hatreds: Anti-Soviet Nationalists and the Cold War” (Working Title)

I intend to examine the American exploitation of xenophobic nationalism as a method of destabilizing Soviet authority in the Early Cold War. From the post-war period through the 1960s, U.S. covert operations sought out Soviet nationalist emigres to run anti-Soviet operations behind the Iron Curtain. The individuals and organizations on which I concentrate, many of whom openly collaborated under Nazi occupation, appear to have been valued for their intense xenophobia. The Central Intelligence Agency saw great value in using exclusionary nationalist sentiment as a mobilizing force capable of counteracting Soviet internationalism and exploiting the Soviet Union’s diversity, its history of mutual ethnic animosities, as well as its federated, multinational structure. I in turn consider the emigre agents’ manipulation of American patronage, the responses of Soviet counter-intelligence, and the consequences of state-sponsored xenophobia on both sides of the Cold War.

Cohort: 2006

M.A., History, Northeastern University, 2008
B.A., Colby College, 2004

Interests: History of Informal Economies, Drugs: Central and South Asia

Thesis: Seeds of Dissent: Informal Economies, Invisible Boundaries, Opium, and Development in Afghanistan

My project examines the history of opium production in present day Afghanistan and Pakistan, and considers the social, political, and economic factors which influenced the emergence of the largest opium industry in the world. I have always had a keen interest in the complexities of drug economics and culture, and particularly the issues arising from First World consumption of drugs and the subsequent blame placed on Third World producers. I am fluent in Spanish, capable in Thai, and currently learning Persian and Pashto.

Email: bradford.ja@husky.neu.edu
James Bradford encourages his students to enroll in Samantha Christiansen’s Fall 2011 course.

Cohort: 2008

M.A., History, Northeastern University, 2011
B.S., Educational Studies, University of Maine-Presque Isle, 2008
B.A., History and Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Interests: Food, Commodities/Commodification, Maritime Trade, Pacific Island ‘world’
Languages: Classical Latin, Hawaiian

Email: dixon.t@husky.neu.edu

PhD Candidate, World History

MA History, Northeastern University, 2009
BA History, Georgia State University, 2007

Fields: modern Middle East history, Syrian and Lebanese history, global migrations history, Arab diasporas, transnational activism and political culture

Dissertation Title: The Global Levant: Making a Nation in the Syrian-Lebanese Diaspora, 1913-1939

My dissertation studies Syrian and Lebanese political culture in the American mahjar (diaspora) during the interwar period. Tracing intellectual and activist networks between the Syrian and Lebanese communities in Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York City, the project is the first of its kind to triangulate the Levant’s colonies across three continents and explore the political culture they shared. The project documents and analyzes the Syrian diaspora’s political activism beginning with WWI, arguing that emigrants played a formative role in the construction of the modern Lebanese and Syrian states, as well as in the anti-colonial nationalist movements that emerged in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. I then explore the emergence of a transnational patriotic culture in the diaspora’s periodical press. Using newspapers, club records, and correspondence circulated by Arab emigrants themselves, I ask new questions about the construction of political communities in the modern Middle East.

I am affiliated with the Lebanese Emigration Research Center in Zouk Mosbeh, Lebanon, and I have collaborated with a variety of institutions in completing this project: the Immigration History Research Center, the Maronite Patriarchate in Bkerke, and the American University of Beirut. I owe much gratitude for generous funding from the Lucille Zanghi/James Dow Dissertation Research Grant, the IHRC’s Grant-in-Aid, and the Gillis Family Grant, and I am especially grateful for my wonderful committee: Ilham Khuri-Makdisi (chair), Laura Frader, and Akram Khater (NCSU). My most recent article, “Transnational Modes and Methods; the Syrian Press and Emigrant Activism” is forthcoming in Mahjar and Mashriq, a peer-reviewed online journal produced by the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies in Spring 2013.

Email: fahrenthold.s@husky.neu.edu

Cohort: 2009

M.A., Comparative History, French Empire, Brandeis University
B.A., Cultural History and Musicology, University Professor Program, Boston University

Comprehensive Exam Fields: France and the World, Modern Russia, Cold War Cultural History

Dissertation title: “Cold War Cultural Exchange and the Moiseyev Dance Company: American
Perception of Soviet Peoples”

Dissertation Description:
Beginning in April of 1958, as part of the Lacy-Zarbuin Agreement, the Moiseyev Dance Company visited the United States with performances in multiple cities including New York, Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cleveland, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia, as well as a popular television appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The Moiseyev fascinated American audiences and Americans drew direct comparisons between themselves and their culture with that of the Soviet Union, as presented on stage by the Moiseyev dancers. The company evoked a multitude of responses, from protest to admiration, fear of cultural inferiority to enthusiasm for the United States
to send over its own cultural representatives to demonstrate American cultural excellence. Newspapers and magazines widely discussed how the group influenced political relations, whether writers felt the company demonstrated that cultural performance was a non-political space in which mutual respect between the two superpowers could be achieved or that it was pure propaganda, and possibly even dangerous propaganda at that. This project revisits the role of cultural symbols and cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, using the US tours of the Soviet Union’s Moiseyev Dance Company as a case study. In particular, it examines the Company’s multicultural and Cold War messages as a framework for understanding the impact of cultural politics on American-Soviet relations.

Email: waxman.v@husky.neu.edu

Cohort: 2010

My area is the United States in the world with an emphasis on the transnational construction of race. I am interested in exploring schools as sites of cultural production about race, identity and nationalism. In addition to being a doctoral candidate, I am a full time member of the faculty in Northeastern University’s Graduate School of Education. My courses include Teaching History and Social Studies and Race and Ethnicity in Education. I also have taught workshops and courses for high school teachers on gendering the world history curriculum.

Email: harrington.sh@neu.edu

Cohort: 2007

M.A., Modern European History, Subfield in Global History, Portland State University

B.A., UNC-Chapel Hill, Global History and French Literature, 2001

Interests: French colonial history, postcolonial studies, Magrhib studies, pan-African and European intellectual history, 20th-century transnational protest

Thesis: Imperial Fragments and Transnational Activism: 1968(s) in Tunisia, France, and Senegal

My current research compares social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in three different cities located in the former French empire; Tunis, Paris, and Dakar. I conducted fieldwork for my dissertation from September 2009 to July 2012 in these three sites. I was affiliated with the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, in 2009-2010, and an invited researcher at the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhônes-Alpes in 2010-2011. Funding for research in Paris, Tunis and Dakar in 2010-2011 was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship) and Fulbright-Hays (Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad). My findings suggest that colonial history, intellectual migration, and global protest were intertwined, and that colonial ties transformed the university into a site of conflict between activist youth and the state in 1968 over modernization strategies and the direction of the nation. I am also interested in the emergence of human rights organizations in response to state repression of 1968 university protests, particularly in Tunisia.

Data collected during this period has provided material for three publications, including a peer-reviewed article in the November 2012 special issue in the International Journal of Middle East Studies and two French-language publications. My dissertation committee consists of Drs. Laura Frader, Timothy Brown, and Katherine Luongo, while I have received local guidance from Drs. Pascale Barthélémy and Boris Gobille (ENS de Lyon), as well as Dr. Habib Kazdaghli (Université de Tunis-Manouba) and Dr. Ibrahima Thioub (Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar). My historical heroes include, but are not limited to, Gracchus Babeuf, Frantz Fanon, and Rasheed Wallace.

Burleigh was recently a featured guest of journalist Antonin Perraud for Mediapart tele-webcast, “La revolution tunisienne à l’aune de Mai 1968,” February 25, 2011.

Email: hendrickson.b@husky.neu.edu

Cohort: 2008

ABD, World History, Northeastern University
MA, History, Northeastern University, 2010
MST, Secondary Education, Pace University, 2007
BA, History, Bates College, 2005

Interests: Modern Germany, Empires and World War I

Unprepared for the demands of a Continental war against the German army in 1914, Great Britain sent for its imperial reserve, two infantry divisions of the Indian Army. Deployed to the trenches outside Ypres in late October 1914, 138,000 Indian soldiers held the lines through the end of 1915. My dissertation explores the myriad of imperial concerns surrounding this curious decision, and argues that the story of the sepoys in Europe is best understood when properly located within an inter-imperial social fabric that includes England, India, and Germany. This work draws on archival research conducted in the United States, England, and Germany. I am also working on an edited volume titled “Empires in World War I,” which is set for publication with I.B. Tauris winter 2012-13.

Email: jarboe.a@husky.neu.edu

Public History
Cohort: 2008

B.A. Furman University

Interests: Public history, artistic and cultural history, early modern Europe.

My research focuses on the creative ways in which people express and define themselves, others, and history. Thus, I examine what music, theater, dance/movement, the visual arts, literature, storytelling, film, costume, and craft say about the peoples that produce them and the potential of these mediums to act as effective cultural conduits across space and time.

M.A., History, Northeastern University, 2009
B.A., History, Hampshire College, 2007

Interests: The Atlantic World, the British Empire, Colonial North America, Comparative Colonization, and Religious Encounters

Dissertation: “Patrons, Politics, and Pews: Boston Anglicans and the Shaping of the Anglo-Atlantic, 1686-1805”

My dissertation looks at links between Massachusetts’ minority community of Anglicans and the larger Atlantic World. I focus especially on lay Anglicans who gave and solicited aid to local and far-flung churches. My dissertation examines cultural meanings associated with religious artifacts and gifts, such as communion silver and the Book of Common Prayer, used within Boston’s Anglican churches. By exposing elite, ordinary, and enslaved participation in religious life at Anglican churches, my dissertation shows how elites constructed their statuses within religious and civic communities and draws important links between New England slavery, West Indian planters, and the larger Atlantic slave trade. Though Anglicans were often aligned with the crown I further look beyond the immediate events of the American Revolution to show how members of this community navigated the economic and political exigencies of the day and remained remarkably rooted to local places and material artifacts. I have published on slaves and masters at Boston’s Christ Church (commonly known as the Old North Church) and the relationship between British logwood merchants residing in the Bay of Honduras and members of Christ Church. I also consult and research for Boston’s King’s Chapel and the Old North Foundation, along Boston’s Freedom Trail, and teach “Introduction to United States History” and “Atlantic Connections” as a lecturer at Northeastern.

Email: newton.r@husky.neu.edu