Over the summer, Professor Kirsten Wesselhoeft (Religion Department) and I worked on a project called “Muslims of the Present: Islamic Ethics, Social Critique, and the Inheritances of Immigration in France.”  We spent the summer reading the writings of French Muslim social activists, student led movements, and feminist organizations, and reading about the public reception of their work. We looked at the results that Professor Wesselhoeft collected throughout her eight years of ethnographic research in France and spent a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the identities of groups and individuals impact their relationship with the state.

A large part of the summer included collecting and analyzing primary data from activist groups, from politicians, from philosophers, and from artists in order to gain a deeper understanding of the current dynamics of the Muslim community in France. We analyzed the relationship between French religious groups, politicians, and state policies. Is French secularism simply a thinly veiled disguise for anti-Muslim racism and religious and/or racial discrimination? How does the racialization of Islam impact the work of Muslim communities and civil rights organizations? How does the gendered politics of Islamophobia in France influence the work of Muslim feminist groups?

As Professor Wesselhoeft continues to develop the project, complete various articles, and ultimately finish her book, we plan on taking our research to Denver, Colorado for the American Academy of Religion annual conference in November 2018.  We will present our findings, our progress, and our plans for upcoming research in hopes of receiving feedback from other professionals in the field. Our paper is entitled “‘Muslimness is a Relationship of Power’: The Racialization of Islam in European Anti-Islamophobia Activism.” We are very excited to share our work from the summer, and to continue to develop our understandings of Islam in France and its social, political, and economic manifestations.

This summer, I worked with Professor Ben Morin on a project titled “What Does a Vassar Mathematician Look Like?” The goal of this project was examine the history of Vassar’s Mathematics Department and find notable people who have passed through it. Specifically, we wanted to find alumnae/i who belonged to minority groups in order to show that Vassar mathematicians are a diverse group. The work done this summer was the beginning of a much longer project.

In my research, I found many people who stood out. The diversity of the early years of Vassar unfortunately only concerns sex; we did not see the first math majors of color until well into the twentieth century. Many women who passed through the department as students before World War II went on to do things that we atypical for the time: seven went on to receive PhDs in mathematics, and we know of at least one woman from the class of 1911 who became a doctor. Additionally, the faculty of Vassar’s math department had an atypical makeup for most of its history. For a large portion of the twentieth century, the faculty was comprised entirely of women. Our first faculty member of color was Gloria Castellanos, a Cuban refugee; she was also the first applied mathematician in the department. Clearly, the early women of Vassar were not afraid to push the envelope.

Our findings this summer focused on the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to researching specific students and faculty members, we found out more about the culture of Vassar’s Mathematics Department and Vassar College itself. Future work will continue to examine notable alumnae/i and faculty members, and we hope to showcase the diversity in the Mathematics Department.

I worked with Professor Mampilly in the Political Science Department to understand the noneconomic logics of rebel taxation, in preparation for abook Professor Mampilly is writing.

The traditional view of rebel taxation is as a revenue generation scheme. These Olsonian logics, which focus on self interested group behavior, do not capture all benefits of taxation. It is also not entirely clear that taxation practices generate a useful amount of money.

I spent a fair portion of the project delving into concepts of moral economy. Moral economic analysis places an emphasis on relationships, morality, and social norms rather than utility maximization. This lens was very useful for how Professor Mampilly and I began to think about why rebels use taxation.

Logics of social norms suggest that taxation can be used as a mechanism for legitimizing a group as a government. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of what people expect from a ruling body.

Start of the constitution for The People’s Republic of Eelam, which discusses taxation policy

This research led to interesting ways in which economists are applying the ideas of moral economy, shedding light on how it is possible to properly quantify and analyze data Professor Mampilly has on rebel taxation practices. Examples of such work have found ways to quantify how much a person values public perception of their actions, as well as track how charitable contribution decisions are made in rural versus urban environments. It was very interesting to do research outside of my primary area of study, where I got to apply my skill set in a different way.

I also investigated an archive of documents surrounding the Tamil Tigers. Gathering primary sources on a rebel conflict to understand taxation and monetary practices was a valuable and informative experience.

Plea for assistance from the Sri Lankan government’s blockade for people in Tamil controlled territory

This summer, two undergraduate students worked together with one of the students hailing from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus. This was the first time a student from that university was brought to Vassar College to participate in the Ford Scholars program.

We completed a wide variety of activities throughout the summer with the ultimate goal of understanding black Americans feelings towards and perceptions of black judges in state courts. In the initial weeks, we read extensively on judicial representation, gathered bibliography, and assisted in creating surveys and interviews. Next, we interviewed and surveyed black Americans at the Poughkeepsie Galleria Mall, in downtown Poughkeepsie in front the courthouse, and at Union Square Park in Manhattan.

Towards the end of the summer, we gathered the qualitative and quantitative data we had collected. We transcribed the interviews, collected data from the surveys, and collected data from the content analysis performed on over seventy cases of black judges’ television show episodes to analyze how black judges portray themselves on these programs. We exported and analyzed the qualitative data into a software called NVivo.

The research done this summer will be used by Assistant Professor of Political Science, Taneisha Means, in a chapter of her manuscript, Representing the Race: Black Judges and Justice in State Courts.

This summer, I worked with Professor Dustin Frye on the topic of spatial income inequality in the United States from the 1950’s onwards. Our main goal was to develop a comprehensive data set regarding the topic.

To achieve this goal, we used the County Business Patterns (CBP). CBP is run by the US Census, and is an annual series that provides subnational economic data by industry. This series includes the number of establishments, employment during the week of March 12, first quarter payroll, and annual payroll. We have access to CBP data all the way back to 1953. Within this data, we were interested in the county level data: county by county, industry by industry, how many people worked in that industry, what they were paid, and what the firm size breakdown was for that industry. The CBP data is in a digital form from 1970 onwards, but before then all we have are PDFs of the original books themselves, which isn’t very useful for economic analysis.

To make the pre-1970 data into a useable form, we used an OCR scanner to run an initial sweep of each year’s book. Each year has several thousand pages worth of data, so this step was crucial, as hand entering was not an option. After the data was read by the OCR scanner, we used excel and STATA to format it and write code that would find errors within the data from the scan. We also found more errors by scanning two different versions of each year. From there, we hand collected what was missed from the scan, and combined all of our data into one set, allowing us to examine income patterns from 1953 to the present day. Using this data, we looked then specifically at Dutchess County and explored local changes in industries and income. Since the 1950’s, Dutchess County has undergone an enormous shift, moving away from being a town with the majority of jobs in the manufacturing industry, and towards a more service-based

Prof. Frye and I visiting an abandoned factory in Beacon, NY

job market. We were able to visit old manufacturing sites as well to help investigate this change further.

From 1798 through the nineteenth century, imperial leaders and the English elite used vaccination as a tool of colonization. Vaccination, unlike public records such as birth and death certificates, gave British military officials the opportunity to track the population in the colonies. As historian Alison Bashford stated in Imperial Hygiene: Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, “vaccination came to be important as a means for the collection of information through systems of registration and certification of individual infants and children.”[1] What is left untold, however, is how vaccine matter was transported from providence to providence, even from England to the colonies. This summer, I researched how the British used children, mainly native children, to transport and introduce vaccines to India for the health of British children, but also, how it became a colonial, humanitarian campaign to colonize the providence.

This is me looking for Microfiche in the Vassar Library.

By looking at various primary sources such as childrearing guides, medical journals and publications, and newspaper articles from the Times of India, I found that there was a significant disparity between children of different races and classes and how they were discussed in the sources. For example, the literature only discussed vaccination through a white-English perspective. For the English elite, vaccination was essential to the survival of European children in India. It protected them from the alleged filth that surrounded them. As one guidebook put it, European mothers could not be too careful as Indian nurses, or Ayahs, would be accused of exposing children to the plague-stricken streets of India.[2]

Nevertheless, despite the racism that encouraged mothers to limit their children’s interaction with India or its inhabitants, the truth was that children were exposed to the vaccine lymph thanks to native children. At the time, the easiest and most successful form of vaccination was arm-to-arm vaccination. This means that the vaccine lymph, cow-pox, was first injected into the arm of a child, very likely one of native dissent, and puss would be extracted from that child’s pustule and then transmitted to other children. Vaccinifers, or children used for this purpose, would then travel with vaccinators to different provinces to spread the smallpox vaccine throughout India. These children, unlike the elite children were rarely mentioned in the sources, so much of my time consisted of looking for sources that hinted at the use of native children for vaccination.

Image From Campbell, Helen Y. Practical motherhood. Johannesburg: R. L. Esson & Co., 1910.

This research will serve as the basis of a lecture by Professor Lydia Murdoch next fall in Northwestern University discussing childhood and how it can be used to write history.

[1] Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014                        [originally published 2003]), 33.

[2]A domestic guide to mothers in India, containing particular instructions on the management of themselves and their children. By a                                     Medical practitioner of several years experience in India. Bombay: American Mission Press, 1848.

The United States is currently ranked number one globally for incarceration rates per capita, with a rate of 665 prisoners per 100,000 individuals. These numbers may seem disconcerting; however, they’re by no means arbitrary. There are underlying sociological concepts that explain the driving force for this large wave of incarceration, specifically, as it pertains to drug crimes. This summer, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Leonard and work towards completing the manuscript for her new book “Reframing Drug Crimes in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The manuscript provides a deeper analysis into understanding how drug crimes are framed as well as how victims of drug crimes are criminalized, thus, highlighting the United State’s biased approach to criminalizing drug-related individuals. In the vanguard of current media, certain populations are heavily demonized–as evident by the mass incarceration of Black and Hispanic men, but it is the more harmful, systematic transgressions of pharmaceutical companies and their alarming role in the United States public health crises, that are largely ignored.

Although I assisted Professor Leonard with research for various chapters, my primary responsibility was to research and draft a chapter in the book entitled “The U.S Opioid Crisis.” This chapter examines the current opioid crisis in the U.S. and investigates how pharmaceutical companies, the medical community, the media, and public policy have contributed to the creation of the opioid crisis. This chapter also explores the role that race, class, and geography play into the construction of populations who are humanized for their opioid use, such as white middle-class individuals, and those who are demonized and ignored, like low-income communities of color. Ultimately, this chapter–and the book as a whole–is meant to provide readers with a critical perspective as to how we understand and criminalize drug-related crimes in the United States, as well as how we can work to better address these crimes.

Professor Christine Howlett and Linda Liu ’19

A choir has the potential to honor the face and voices of the world’s people. However, this potential is often only used to serve dominant ideologies of what is choral music and who contributes to it. This project allowed Christine and I to explore how we can develop the choral arts into a practice that will actualize its potential for diversity and inclusivity. Our work included research into the question of “What do diverse and inclusive choirs look like,” as well as leading the Capella Festiva Summer Choral Festival [SCF], a choir camp that serves Poughkeepsie youth, ages 8-18.

The first half of the program was spent preparing and running SCF. My mindset as the first day of SCF approached was to contribute in a way that would last beyond this summer. To do this, I directed games and activities, led discussions on diversity and inclusivity in choir, assisted in sectional work, conducted one of the concert pieces, and performed statistical analyses of the singer’s feedback surveys. Through these actions, I hoped to create a space for the camper’s that was musically and socially fulfilling.

Rehearsal with the Treble Choir

A personal highlight of the camp was hearing the camper’s thoughts as to what they believed diversity and inclusivity in choir included. So much pride bloomed within me as I listened to singers as young as ten speak about issues surrounding how gender roles restrict the inclusivity of choir for non-cisgender women, all the way to fundraising suggestions to increase accessibility for choristers with financial difficulties. These discussions, combined with the feedback from the surveys, will allow their voices to improve the future years of SCF.

Spearman’s correlation between age and enjoyment of the songs, a way of learning which pieces resonated with which singers

After the camp’s conclusion, Christine and I continued the research of our central question. This included collecting literature on the subject of diversity and cultural exchange, searching for repertoire and composers that contributed to our mission of diverse choral music, speaking with experts on diversity in choir, and participating in an Engaged Pluralism Initiative workshop with other faculty, administrators, and students. Together, we delved into issues of honoring music from non-classical European tradition, while avoiding the othering and appropriation of such music; issues of critically analyzing social structures that exclude underrepresented groups of singers, and those that could create welcoming spaces for such singers; and a myriad of other issues. This work will lay the foundation for our upcoming symposium on diversity in music.

Although my work this past summer has come to a close, it is clear that this question of diversity and inclusivity in choir extends far beyond the summer, and even beyond the symposium. I am grateful for the way this research has absorbed, and continues to capture, my heart and mind, for a choir’s potential for positive, powerful change deserves the dedication.

Isabel Bielat ’20 and Professor Robert DeMaria

The Tatler, an influential British journal of periodical essays, circulated between 1709 and 1711. Richard Steele founded the journal with influence from satirist Jonathan Swift. With Joseph Addison and other London intellectuals, Steele produced content that included social commentary, literary criticism, and news. Much like modern media, The Tatler wrote for a society that mingled social, intellectual, political, and entertainment concerns.

This summer, under the guidance of Professor Robert DeMaria Jr., I worked on a critical edition of The Tatler, for publication by Cambridge University Press in 2020. This work will conform to editorial standards of copy-text accuracy, and draw from scholarly sources and digital resources to provide commentary that is relevant and useful to 21^st-century readers.

While establishing the text of The Tatler, I immersed myself in the language of the era. An important stage of the editorial process was collating the three early printed editions held in Special Collections and annotating their differences, giving preference to the octavo as copy-text. Textual inconsistencies provided insights into authorship, emerging spelling and grammatical conventions, and the journey of the text from contributor to printer. The collation process, begun by previous Ford Scholars, accumulated enough text to begin the historical and literary footnotes.

In addition to experiencing the linguistic conventions of the time, I found it essential to appreciate the historical context of the essays, and to communicate it through footnotes. The Tatler’s connection to historical events was most obvious in its news reports, such as those related to the War of the Spanish Succession. We consulted concurrent reports in the London Gazette, which Steele had edited from 1707 to 1710, and clarified them using scholarly sources. Where The Tatler referred to historical figures by unclear or contested titles, we identified them unambiguously. Other aspects of the text were enhanced by an understanding of the roles played by specific writers, politicians, theatres, and coffeehouses. Annotating such allusions situated the essays in the social and political spheres of 18^th-century London, a London that was observing the world as eagerly as it observed itself.

The advertisements that followed each issue of the Tatler interacted with the preceding text in a metatextually innovative way, and provided local economic and historical insights. For the critical edition, we developed protocols to summarize and contextualize advertisements, as through including Short Title Catalog numbers corresponding to the appropriate editions of advertised books.

While preparing footnotes on unusual vocabulary, we found that The Tatler is considered not merely a representational, but a founding text by sources such as Samuel Johnson’s dictionary and the OED. Additionally, The Tatler is rife with references to other works across a variety of genres and eras. From appending modern translations to the Latin and Greek epigraphs to citing literary quotations, editing The Tatler opened a window into its literary world. We hope the critical edition opens windows into The Tatler’s historical and literary world for readers as well.

I sincerely appreciate this opportunity the Ford Scholars program offered me to participate in The Tatler project. I learned from editing the historic text, researching to enhance the text, and preparing books for publication. As I enter my junior year at Vassar, I am looking forward to continuing this project and preparing for future academic research, especially projects that preserve literary and historical resources in ways that make them accessible to other researchers and students.

Tatler 178 in the octavo edition. Image courtesy of Vassar College Archives & Special Collections Library.

Tatler 178 in the folio printing, preceded by the advertisements from Tatler 177. Image courtesy of Vassar College Archives & Special Collections Library.

This summer I traveled to the Czech Republic with Professor Libin and alumnus Joseph Gusmano to study the Lobkowicz music collection. The Lobkowicz family is a line of Bohemian nobility that dates back to the 14^th century. They are known music lovers, especially the seventh Prince Lobkowicz (1772-1816), who spent exorbitant sums of money on performances, scores, and commissions, and was a patron of both Haydn and Beethoven. Our time was divided between cataloguing and cleaning the collection, and assisting Professor Libin with research for her biography of the seventh prince.

Our workplace, the Lobkowicz castle in Nelahozeves

Our first task was to digitalize the catalogue by inspecting each piece of music individually and recording its attributes, such as the title, composer, publisher, date, condition, and more, into a digital cataloguing program. We also cleaned the scores and moved them into new storage boxes. Cataloguing is a time-consuming process that has already been underway for a number of years, but we made substantial progress. This project brought us into contact with a wide variety of scores, both manuscript and printed, ranging from a string quartet arrangement of Haydn’s The Seasons to piano potpourris inspired by popular operas.

Our research on the seventh prince was centered around opera. The prince had a personal opera troupe that traveled with him to put on performances. We examined the parts used by this troupe, in an effort to find information about who was involved, and when and where they performed. This music was full of life, precipitating joyous discoveries; we became well acquainted with the lead singers who routinely wrote their names on their parts, and enjoyed lighthearted sketches made by bored instrumentalists.

The team hard at work studying opera parts

My experience with this project emphasized the importance of musicology in achieving a complete understanding of history. Music holds a wealth of information; it can reveal large-scale abstractions such as societal values, political ideals, and spiritual beliefs, while simultaneously providing an avenue into a personal, intimate dimension. The research we conducted on the Lobkowicz music collection provided invaluable nuance to our understanding of the family, transforming them from one-dimensional names on a page into living, breathing, and feeling human beings.