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.

Anita Hemmings (1897)

Over the past nine weeks, we have been revisiting a chapter of Vassar’s nineteenth century history. We wanted to learn about the institution’s past to better understand its present and its future in hopes of rethinking how elite institutions can recreate themselves as multicultural, cosmopolitan, and inclusive. We began this journey by researching Vassar’s first known African American student: Anita Florence Hemmings.

Matriculating into Vassar in 1893, Hemmings passed as a white woman, in hopes that hiding her racial identity would give her access to one of the most elite academic institutions in the world. Achieving a Vassar education among well-born, elite white women was a coup d’état for an African American woman born to parents of modest means. 

Clip from the Sacramento Daily Record Union (1897)

 However, living as a white woman meant Hemmings had to forsake her African American heritage, an abandonment that would affect the lives of her family for generations. Unfortunately, she was “outed” by her roommate Louise Taylor a few days before their graduation in 1897. Vassar allowed Hemmings to graduate after a series of private meetings between the President, the Board of Trustees, and faculty.

Though Vassar has long since opened its doors to an increasingly diverse group of students over the years, including a shift to coeducation in 1969, there are aspects of Vassar’s turbulent history with inclusion and integration that still permeate the lives of students 121 years after Anita’s graduation.

Students from under-represented communities (i.e., first-generation, low-income, international, transfer and people of color) are helping to recreate Vassar in the twenty-first century. We all have a role to play in eradicating feelings of discomfort felt by some and helping to create a sense of belonging for all. We can begin this journey by looking back at our institutional history.

 For more information, visit the Passing Beyond Passing site!

During the summer, we examined multiple ways in which autistic individuals learn from and partake in organized activities outside of the traditional classroom setting. These “third spaces” included a Judo Dojo and a music and creative arts program. At these sites we observed and considered the alternative ways in which individuals learned, grew, and managed their behavior, mainly through the pedagogical framework introduced by Paulo Freire. Our goal throughout the project was to learn more about accessible teaching approaches that empower Autistic students and how these may be implemented into mainstream education. Successful approaches to behavior management and learning are promising in creating viable alternative options for Autistic individuals and their communities. They have the capacity to put into question rhetoric regarding traditional approaches that have dominated the field (such as Applied Behavior Analysis) and the monolithic shadows they cast.

In our work we: researched potential field sites to explore in the future (theater, equine therapy, and music therapy programs), analyzed visual and auditory data, transcribed interviews and presentations, took field notes, and compiled and annotated relevant scholarship and research. Our work especially focused on the Judo program and the ways in which it provided increased self-confidence, impulse control, relaxation, and socialization in students without compromising their sense of agency and individualism. We considered the ways in which the teaching practices and the nature of this program yielded these results, looking to the narratives of the involved community the Dojo serves. These approaches were rooted in and shaped by community, Autistic voices, mutual respect, sensory stimulation, deep touch, and gentleness. The results and observations of this work will contribute to ongoing research and the development of an upcoming manuscript.

A volunteer black belt guides two students as they practice throws and falls.

Over the course of the past eight weeks, I have been working with Dr. Seungsook Moon of the Sociology Department to further understand the systems of garbage and waste that are inherent to consumer capitalism. This project worked as preparation for Professor Moon’s six-week class of the same name to be taught in the Fall of 2018.

Collection Day in Arlington!

For the first two weeks of this project, I hunkered down in the library to research and discover theoretical texts to understand the processes of waste and garbage. Though many of these texts were not centered around Dutchess County, they helped us to understand how the county fits into the global systems of waste production, collection, management, and trade. The literature review portion of this project has been crucial to the formation of the syllabus for the class in the fall.

Following the theoretical portion of the project, we began to dig through the archives of the Poughkeepsie Journal and the Miscellany News to craft a historical timeline of the local laws around garbage, recycling, and composting throughout Dutchess County, with some comparisons to other local counties (specifically Ulster), as well as a thorough examination of policies on campus.

Simultaneously, I began to create visual representations of the data presented in the “Rethinking Waste” plan, presented by the Dutchess County Division of Solid Waste Management in 2012. This included understanding the composition of the waste produced in Dutchess County, as well as creating visual representations about where garbage and recyclables from the county are transported.

One of the visual representations that I created showing where and how much garbage from Dutchess County is being distributed at various landfills throughout New York State.

The final part of our project included scheduling and conducting interviews with local officials involved in garbage and waste management throughout the county. Though we had some difficulty with this portion of the project, as finding relevant parties who were interested and available took longer than expected, we were able to interview Atticus Lanigan of Zero to Go, an education-based waste management company based in Beacon, and have scheduled further interviews with the Deputy Commissioner of Solid Waste Management for the County, and tours of waste, recycling, and composting facilities in the Mid-Hudson region.

James on a field trip to the DSNY garage in NYC

Conducting research through the Ford Program allowed me to develop a greater knowledge of sociological theory and interest in conducting independent research throughout an extended period of time. As I prepare to write a senior thesis beginning in the fall, I am grateful for the opportunities afforded to me by the Ford Program which have strengthened my research capabilities and nurtured my interest in pursuing academic research further.

I researched with professor Esteban Argudo and Ningyao Geng about the tax repatriation holiday which is part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) enacted by President Trump on December 22, 2017. Our main research questions were the following:

■ Looking at differences in Multinational Corporations and Domestic Firms

■ Does the introduction of the Tax Repatriation Act affect the behavior of firms? If so, how?

■ Looking at differences in firms that will repatriate and those that won’t

■ Assess if the proposed one-time tax repatriation of the TCJA reform will lead or not to higher investment, output, wages, and employment

■ Look at how firms use repatriated foreign earnings

However, due to limitations and challenges to data collection, we mainly focused on the first two research questions. We used the CSV and TSV files uploaded at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) site. The final dataset we got had 10148 unique firms, 45604 rows and 30+ columns (variables).

Previous Literature that performed research on the repatriation tax holiday from U.S. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (AJCA) generally concludes that repatriation had little to no effect on domestic investment, employment, and R&D. Instead, repatriated foreign profits were used to buy back shares and increase the dividends given to their shareholders.

To keep the firms for analysis constant, we kept only the firms that had values for all fiscal years 2013 to 2016 (Because our data for those years matched well with BEA data) and focused on the manufacturing industry which had the most data points.

The following are some findings from exploratory data analysis:

■ Decrease in UFE doesn’t correspond to higher R&D for both domestic firms and MNCs which supports findings from previous literature

■ R&D for MNCs seems to be pretty stable between 3.5%-3.6% level of assets. Repatriation of funds doesn’t really seem to affect R&D behavior of MNCs

■ For both domestic firms and MNCs, liabilities are increasing over time. Liabilities keep increasing regardless of repatriation, so repatriation doesn’t seem to affect liabilities

■ Has the introduction or announcement of the repatriation tax holiday incentive firms to stockpile money overseas? (Hence, the increase in UFE in that period)

■ But increase in foreign income in that period would have also contributed to the increase in UFE.

This summer I worked alongside Professor Kagy in the Economics Department on a project titled “Poor Bargaining? Theory and Evidence on How and Why Liquidity Affects Price Negotiations.” We worked alongside two other co-authors, Morgan Hardy (NYU – Abu Dhabi) and Lena Song (NYU). Our project, centered in Ghana, looks at the bargaining patterns of garment makers.

In many developing countries, the process of purchasing a garment requires haggling between the seller and the buyer.  For the sellers, how they haggle directly affects their income, so the concept of bargaining is very important in developing countries. Classic economic bargaining models only take into account seller cost and buyer value, and we are interested in if a person’s liquidity (availability of liquid assets) affects how they bargain. Our theory is that those with lower liquidity feel more constrained and thus offer lower prices during bargaining because they urgently need the sale.

Our paper consists of a theoretical section in which we model bargaining with an added liquidity constraint, as well as observational evidence of this from our data. We are working with data that Professor Kagy and her co-authors took themselves in January of 2018, in which we surveyed 312 small garment firm owners about their business and personal characteristics. In the survey, we included a bargaining exercise where we asked to purchase a shirt and haggled over the price. From this, we can test the relationship between the final price and the personal liquidity of the garment maker. What we found is a clear positive relationship between liquidity and final price in the bargaining exercise. Those with higher liquidity charge significantly higher prices than those with lower liquidity, which supports our theory that people with higher liquidity feel less constrained.

I have learned so much this summer about the process of designing surveys, conducting research, programming in STATA and Latex, cleaning data, and creating figures for statistical use. I am very grateful for this opportunity and hope to continue conducting research in the future.

This summer, I worked with Professor Su on the topic of Chinese resource export in global developing countries. The study was a supplement for Professor Su’s paper on Chinese export and the case of resource curse of developing country. I was responsible for writing the case study in his paper.

We spent most of our first 2 weeks find the most appropriate subject for study. After we were certain that our case will be on Zambia, a country that was heavily invested by Chinese companies, we analyzed the economic and political situations that the Zambian government faces before and after the Chinese influences started to go their way in Zambia. We set the time framework for two groups as “2003-2007” and “2009-2013”. In the first time period, China was only a minor player in the export market, but from 2009, China becomes one of the biggest importers of Zambian Copper.

The last two weeks of our research, we had two more case studies, namely Ethiopia and Chile. Chile has the same product for export as Zambia: copper ores; Ethiopia was geographically close to Chile and was also very tight in its relationship with the Chinese government. However, Professor Su and I argued that Chile was different from Zambia that Chile’s institutional set-up was much more democratic than Zambia; Ethiopia, alternatively, exports a very different product to Zambia. As Zambia focuses it export industry in products such as Copper, Ethiopia specialized in oily seeds and other agricultural goods.

What we find throughout the data in two time periods was that Zambia, as well as Ethiopia, experienced a fall in the manufacturing sector’s share of GDP, indicating an increasing level of de-industrialization within these economies. However, Chile, with a more robust political institution, was more resilient to the possible consequences of resource curse.