What is tribal enrollment and how did it become a key part of a Native American Identity? This talk discusses the history behind the creation of tribal enrollment policies and how it relates to being Native American in today’s world. Drawing on interviews conducted with Southwest Native American women, specifically Pueblo women, this presentation will connect tribal membership with women’s experiences navigating dating, marriage, and family planning.
Danielle D. Lucero earned her PhD from Arizona State University and was the Charles Eastman Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. She holds an Ed.M from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education in Learning and Teaching and a BA in Anthropology and Ethnic Studies from Columbia University. Danielle is an enrolled member of the Pueblo of Isleta located in central New Mexico as well as Hispano with connections to the northeastern New Mexican town of Santa Rosa.
Photo credit Cara Romano.
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Vaccination is roughly 200 years old and it has dramatically reduced infectious disease. Global vaccination campaigns have eradicated smallpox and decreased polio incidence by 99%. These remarkable achievements have reduced the number of deaths and prevented lifelong disabilities such as blindness and paralysis. Today we routinely vaccinate infants and children to protect them from many life-threatening and disabling diseases. But ever since Edward Jenner vaccinated eight-year-old James Phipps with cowpox in 1796, vaccines have provoked profound scientific questions about what they are, how they work, and whether they are safe. More broadly, we continue to wrestle with ethical and religious issues that stem from the very principle of vaccination, to create an immune response to prevent future infection. This talk will explore the history of vaccines, the emergence of vaccination protocols and policies, and changing public opinion about vaccines and vaccination, up to and including our current debates.
Presented by Andrea Rusnock, PhD, a historian of science and medicine and a professor of history at the University of Rhode Island. She has written extensively on the early history of smallpox inoculation and vaccination and is the author of two books and over thirty journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews.
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In the famous words of Wallace Stegner, “national parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst." But are National Parks truly “democratic”? This interactive program explores the history of U.S. National Parks—as myths, symbols of democratic ideals, and colonial spaces—alongside today’s common National Park activities. What do we seek at National Parks? What do our National Park consumption habits tell us about ourselves? We will look at the rising phenomenon of “selfie deaths” and the role of social media in National Park consumption. National Parks may represent freedom for some, but no matter how carefully tended and regulated, they also form part of a planet in crisis. How does climate change fundamentally threaten National Parks, challenging their status as highly valued, preserved spaces? How might we revise the preservation tradition that gave birth to the National Parks to include our own neighborhoods and communities? We will consider these questions in the national context, but also in light of our own state—home to the White Mountain National Forest, which attracts so many eager visitors every year.
Presented by Abby Goode, Associate Professor of English and Sustainability Studies at Plymouth State University. She is the author of Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability (UNC Press, 2022), and her work has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the American Antiquarian Society, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and the First Book Institute at the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State. She is a recipient of Plymouth State's Transformative Teaching Award and Distinguished Scholarship Award.
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In 1974, a lawyer for the University of New Hampshire argued that the university could legally bar the newly founded Gay Students Organization from activity on campus because its members had a “communicable mental illness.” This public battle, in both the courts and the court of public opinion, might have been the first time LGBTQ+ identity was a major topic of conversation in New Hampshire, but LGTBQ+ individuals had called NH home for much longer.
In this talk, Dr. Holly Cashman will underscore the importance of knowing the histories of LGBTQ+ communities and share stories collected through two ongoing research projects: the Seacoast NH LGBTQ Oral History Project and the Living Free & LGBTQ+ at UNH in the 1970s project. The NH Seacoast LGBTQ Oral History Project grew out of a larger history project founded by Tom Kaufhold in the years approaching the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots of 1969, considered by many the birth of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement. Living Free & LGBTQ+ at UNH in the 1970s traces the founding of the Gay Student Organization, the first such organization on campus. This project involved UNH students’ hands-on research in the university archives to look at a story now viewed as a victory. These programs continue to make LGBTQ+ histories more visible in New Hampshire, uncovering for the public stories that have been overlooked for decades, and enriching our understanding of what it means to make the Granite State home.
About the presenter: Holly R. Cashman is Professor of Spanish and Women's & Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire and author of Queer, Latinx, and Bilingual: Narrative Resources in the Negotiation of Identities. She is past president of the International Gender and Language Association and the Linguistic Association of the Southwest. Cashman was awarded the Kidder Award for “foster[ing] greater understanding of sexual orientation and gender expression,” the President’s Good Steward Award for using professional expertise in service to the wider community, and the Pink Triangle Award for “outstanding contributions to efforts for equity and visibility for the UNH GLBT community.”
In a heavily patrilineal society like medieval England, reproduction was meant to reinforce likeness between father and son. While medieval men might have wished to pretend otherwise, women too had a great impact on their children. Join us as Dr. Samantha Seal of UNH explores the medieval fears of the female womb and female influence on children. She’ll illustrate examples from medieval romance and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, in which mothers subvert fathers’ biological connection with “their” sons, bestowing their own matrilineal traits— magic and monstrosity, holiness and hereditary power— and challenging which sex was the more powerful.
About the presenter: Dr. Samantha Seal is an Associate Professor of English and the Pamela Shulman Professor of European and Holocaust Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She specializes in the study of gender and race in medieval English literature, especially in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. She currently serves as a member of the editorial board of Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies, held an ACLS faculty fellowship in 2019-2020, and will be a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in Spring 2023.
As recent European elections show, the far-right is making enormous gains in Europe’s largest and most powerful democracies. This includes Germany, which was presumed to be immune from far-right politics, having learned the hard lessons of the Nazi era. This talk will explore how recent expansions of German citizenship laws and ideas of culture have also smuggled in new forms of racism and anxiety about the “wrong kind” of immigrants. We will examine how media and popular culture including national sports provide central stages for deciding who belongs in the nation.
Presented by Kate Zambon is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in global media studies focuses on the politics of nationalism, race, migration, and cultural difference in Germany and Europe through the analysis of international sporting events, news, and entertainment media. Her book, Interrogating Integration: Sport, Celebrity, and Scandal in the Making of New Germany, is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press.
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