Historical Understanding
The Rhetoric of Buried Testimony: Memory and Absence from the Warsaw Ghetto
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarah Goldwasser
In this paper, I suggest specific ways to interact with and learn from the still-buried segments of a sprawling Holocaust archive created in the Warsaw Ghetto. I will argue in that the distance between us and the still-buried portions of the Ringelblum, or Oneg Shabbas, archive can be meaningful through the ways in which we engage with its absence. I’ve grouped my suggestions into two approaches: one which studies around the absence, as a way to learn about the international policies and reactions after the war which left the archive underground, and within the absence, a more rhetorical approach to studying Jewish collective memory and the sublime historical experience of studying buried testimony. I end with context about how museums display and preserve discovered Holocaust testimonies, and how technology may or may not alter the museum goer’s interactions with testimony.
Navigating Multiple Easts: Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Travels from Persia to Poland, 1608–11
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Bernadette Andrea
This paper examines a neglected episode in the life of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley, a seventeenth-century Circassian woman from the Safavid court who travelled across Eurasia with her husband, the “English Persian” Robert Sherley, who was the shah’s ambassador to the Christian rulers in Europe. The three years she spent in Cracow, while her husband continued on his journey through the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, and Spain, offers unique insights on early modern women’s complex navigations of gendered ethnic and religious strictures. In 1611, Teresa Sampsonia reunited with her husband in Lisbon, having travelled through Hamburg, and together they travelled through Spain, departing from Bayonne in France for England. They remained in England for two years, returning to Iran in 1613. She thus epitomizes the “chameleon,” “cosmopolitan,” and “renegade” that Sanjay Subrahmanyam theorizes in Three Ways to Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World, even though he neglects to mention her in his analysis of Robert’s elder brother, Anthony, who was also the shah’s erstwhile ambassador. Her time in Cracow, in particular, complicates the dichotomy between East and West as it was mapped onto Islamic and Christian polities, as Poland (like Russia, which the Sherley party also passed through) oscillated between these geopolitical designations. This paper investigates the shifting connotations of these terms, and their political import, establishing Teresa Sampsonia’s travels from multiples “Easts”—Persia and then Poland—and onto Western Europe as a notable, albeit neglected, instance of cultural hybridization in the early modern period.
The Transnationalization of Domestic Law - A Perspective from the United States: Globalization and Deregulation and the Role of Domestic Courts
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alfred Aman
The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, I discuss how globalization has resulted in the transnationalization and neoliberalization of domestic administrative law in the United States. In this context, globalization and transnationalization are related but not interchangeable terms; transnationalism refers to the relational and localized aspects of economic globalization, and that is my main focus here. Second, I discuss the legal mechanisms by which U.S. domestic administrative law became integral to globalization through its transnationalization and how it affected institutions such as courts. Third, I offer brief reflections on the state of U.S. administrative law with respect to transnationalism today—particularly in relation to courts and especially to the growth of executive power and the potential for administrative law reforms in the public interest. Globalization is often (correctly) seen as a source of democracy deficit, but thinking about administrative law in terms of its transnationalization draws attention to what are also its democratic possibilities. My focus is on U.S. experience, but I hope in a way that contributes to a wider comparative discussion.
A Moral Steam-Engine: Thomas Clarkson and the British Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade, 1787-1807
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Catherine Tourangeau
This paper sheds new light on the associational context in which the successful campaign to abolish the British slave trade took place. Zooming in on the key figure of Thomas Clarkson, it considers, in particular, the role of formal associations dedicated to the cause in London and across the provinces and the colonies in mobilising public opinion against the trade. It suggests that without an intimate knowledge and experience of associational life--experience acquired through a sustained participation in clubs, societies, and associations of all kinds--the British abolitionists of the late 18th and early 19th century would not have been so successful in their endeavours. While they did not invent modern social movements, as historians sometimes suggest, they certainly exploited the possibilities, strategies, and methods of associational organisation to a greater extent than ever before. Doing so, they paved the way for the movements of the so-called "Age of Reform" which soon unfolded across the English-speaking world. Their story serves as a reminder of the potential of civil society to act as an agent of social, political, and economic change in times of crisis.
