This 50-minute lecture presents some ways to approach and participate in graduate and departmental seminars, including how to prepare for them, when and how to jump in, and approaches to asking questions.
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This 45-minute talk explores the basics of academic journal publishing in history: the reasons why one publishes journal articles; deciding what to submit; selecting a journal; preparing a manuscript for submission; navigating peer review; and making the best use of criticism.
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This 70-minute talk to graduate students suggests ways to go about selecting a problem to work on for one’s dissertation, including tools for identifying one’s interests, questions to ask (and not ask) of a potential topic, negotiating professional pressures, the proper role of advisors and the function of the prospectus.
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This essay summarizes the methodological approach and themes of The Blood of Government. Beginning with a critique of conventional, “export” models of transnational cultural history, it provides a definition of “transnational” history and employs this technique to illuminate Philippine-American colonial encounters of the early 20th century through changing racial discourses constructed…
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NPR, January 29, 2015 Guantanamo Bay is home to the United States’ oldest overseas base. And since it was established in 1903, the base has been a bone of contention in U.S. and Cuban relations. Melissa Block talks to Vanderbilt History professor Paul Kramer.
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The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2015) This essay argues for an imperial lens onto migration history by focusing on “civilized” exemptions to anti-Chinese barriers in the late 19th and early 20th century. U. S. exporters, missionaries and diplomats opposed totalized Chinese exclusion and lobbied successfully for…
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The 35-minute lecture presents some habits of mind useful for cultivating rich, complex, dynamic thinking in history, and the broader humanities and social sciences.
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This 25-minute lecture covers the varieties of reasons and ways one reads in graduate school, and techniques and functions of note-taking.
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The New Yorker, September 2014 This essay explores the ambiguities and politics of border-making through the history of the Chamizal, an area of about seven hundred acres contested by Mexico and the United States for a century. In the mid-19th century, American and Mexican boundary surveyors established that the border…
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In Emily Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick, eds., Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U. S. Body Politics in the 20th Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) The essay explores the U. S. military’s regulation of prostitution during the Philippine-American War, and a resulting scandal, as a lens onto the…