Hello!
I am a PhD student in the History Department. I study modern U.S. history and I am especially interested in APIDAA history, immigration history, and legal history. My dissertation concerns changes in U.S. immigration and naturalization law after World War II and their connection to ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and military labor. By examining the War Brides Act (1945), the Sweethearts’ Act (1946), and their amendments, my dissertation will show how ideas of gender and family facilitated a shift in racist, anti-Asian U.S. immigration and naturalization law, despite ongoing opposition to Asian immigration.
In the Spring 2025 semester, I worked as a graduate assistant in LEADR. It was a tremendous opportunity to learn about digital methods, to learn how students responded to them, and to think about how digital methods can change how history is taught. It was also a fantastic collaborative environment, and I benefited much from the strengths of my colleagues and their different backgrounds and areas of expertise. This experience inspired me to learn more about digital methods and cultural heritage and to apply for the CHI Graduate Fellowship Program.
Public history is extremely important to me, and I am excited to learn how digital methods can make primary sources and scholarship more accessible. Archives are an invaluable cultural heritage into which I think we should invest more resources. Yet, as it is, numerous barriers exist for folks who want to access physical archives to learn more about history. For instance, not everyone has the funding and time to travel to Washington, D.C., or to College Park, Maryland, to conduct research in the National Archives. What might be possible for people in Virginia or Pennsylvania is far more difficult for people in Arizona or Alaska. Shutdowns of the federal government can also affect access to the National Archives, limiting building usage and staff support. Digitization is certainly not a panacea for every accessibility issue; it presents a different set of concerns that must be addressed. However, I am interested in learning more about the possibilities of thoughtfully and ethically digitizing archival holdings to improve their accessibility to the public.
I hope to learn more about digital mapping technologies, for they seem like exciting tools to help make primary sources and scholarship more accessible. For example, digital mapping technologies seem like a great way to better explain legislative histories by showing complicated data over large areas of space and time. When thinking about transformative legislation in twentieth-century U.S. immigration and naturalization law, most people would probably think about the National Origins Act of 1924, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, or the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 before they would think about the War Brides Act and the Sweethearts’ Act. However, in my research I have learned that the War Brides Act, the Sweethearts’ Act, and their amendments were a pretty big deal, too.
They were enacted out of a pool of at least thirty-six (!) different immigration bills that were introduced in Congress in the short period of time between 1945 and 1951 to regulate the intimate relationships of U.S. military personnel. These thirty-six bills had twenty-seven different sponsors from nineteen different states! Seventeen of the sponsors were affiliated with the Democratic Party, and ten of the sponsors were affiliated with the Republican Party. While representatives from some states like New York and Michigan might have been expected to take an interest in such legislation, other states like the Dakotas and Kentucky were more surprising. These bills offered competing visions of how to regulate the intimate lives of U.S. military personnel, including: which personnel could facilitate the immigration of their loved ones (U.S citizen personnel only? non-U.S. citizen personnel, too?), which loved ones could immigrate (spouses? intended spouses? children?), what legal status immigrants would be granted (citizenship? residency?), how long personnel would have to petition for their loved ones to immigrate (one year? three years? more time?), and whether any statutory bars to immigrating, like race, would be waived for beneficiaries.
Digital mapping technologies can offer much in helping people understand the politics and society of the United States through postwar immigration and naturalization laws. People can understand the details of research data easier and quicker than by reading prose walls of text or by looking at a large table. Additionally, digital mapping technologies can offer different perspectives on data, allowing people to see new things in and to ask new questions of the data. When I first looked at my research data, I was quite focused on the differences in the contents of the various bills. However, after preliminarily trying to represent my data through a map, the geographic range and political identities of the sponsors came through more powerfully, underscoring the need to consider these factors in greater detail. On a final note, digital mapping technologies can also help one share information swiftly and widely over the Internet. Sometimes such information is locked behind expensive subscriptions for databases or paywalls, limiting accessibility to the public, and this is really unfortunate. It is important to me that I learn to use digital mapping technologies that can share information with people at no cost to them.
One of the things that I liked the most about working in LEADR this past spring was seeing how my colleagues’ varied interests and projects were developed through the different digital methodologies that they employed in their work. This gave me much to reflect on in my own work. As this year’s CHI Fellows look to be a great bunch of people, too, I am really excited to get to know everyone better and to hear about their projects. I look forward to working with everyone and to learning much from folks and their work!
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