Presenter Abstracts & Bios

QUALICUM HISTORY CONFERENCE 2020 Bios & Abstracts ALLARD, DANE (UBC) PANEL 3B “When Family and Archive Blur: Academic Writing on Home”” Abstract: "Can I do this and still come home; what am I revealing here and why? Where will this get us? Who benefits from this and why?" ("On ethnographic refusal," 78). Audra Simpson asked these questions in a 2007 paper that would later become her ground-breaking book Mohawk Interruptus. Simpson's scholarship on her own community not only provided critical insight into Indigenous modes of refusal but has prompted us as graduate students from diverse fields to ask what it means to do work as scholars both "inside" and "outside" Red River, Mi'kma'ki, and Paueru-gai. Roundtable with Nicole Yakashiro - Nikkei settler PhD Student at UBC and Mercedes Peters - Mi'kmaw PhD Student at UBC, Glooscap First Nation This roundtable offers the opportunity to engage with the ethics, practices, and politics of community-based research when you have to return home. We will discuss questions of methodology, community knowledge production, and the intimacies and affective dimensions of our research. As graduate students, we sit uncomfortably between the academy and the communities we come from and are responsible to. We ask, then: what are the radical potentials that emerge from community work as community members and what might the limitations be? What are the unique roles and responsibilities of graduate students at the intersection of academia and community? Bio: Dane Allard - Métis PhD Student at UBC BURTON, JOSEPH (SFU) PANEL 5B “The Student as Revolutionary: Graduate Student Organizing and Social Movements in Vancouver” Abstract: Beginning in the late Summer of 2019, Research Assistants at Simon Fraser University launched an organizing campaign under the slogan "Research is Work," rendering their status as workers and solidarity with the labour movement explicit. Contextualizing this campaign in the history of students' trans-university activism in Vancouver - beginning with SFU students' initiative to bring their movement "off the mountain"• during the late 1960s - this paper attempts to assess the relationship between contemporary graduate student activism at SFU and social movements beyond the university. How, that is, have students framed their objectives and movements in relation to broader campaigns against austerity and privatization? To feminist and anti-racist movements? What can such an examination begin to tell us, at a broader, more theoretical plane, and with the objective of contributing to a foundation for comparative analysis, about students' role in a movement against the neoliberal university? Against capitalism and other forms of oppression? Bio: Joseph Burton is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Simon Fraser University. His research addresses the history of anarchism in the United States, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the category of the worker-intellectual across the twentieth century. CAPUTO, EMILIO (UNBC) PANEL 4C “And In Their Image, Man Made God: Masculinity, Hierarchy, and Obedience in the Medieval Spanish Military Orders” Abstract: Sexuality and war occupied much of the discussions surrounding the new knighthood that originated in the Holy Land in the twelfth century. Seemingly antithetical to Christianity, these soldiers of Christ blended monasticism with a secular tradition of violence. Together, these incongruous worlds formed a masculinity known only to the military orders. While gender studies is not new to the military orders, few scholars have addressed what it was to be a man in a world almost entirely devoid of women. Further, distinct regionalism in Spain offers scholars a new view of how the orders were shaped by the places they inhabited. The unwashed Templars are the ideal, living in chastity and obedience to God. Yet in Spain, a land dominated by frontier society, masculinity in the military orders was more pragmatic, inducting children and married men. My talk will challenge established academia about a crusading masculinity by using the Templars and the Order of Santiago as a case study of how frontier life altered an established tradition, creating a new regional knighthood that more closely resembled secular masculinity. Bio: Emilio Caputo is an alumnus of the University of Northern British Columbia. In 2019, he graduated with Honours in History and minors in Political Science and Philosophy. He was also the Valedictorian of the College of Arts, Health and Social Sciences. In his undergraduate he completed an honours thesis titled "Masculine Reconquests: Military Orders in Castile and the Crown of Aragon, 1085-1250", bridging a gap in the literature between the Spanish military orders and the study of masculinity. He has gone on to present his research at conferences and now works actively to promote historical research more broadly, most notably co-founding the Northern Historical Conference. CHENG, JUSTIN (UBC) PANEL 2C “Circumstantial Nationalism: Hong Kong Chinese Merchants in the Canton-Hong Kong Strike of 1925-1926” Abstract: In the years before World War II, British Hong Kong functioned as a major conduit for Sino-Western movement of goods and people. Chinese merchants benefitted greatly from Hong Kong's trading position, and became part of the established elites. Tension, however, broke out between China and the West from time to time. One such instance was the Canton-Hong Kong General Strike of 1925-1926, during which Chinese laborers went on strike against Western-owned interest and imperialism. Many Chinese merchants stood with the colonial government and contributed in settling the Strike in order to resume the business. This Strike, however, was atypical in that it was utterly a patriotic campaign. Such confrontation tested the sense of identity of Chinese merchants who stood in between the Chinese and western sides. This paper reveals the flexible, circumstantial, opportunistic, yet multi-layered characteristic of the Hong Kong Chinese merchants' identities, which were performed to best fit their interest depending on the circumstance, and reflected the layers of being a Chinese in regard to cultural and political levels. Hong Kong Chinese merchants were taking advantage of their Chinese ties and western training to situate themselves nationalistic Chinese persons and loyal British subjects at the same time for self-interests. Bio: Justin Cheng is an MA student in the Department of History at UBC. His research focuses on Hong Kong. In particular, he is interested in the relationships between the government and the Chinese merchants in the early twentieth-century. He hopes to delve into the relief effort of the government and the charities ran by the Chinese merchants at the time of natural disasters, such typhoons. More broadly, through the lens of relief effort, he hopes to understand the interaction between the government and the Chinese elites, hence to explore the position of the Chinese elites in Hong Kong. In addition to working as a teaching assistant, Justin is also a Student Associate at Hong Kong Studies Initiative (HKSI). Page 2 of 20 CHIA, STANLEY (UBC) PANEL 2C “Oral Histories of the May 1969 Race Riots in Kuala Lumpur” Abstract: Roundtable with Justin Cheng and Nathan Gan. This panel examines how three "protests" took place in disparate forms and how discontentment was articulated in East and Southeast Asian contexts during the 20th century. The panelists take a bottom-up view on different contentious spectacles by considering how local people navigated and self-positioned themselves in the face of control asserted by authorities. Our three cases of "protests"• are situated in various colonial contexts that share similar oppressive atmospheres. Justin looks into the Canton-Hong Kong Strike of 1925-1926 to understand how Chinese workers were mobilized and organized amid the hostility between the British colonial authority of Hong Kong and the Chinese regime in Canton. Nathan examines how Sinophone Muslims struggled against everyday internal-colonialist discrimination in China in the 1930s and 1940s by claiming their rights as well as mastery of particular languages. Using oral history accounts of the May 1969 racial riots in Kuala Lumpur, Stanley examines the ways in which rumour, self-defence groups and inter-ethnic cooperation were significant in how ethnic minorities survived political violence. Overall, the panel attempts to revisit the organizational bases and cultural repertoires for protests and thereby re- contemplate the definition of protest itself. Bio: Stanley Chia researches political violence in Southeast Asia as a Master's student in History at UBC. His other research interests include international lawyers, Chinese diaspora and decolonization in the 20th century. DOYLE, JENNIFER (UVIC) PANEL 1C “’As a long life promiséd’: Birth, Death, and the Poetic Alchemy of Katherine Philips” Abstract: In May of 1655, the poet Katherine Philips (1632-1664) gave birth to a little boy who died just days after his birth. Philips's grief over "little Hector" resulted in a literary response that might be considered unusual, in that she left to us not just one, but two poems in his memory. Philips's elegy for Hector was known during her lifetime: two verses of it had been set to music by Henry Lawes and it also appears in original manuscripts housed in the National Library of Wales. The church of St. Benet-Sherehog and the tombstone on which Philips's epitaph for Hector was engraved are long gone, but the epitaph itself survives in a volume of poetry published after Philips's death. Using an imagined narrative framework, this paper analyzes Philips's epitaph for her son against the backdrop of social and political restraints of the Interregnum, and how Philips's diction, metrical choices, and alchemical and Biblical allusions serve to help her process her profound grief in an Early Modern London whose Cromwellian reforms discouraged ritual and outward displays of mourning. Bio: Jennifer Doyle is an MA student in English at the University of Victoria with a background as a performing artist and director.

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