Graduate Research at EMU

By Charlotte Slomkowski (MA in History student)

 

On March 21, Eastern Michigan University hosted its annual Graduate Research and Creative Activity Conference (GRCAC), and seven History students presented their work. The GRCAC allows current EMU graduate students to present on research that they completed as part of their coursework or from independent projects like their master’s theses. 

The GRCAC consists of two morning sessions and two afternoon sessions, each about seventy-five minutes long. Each session consists of panels of oral presentations as well as poster presentations in the EMU Student Center.

John McCurdy and Mary Lane at the GRCAC
John McCurdy and Mary Lane at the GRCAC
John McCurdy and Mary Lane at the GRCAC

John McCurdy and Mary Lane at the GRCAC

The GRCAC’s keynote speaker was Dr. Shetina M. Jones. Dr. Jones currently serves as the associate Vice President for Student Affairs at the University of Windsor. Dr. Jones is also an alumna of Eastern Michigan University, earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at EMU before completing her Ph.D. at Indiana State University.

Seven MA in History and MA in Social Science students presented their work at the 2025 GRCAC. Each student was kind enough to share a short synopsis of their research which is provided below.

 

  • Hannah Doty, "United Neighbors: Rose Bell and Community Agency" (Mary-Elizabeth Murphy, faculty mentor)

In 1968, Rose Bell quit her job as a domestic laborer to set up her organization, United Neighbors. United Neighbors provided community housing assistance to Black neighborhoods in Detroit through donated money, furniture, and other resources. Bell’s organization was a response to social welfare housing programs provided on the federal, state, and city level through urban renewal funding. Many of these city-provided initiatives and projects, as well as the predominantly Black families that resided within them, were neglected. In Detroit, public housing projects suffered from deterioration due to cheap building materials that degraded quickly over a short span of time. Additionally, city officials were unwilling to perform the necessary maintenance on buildings as they repurposed funding elsewhere in the city. Bell sought to help Black families move out of public housing projects in order to be independent from welfare housing programs in an effort to gain agency over their communities and their lives. Most of Bell’s assistance went to single Black women seeking safer options within the city, financial help in securing a place to live, and care for their children during work hours.

 

  • Deborah Fagan, "Widows, Wives, and Women of the Church: An Examination of Female Influence in Renaissance Florence" (John McCurdy, faculty mentor)

Patrician women in Renaissance Florence, Italy were confined to strict roles due to the patriarchal society that surrounded them. Despite these limitations, many were able to find ways to exert power and influence. Undeterred by being largely confined to the home, their influence can be seen through the records of land ownership, occasional influence in politics, and the commissioning of art. Through their domestic roles, patrician women also had significant influence over their family’s wealth and estates. Widows, in particular, older widows, often held considerable power. The constraints of marriage no longer existed, and their late husband’s family provided for them. In this role, widows had greater autonomy over their children’s marriages and futures. As a widow, a woman often had more power than as a wife. Patrician women in Florence were also often relegated to the church due to a surplus of daughters and a lack of dowry funds, but some chose to join the church themselves, subverting their patriarchal value of marriage and offspring. In the church, these women not only exercised personal and religious freedom, but influenced church decisions and proceedings. Patrician women in Renaissance Florence had strict societal expectations defined by the patriarchy. Despite this, these women found ways to exert power and influence within their community’s standards. This is evidenced by their roles in managing estates and familial power, shaping the lives of their offspring, and in the church either through patronage or membership within the church itself.

 

  • Nicholas Gillin, "Enforcing Prohibition in Detroit" (Ashley Bavery, faculty mentor)

This study aims to explore the influence of antisemitism on the enforcement of Prohibition in Detroit, including the reactions of the city’s Jewish community. Detroit was home to America’s most influential antisemitic ideologues of the 1920s, Henry Ford. His newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, blamed Jews for the proliferation of illegal alcohol during Prohibition. Antisemites amplified the Purple Gang's criminality to blame Detroit Jews for the widespread bootlegging of alcohol from Canada. Much of the retrospection about the Jewish experience during Prohibition revolves around the criminal activity of the Purple Gang, overshadowing how average Detroit Jews responded to the Volstead Act. I argue that systematic and disproportionate force against alleged Jewish bootleggers was encouraged by law enforcement.

 

  • Mary M. Lane, "Was Colonel Ephraim Williams, Jr., Gay, and Would It Have Mattered?" (John McCurdy, faculty mentor)

French-and-Indian War militia Colonel Ephraim Williams, Junior, was killed in an ambush similar to Hawthorne’s The Last of the Mohicans - even in the same location (although two years earlier). Williams was a colonial “river god,” who bequeathed the second educational institute in Massachusetts, purportedly because of being jilted just before his fatal encounter. But how accurate is the legend? Did his philanthropy instead result from remorse over his family’s deceit and theft of Native American lands? Was it because Williams had been unmarried? Was this related to his sexuality? This study explores the man, the times, and what might be revealed by greater scrutiny and skepticism through an extensive review of historical knowledge and a broad array of cross-disciplinary techniques.

 

  • Alan Sangster, "It Ain't Constitutional, Detroit: Jewish Resistance to Michigan's 'Little Smith Act'" (Ashley Bavery, faculty mentor)

Among national fears of immigrant communities containing radical political views that would change American life, alien registration became national policy in 1940 with the Alien Registration Act, or Smith Act. However, in 1931, the Michigan legislature passed its own alien registration statute that, while blatantly unconstitutional, targeted largely nonwhite and Eastern European communities with registration, all under the guise of public order. This paper examines how Detroit’s Jewish community, armed with legal acumen and political savvy, took the lead in challenging this state-enforced immigration law. Using primary sources alongside the works of Libby Garland and Ashley Johnson Bavery, this study explores the tensions between liberal Jewish activists and far-left organizers fighting against this state law; while they shared a common enemy in the nativist movement, they clashed over their fundamental understanding of American institutions. Jewish leaders illuminated the law’s un-American nature through emphasizing the economic and social costs in the press and in the courts. Ultimately, this paper is about more than one law; it is about the fight to define an American, and it is about those who are willing to embrace American institutions to expand that definition.

 

  • Damien Short (HIST), "Lubsan Samdan Tsydenov and Buddhist Pacifism in the Russian Civil War" (Jesse Kauffman, faculty mentor)

 

  • Charlotte Slomkowski (HIST), "Crossdressers, Queers, and Transvestites: Researching Transgender History" (John McCurdy, faculty mentor)

My research that I will be presenting on is largely based around transgender history. Specifically, I will be discussing what transgender history is, some of the major terms involved, how historians are researching transgender history and giving some examples of my own research. With the term transgender being a fairly recent invention in the course of human history it is important to go back and examine how people have transed gender in the past. Previously I attempted to look at people in Michigan between 1953-1989 but recently I have been looking at people further back in history between the 1870’s and 1930’s. This is largely because this era when it comes to transgender women is unexplored in the United States. For this research I spent a lot of time reading through current historiography before doing my own research into different primary sources relating to major terms or people I identified. Most of this research was done through archives online or old newspaper articles online. Through my research I found that there are a number of similarities to personal experiences as transgender people in the past and in the present. Things like our understanding of self and our ability to identify and be willing to explore our own identities is an extremely personal experience. I also found that the way transgender people are able to be themselves has changed drastically depending on the time period, the community, and the race of the person. Most importantly though transing, gender is an extremely human thing to do and there are records of people doing it all throughout history. Even though transgender history is a recent phenomenon and still largely uncommon for many, the history is rich if people are just willing to open their eyes to explore it.