In 2020, the largest protest movement in US history happened in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In response, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) conducted oral history interviews with prominent African-American physicists, seeking to understand their perspectives on dismantling systemic racism in the physics community. Oral histories provide an alternate view of history that cannot be quantified and exists outside of the normative view of truth; was this an effective strategy for inciting change in a discipline that pedestals objective truths over subjective truths? Moreover, does limiting interviews to notable, outstanding African-American physicists limit the AIP’s ability to capture the range of truths systemically experienced by African-American physicists? This project will investigate the strengths and drawbacks of these oral histories, using primary sources such as National Science Foundation censuses and secondary sources to analyze whether these physicists’ experiences can be generalized and if this generalization holds power over the scientific doctrine of objective physical truths. The treatment of the African-American experience as a monolith dilutes the intentions of the oral histories by withering away intersectional aspects of the experience. As a result, the interviews lack an intersectional and class analysis that reflects how American physics has interwoven with a racial capitalist political economy. By providing an intersectional historical analysis of 20th-century physics, this paper will aim to rethink how large trends are historicized with individual narratives. The framework used to incorporate and critique oral histories in research simultaneously can serve as a model for future history of science research.

On the morning of September 10th, 1990, the body of seventeen-year-old Maria Soledad-Morales was found on the outskirts of San Fernando de Valle, the capital city of Catamarca province in Argentina. What followed in the aftermath of the murder and botched investigation was the Catamarcazo, one of the largest and most publicly salient protest movements in the decades following the Argentinian Dirty War, the military dictatorship that murdered 30,00 people between 1977 and 1983. In this project, I examine genealogies of resistance among women-led protest movements in Argentina from 1977 to 1992 and argue that linkages between movements contributed to a modern Argentinian understanding of gendered violence in the present day. Through analysis of newspapers, interview transcripts, and photographs, I link activist strategies of the 1977 - 1983 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo with the Catamarcazo movement of 1990 - 1991. I discuss how the Catamarcazo drew and built upon the strategies of Las Madres and introduced consciousness of gendered violence to the Argentinian public in the first nationally acknowledged protest movement centered on violence against women. The purpose of this study is to establish and recognize the continual development of feminist activism within Argentinian history and shed light on the subversive, revolutionary tactics used to combat state repression and gendered violence. By analyzing histories of feminist activism in Argentina, we can gain a greater understanding of how the strategies of feminist movements are built upon and expanded over time, and how the strategies of a past movement can be modified to serve a current movement.

The UN Truth Commission tasked with accounting for El Salvador’s armed conflict described it as a war in which “nobody won” (“nadie ganaba”). Between 1980 and 1992, the small Central American country was devastated by a civil war that claimed the lives of more than 70,000 and exposed its people to gross human rights violations committed, overwhelmingly, at the hands of state security forces. This project asks how the armed conflict in El Salvador existed within a broader ecosystem of right-wing state terror by examining one particularly crucial relationship: that between El Salvador and Argentina in the period immediately before the outbreak of war (1978-1980). I argue that the military regimes in El Salvador and Argentina took on a consultatory relationship during the late 1970s in which Argentina passed its “successful” model of repression onto key Salvadoran military officials. As El Salvador barreled toward war in late 1979 and early 1980, those very same Salvadoran officials came to occupy the highest positions of power, paving the way for an urban war campaign that looked eerily like Argentina’s “dirty war.” By pairing archival research conducted at the Historical Archive of the Chancellery (Archivo Histórico de la Cancillería) in Buenos Aires with existing scholarship on Argentine involvement in Central America, I trace the rise of Argentine influence in El Salvador from a few well-placed offers of aid to the minds of four of El Salvador’s top-ranking wartime officials. In doing so, I look beyond the Cold War in Latin America as a phenomenon imposed from above by the United States and instead interrogate the middle layer, in which Latin American states, driven by politics, culture, and their own will to survive, reproduced the Cold War along more local and regional lines.

American Samoa’s unique relationship with the U.S. today escalated throughout the 19th century and reached its official turning point when it became a U.S. territory in 1900. This archipelago comprises the eastern islands of the greater Samoan islands within the South Pacific, approximately 2,500 miles southwest of the U.S. state of Hawai’i. This study examines and analyzes the imperial history of the United States and participating actors attempting to dismantle Samoan cultural practices in food, labor, and politics. The U.S. also tries to associate a false narrative of primitiveness and ignorance with the Indigenous Samoan people. However, I will analyze white travelers' accounts and documentaries about American Samoa to chronicle Americans’ perspectives on the imperial project in American Samoa by reading against the grain. I will analyze the actions of the Samoans filmed and discussed to put forward an alternative reading of this history, highlighting their use of cultural resistance tactics to defy American imperialism. I will also use evidence from my and my family’s history in American Samoa to continue to bring an Indigenous perspective to this history and show the importance of Pacific Islanders' historical experiences in academia. With this project, I will share the importance of studying imperial histories between the U.S. and the Pacific and, ultimately, bringing an indigenous perspective to the histories that Western ideas have silenced. The preliminary results I hope to get from this study, is to contribute a literary source to academia for a history that is only transmitted through oral trdaitions. I also hope to raise awareness about the need for the study of Pacific Islander history within the academy, which is not currently offered at 4-year institutions in the U.S. today.

While much has been done to understand rape as an act of genocide and as a war tactic, little scholarly work has focused on how the intentional wartime spread of HIV/AIDS in the Rwanda genocide led to a slow genocide of the Batutsi. This work argues that the spread of HIV/AIDS resulting from the rapes that occurred during the Rwandan Genocide has led to the continuation of the slow genocide against the Batutsi people. I analyzed seventeen semi structured interviews of rape survivors that were conducted between 2007 and 2008. These interviews were published in Sandra Chu et. al. The Men Who Killed Me Rwandan: Survivors of Sexual Violence. By using thematic coding, my analysis of the interviews concluded that Tutsi women were intentionally infected with HIV by the Interahamwe so that the women themselves would be turned into biological weapons of genocide that could be used to inflict a delayed death-sentence on another Tutsi. Roughly 80% of the women who survived the Rwanda Genocide were raped, and of those women, 70% contracted HIV. With the lack of medical treatment in Rwanda for HIV/AIDS, those who test positive for the disease have 7-15 years to live before they will die a slow death. The intentional viral spread of HIV and the subsequent deaths from AIDS is a direct result of sexual violence committed as a tactic in the 1994 genocide. Despite being purposefully killed due to their ethnicity, women who died of HIV-related illness in Rwanda are not calculated in the death toll for the genocide against the Batutsi in 1994. This work expands our conception of the long-term effects of the rape campaign led by Hutu militias that intended to inflict death upon survivors of the initial violence from April to July 1994 in Rwanda.

This digital humanities capstone project builds upon my senior thesis “An Analysis of Western Perspectives on the Khmer Republic, 1970-2023”. The thesis examined Western scholarly works related to the escalating events that enabled the Khmer Rouge’s rise in Cambodia, revealing biases in how the events leading up to the Cambodian Genocide were portrayed. This research demonstrated that the roots of the Cambodian genocide stretched back years before the Khmer Rouge came to power, fueled by political instability and civil war. Through an interactive digital timeline, this project synthesizes primary and secondary sources across media reports, government records, and academic analysis, to name a few, to visually display the narratives and divergences in Western scholar’s perspectives. My main research question has changed from the start of this project, today resulting in: How can a digital timeline effectively showcase the divergences in Western scholars’ portrayal of events during the Lon Nol Era, that preceded the Cambodian Genocide? Over the past two semesters, I have been building a website to illustrate the history leading up to the Khmer Rouge regime. The website features an interactive timeline and globe, based on latitude and longitude points. It features three interlinking sections tracking: 1) Scholarly Works, 2) Surrounding World Events, and 3) The Lon Nol Era and Cambodian Genocide. By revealing biases and gaps through a visual model, it can reveal blind spots or skewed narratives. It can also track interconnections, and observe how scholarly interpretations evolved to provide context for the escalating political instability to demonstrate the Khmer Rouge’s rise in power. By uniquely challenging oversimplified narratives, this project can provide a more contextual understanding of how Western perspectives shaped understanding of the Cambodian Genocide.