Celebrating Our Contributors #2

In the past two years, we have been celebrating members of the EHN community who, despite the difficulties posed by COVID-19, completed their degrees—and we would like to continue that tradition of celebrating our contributors’ achievements.

This March, we will once again publish a series of posts to showcase the work and recognize the accomplishments of nine EHN contributors who graduated in the past year. Today, let’s toast to Sarah Pickman, Diana Valencia-Duarte, and Genie Yoo!

Dr. Sarah Pickman

Give us your elevator pitch. What was your dissertation?
My quippy way of describing my dissertation is that it’s about “unpacking packing.” I look at British and American explorers from roughly the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, and focus on the seemingly ordinary supplies they packed for expeditions, as a way of understanding how ideas of “comfort” shaped Anglophone exploration and science, colonialism, and capitalism. I argue that that explorers made these items essential for their comfort in so-called “extreme” environments, like the polar regions, high altitude mountain ranges, and tropical environments. In doing so, they naturalized concepts of physical and psychological comfort that were in fact grounded in specific norms of bourgeois, Anglophone society. Even as they claimed to be inherently hardy enough to conquer any environment, explorers promoted the idea that white travelers were entitled to particular forms of comfort anywhere in the world. In turn, by using explorers and images of adventure in their advertisements, British and American companies naturalized the idea that exploration, colonialism, and environmental exploitation were necessary to create the goods that constituted a comfortable life. 

My dissertation is structured primarily around case studies of four different objects: rubber waterproof clothes, tents, chocolate, and first aid kits. Each chapter traces these objects from raw material to consumer commodity, and examines how they were used by explorers in the field and in advertisements back home. A fifth chapter looks at the expedition packing list as a genre, arguing that these mundane documents can tell us quite a bit about the assumptions built into Anglophone exploration and field science. Just look at the thousands of pounds of gear on these lists that needed to be transported—somebody (often unacknowledged expedition porters, who were people of color) had to physically support the weight of these colonial ventures!

What was one thing that stood out to you, a cool find you came across, or something that surprised you in the course of your research?
One surprise was how big of a role advertisements, and analyzing advertisements, ended up playing in my dissertation. Part of it was practical: I realized that if I was going to talk about Anglophone explorers as a cohort or cohorts, rather than focus on individual expeditions, I’d need to take a look at products they all used. And I wasn’t able to get into the corporate archives of some of the companies that outfitted these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expeditions, like Burberry and Cadbury, so I turned to their published advertisements instead. But Victorian and Edwardian ads are also so interesting to look at, because they’re so bombastic in their messaging, even when that message is racist or nationalistic. They really say the quiet part out loud.

There were also lots of fun individual archival finds, like a gear catalogue from polar explorer Anthony Fiala, who went on to open his own outdoor goods store in New York City, or a receipt that a British mountaineer submitted to the Royal Geographical Society for purchasing five dress shirts for an expedition, with a handwritten note saying “These are absolutely necessary.” I also found out that TV survivalist Bear Grylls is a direct descendant of Samuel Smiles, the “father of self-help books”!

Tell us a little bit about your process. Was there anything unique about how you did the work?
I’m not sure there was anything unique about my process, but like everyone working on a dissertation during the pandemic, I had to rethink my archival research. I was fortunate in that, because I was working with English-language sources, and because I was looking at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a ton of relevant digitized material I could access from home. I’m very grateful to the folks who keep repositories like Archive.org, HathiTrust, and the Wellcome Collection going. At the same time it made me cognizant of the huge challenges in making these kinds of resources accessible online, including institutional funding and the privileging of materials in certain languages.

What kept you going?
Zoom writing groups and co-working sessions! During 2020 and early 2021 especially, I joined a number of writing groups and put together a few small ones with friends, and it was so helpful to have other folks to chat with and to be accountable towards (or just to vent to). I’m not sure I would have been able to write as much without them. I also got really into audiobooks; I’d kind of gotten burned out on reading while prepping for my comp exams and audiobooks helped me get back into reading fiction again for fun without taxing my scattered pandemic brain. I thanked the Libby app in my dissertation acknowledgements! 

Dr. Diana M. Valencia-Duarte

Give us your elevator pitch. What was your dissertation?
I am the granddaughter of Colombian peasants. I grew up in a very rich country, however many people there are poor, especially peasant families. In my research, I took on the task of understanding the uneven transformations in the countryside—or countrysides—of Colombia: namely, the unjust resolution of the Peasant Question.

What was one thing that stood out to you, a cool find you came across, or something that surprised you in the course of your research?
I chose highly different peasant communities in order to write a comparative environmental history which helped me understand the effects of agrarian policies in the field. In fact, they had varied effects on different “fields,” in warm-lands, temperate-lands, and very cold highlands. I was expecting many differences but mostly found a lot of common consequences, which tells a lot about the policies themselves and the agents of those transformations.

Tell us a little bit about your process. Was there anything unique about how you did the work?
Well, my examiners pointed out that in general, Colombian history has been studied either nationally or regionally. This was the first time that regional histories were studied in parallel, and as such they highlighted the methodology as a novelty. 

What kept you going?
My main inspiration was the loyalty I owe to the peasant communities I worked with and their teachings. Going back to the sources was always a good idea. Secondly, I had supporting academic communities who kept me afloat, such as EHN, and also my writing group who were fundamental really. Before them my only company was the music, which used to worked pretty well before the pandemic. Covid-19 changed everything and made the PhD lonelier and more difficult than ever, this is when that connection to the communities was vital for the final stages of the dissertation.

Dr. Genie Yoo

Give us your elevator pitch. What was your thesis?
My dissertation situated one of the most important spice islands in Indonesia—called Ambon—at the center of multi-scalar process of exchange. It traced how European and indigenous actors on the island collected, mediated, and transformed natural, medical, and religious knowledge across the archipelago and across multiple regions, from the mid-seventeenth to the early-twentieth century. By looking closely at the overlap between ecology, medicine, and Islamic practice, I explored how European and indigenous interpretations about Ambon’s natural world changed across shifting boundaries of science, medicine, and religion; how early modern herbals and natural historical texts came to inform modern colonial bioprospecting activities; and how modern colonial authorities and the indigenous elite ultimately came to associate the Moluccas as the classical locality of VOC commerce and spice cultivation. Reading for convergences and divergences across European and Asian sources, I highlighted the transformative influence of cross-cultural exchange on both European and indigenous knowledge formations.

What was one thing that stood out to you, a cool find you came across, or something that surprised you in the course of your research?
Many of the indigenous sources I worked with surprised me. Since 2017, I’ve been studying a particular genre of Malay- and Arabic-language manuscripts called the “book of medicine” (kitab tibb/ kitab obat-obatan/ kitab mujarrabat) from different parts of Sumatra, Java, the Malay Peninsula, Buton, and Ambon, mainly from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. These manuscripts were compilations of recipes for healing everything from common illnesses, like skin rashes, headaches, stomachaches, to exorcising evil spirits from the body, alleviating psychological disturbances, and using aphrodisiacs. They commonly listed botanical ingredients and spices from the Moluccas, like cloves, nutmegs, and mace, showing how patterns of commerce and cultivation from an earlier time period had a lasting influence on medical and ritual practices across the vast archipelago. I tried to tease out a story of human engagement with the natural world in relation to medicine and religion through the lens of language. For instance, I analyzed a medical recipe in Malay that included the name of botanical ingredients in Dutch and Latin, Chinese, and Arabic. This simple fragment fascinated me because it reflected not only the diversity of the medical marketplace and the influence of inter-regional commerce and medical traditions, but because it also gave me a glimpse of how nature as commodity and nature as a source of healing were conceived and manifested through language.

Tell us a little bit about your process. Was there anything unique about how you did the work?
I don’t think my work is all that unique. There are many wonderful scholars working at the intersection of botany, environment, medicine, and religion. Scholars who work on early modern Latin America and Europe, for instance, have been particularly inspiring. As a historian trained in the region of Southeast Asia, it has been drilled into me since I was an undergraduate student that I need to study local languages. Personally speaking, this brings me immense joy. Languages have the power to open up new worlds and perspectives. Of course, it is also political: who am I to say anything about this region that is not my own? The least I can do is learn the language as best as I can—and this, too, is an ongoing, never-ending, and fascinating process. What this training allowed me to do in the dissertation was to look for convergences and divergences between European and Asian manuscripts, to read along and against the grain of these texts, first individually then in comparison, across space and time. I am still exploring this methodology as I revise the dissertation into a book.

What kept you going?
I would not have finished without the support of my partner, my friends, and colleagues. The community really matters! I also learned to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty, which helped me to finish despite feeling like there was always more to research, to read, and to write. History is never complete, but the dissertation has to be at some point. Keeping this in mind and surrounding myself with inspiring books and people kept me going in the last years.

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*Cover image: “Amphibious Thinker” by EHN’s content editor Evelyn Ramiel.

[*Cover image description: An artful collage of different overlapping and layered images of pictures and objects. In the background, there is a white spiral notebook, overlaid with clippings of printed texts that are geometrically arranged. There is also an airplane ticket, a picture of a pair of scissors, as well as a cutout of a brick building with many windows. At the center of the image lies a royal blue seal, with icons of the four seasons, a clock, and a desk with the silhouette of a graduating student in their academic robe, reading a book. In the foreground and at the bottom of the image, there is a bright pink lizard with purple polka dots and a layer of soil.]