Amelia Hintzen (History)
Amelia Hintzen’s Cultivating Resistance: Haitian-Dominican Communities and the Dominican Sugar Industry, 1915-1990 is an impressive, cogently argued study based on extensive ethnographic, oral-historical, and archival research across a variety of languages. It is meticulously crafted and elegantly written. Hintzen’s work not only uncovers subaltern assertions of community, economic autonomy, and legal rights in Haiti from the early twentieth-century to the present, but it also considers the implications of these issues for the US context. It contributes strikingly to a broad range of scholarly topics, including studies of Latin America and the Caribbean, plantation culture, migration, and citizenship.
Julie Samit’s dissertation, Memories That Won’t Desert: Transnational Legacies of Francoism and the Spanish Civil War in 21st Century Novel, Comic and Film is an insightful study of historical memory in the context of a Spanish diaspora that stretches across cultural and linguistic terrains as varied as those of France and Mexico. Through analysis of a range of cultural products, Samit convincingly shifts theoretical discussion within studies on post-Franco Spain from a vocabulary of trauma to one of collective memory in which the “legacy narratives” she studies contest official discourses imposed from above. Her work contributes to the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, engaging with major theorists and shedding light on the key role of second and third generation accounts of the Civil War and Franco regime in shaping collective memory.