Zet Forward Transcripts

Alan B Delozier   1:27

Hello and welcome to ZET forward, a podcast celebrating authors and other individuals who are involved with projects for the benefit of Seton Hall University and the world around us.

My name is Alan Delozier and I'm proud to welcome our two guests for today and let you know more about them. We will start in alphabetical order. First, it is a pleasure to introduce Dr. Anne Giblin Gedacht who serves as an associate professor in the Department of History at Seton Hall University, Dr Gedacht is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where she earned her A.B Diploma in Asian Studies and History prior to earning a master's degree and a Doctorate in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The research expertise of Dr. Gedacht focuses primarily on the social and cultural history of modern Japan between 1852 and 1953, with a specific interest in Japanese migration, regional identity, formation of that land, expatriate identity, disaster studies, dark tourism, cellular colonialism, they should build memory studies and folklore studies, in particular.

Dr. Gedacht teaches both upper and lower division classes on World Asian and Japanese history here on campus.
 

Some of the favorite courses she has designed include the following titles: global food history; Medieval Monsters, a Japanese history; age of the Samurai, Japan's Pacific Empire; and Japan’s, Modernness and monsters.
 

She was honored as Seton Hall University College of Arts and Sciences teacher of the Year in 2020.

Dr. Gedacht has written various (peer reviewed) articles that have appeared in the Journal of Social History, and the Japan Studies Review, with additional scholarship initiatives that we look forward to hearing about within the course of our interview.

Her latest book, entitled: Tōhoku and Bounded Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject, in prewar Japan, was published in December 2022.

This work examined the domestic history of Japan using a global perspective with case studies in the Philippines, colonial Manchuria, Canada, the United States and Brazil.

Next, it is my pleasure to introduce Dr. Kirsten Schultz, who serves as an Associate professor in the Department of History at Saint Paul University.

Dr. Schultz is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a dual degree in history and political science prior to earning a master's degree; and her Doctorate in History at New York University.

Dr Schultz actively teaches various courses related to the history of Latin America and has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including ones sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies; National Endowment for the Humanities; and the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, among others.

The research expertise of Dr. Schultz focuses primarily on the History of Iberia and Latin America. As an undergraduate exchange student at the Complutense University of Madrid about a couple of years, and you can give me the correct pronunciation: “Comp lu (loo) ten se (say)” and then which is in Madrid per book Tropical Versailles, published in 2001. Examine the ways in which the move of the Portuguese Royal Court to Rio de Janeiro and 1808 transform understandings of monarchy and empire.

Additional scholarship for Dr. Schultz includes the publication of various book chapters, NPR, reviewed articles, and such journals as Hispanic Review, along with slavery and abolition, among others, which we look forward to hearing about as well.

Dr. Schultz latest work, From Conquest to Colony, Empire to wealth and difference in 18th century Brazil, was released earlier this month.
 

It is a real great pleasure to have both of you here. Warm welcome and it's like when advance for sharing more of your activities, interest and respective works. What inspired you to write your respective books?

Anne Giblin Gedacht   5:46

I was told you when I first started my graduate program, by one of my advisors, that when you choose the topic of your book, make sure that it's something you can live with because it becomes another member of your family and you have to commit to it. In my case, well over a decade, about 15 years, I was working on this versus the dissertation.
 

I had taught English in northern Japan, I fell in love with the region, and I figured if I was going to be dedicating myself to really trying to understand an aspect of Japanese history, it should be at least somewhere I want to hang out.  I started off knowing I wanted to research the Tōhoku region because of my time there. I had picked up the Tōhoku dialect which, while to the surprise and dismay of my Japanese language instructors, was useful for research, but not really something that they encouraged me to speak regularly.

It's a very provincial dialect of Japanese, but it did help with the research, and while I've been in Japan living in that region, I was always surprised by how everybody would tell me; “Oh, I'm so sorry you're going to live in the Tōhoku region, but you didn't get somewhere cool like Tokyo or cultural or Osaka.”  And I was like, ‘no’ they're like, “well, you're gonna be living in farmland.” I'm like, ‘I'm from Wisconsin. I know farmland. I can do this.’ But when I got there, I took pictures and sent them home and everyone's like, wow. So, are you are you in Tokyo now?

I'm like, no, this is Sendai.  Like this is a very modern place.
 

Yes, there are farmers there, but that doesn't mean that they're not modern. And I wanted to ask questions about why is there this stereotype of the entire region as being a provincial hinterland? Why when they translate books into English into Japanese from English, do they translate slave dialect? Why do they translate the fool in Shakespeare? Why do they translate that into Tōhoku, then?

Tōhoku dialect. And so that's where my research really started was a question I just personally wanted to answer and willing to dedicate a chunk of my life to do again.

Alan B Delozier   8:15
Excellent. And to you Kirsten.

Kirsten Schultz   8:17
First of all, thanks for the invitation to chat with you, Alan, and especially with my colleague Anne. You mentioned Alan that I had written a book some time ago that was about the transfer of the Portuguese court during a major Atlantic crisis precipitated by Napoleon's invasion of Iberia. And that book looked at how, among other things, how people living in Rio, and people who remain behind in Portugal, grappled with what it meant for a sovereign to live in a territory that had been, at that point, described as a colony, right, that that it was impossible to conceive of Brazil any longer as a colony. Because now it was, it became the center of empire, at least briefly.

After I finished that, I worked on some other things, but I kept coming back to a question that I had thought about as I was wrapping up that project, which was that I became curious about when it was that the Portuguese began to call Brazil a colony when it was that they became to perceive Brazil as a colony.

And I came across the work of some Brazilian historians that were also interested in this question that actually was a kind of fairly recent thing, right?

That is, it wasn't from the beginning of Portuguese settlement in the in the in the 16th century, it was rather in the 18th century that they started to think about Brazil in this way, and so I was interested in that.

I was also, you know, in the wake of that earlier research project, I remained really interested in what we might call the sort of political history of slavery. And as I kind of also, I've been working on this for a long time, like probably around 15 years too.

At a certain point, I understood, or I started to think about the connections between those questions.  that what did it mean that Brazil was a colony? What did it mean, that Brazil was a space or a colony that was overwhelmingly dependent on enslaved African labor?
 

So, among other things, the book sort of grapples with the connections. That that surface and the answers to those questions.

Alan B Delozier   10:57

That is excellent, Kirsten.

It is really great to hear how historians put together their passion or inspiration and spend so much time with the details, which is so important for the readership now talking about, not only how you came into your respective projects, but what kind of resources did you use to make these publications come to actual fruition?

Kirsten Schultz   11:27
I'm curious to hear what Anne says, especially since our books are coming out at the same time, which means that we were sort of going through this protracted research project process at the same time.
the resources that I used were the kind of traditional ones that that historians have used for many decades.

That is, going to archives and understanding the kinds of archival documents that would address the questions that I was interested in. In this case, because I'm working on the 18th century, I used a lot of Portuguese archives and libraries, where there are very large repositories of correspondence that was generated both official and unofficial correspondence going back and forth between Portugal and Brazil.
But I was also, because I'm, you know, I had this earlier experience too based on or earlier research experience based on archives. I was struck how, over the course of the time that I worked on this book, I was really able to benefit also from digitization of archives. It was really striking to me.

For example, I have used in many for many research projects a great repository of rare books at the John Carter Brown Library and now that almost all of the Brazilian Luciphone materials the rare materials are available digitally I was able to use that library again. I used another library. I used a library at Catholic University called the Oliveira Lima Library, which is really, I think, an unsung resource for Portuguese and Brazilian materials that also digitized it's a pamphlet collection. And I also was able to digitize a really important resource for me while I was doing the research. So I benefited from this digitization of rare book collections, but also from our archives, right. The archive there's an archive in Portugal that it has digitized.

Almost all of the correspondence concerns Brazil, so I was able to sort of use that repository and then go to the archive too in some cases to follow up to see what you know maybe wasn't quite digitized or to look at the documents., more closely in person, and it was a it was a really interesting experience.

I think that allowed me to make connections or the access to digitized resources allowed me to think about the connections allowed me to trace connections between people and events across multiple archives in a much more efficient way than I would have been able to without the digitization.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   14:59

I think in many ways, my experience somewhat mirrors Kirsten's because I started doing this as my dissertation project. I was fortunate enough to get a yearlong fellowship from the Japan Foundation, and so I spent a full year in Tokyo, but also taking trips up into the Tohoku region, doing traditional archival work, particularly because at that point they hadn't digitized a lot of the collections. So it was going up into the prefectural libraries as well as the prefectural.

Archives which are different and digging through them. But because digitization was just starting by the second half of my year, I was able to start taking more digital photography of the documents. In some ways, that was, I think, a benefit. In some ways, it was a curse because I started getting this drive to collect everything I possibly could before I left, and I didn't do as much time breeding the documents so that I could get deeper and find those connections at the time. I wound up coming home with hundreds and thousands of images of rare books. I worked a lot with memoirs. I used some government documentation, a bunch of stuff that was all handwritten, which with Japanese is. An added challenge, you know?

I asked my Japanese friends if they can read these documents and they look at me and say no, and then I go ohh OK alright. But I the other huge challenge, but yeah, so I had all these documents that I hadn't been able to work through. So it took me a long time to actually clean the documents and figure out ways to make them scannable and readable. But after that first big collection, I spent a lot of time just working through them and reading them. But the first thing I realized was because of the scope of my project. I look at immigration in six prefectures, so that's essentially saying I study the Northeast, right? That's a lot of states to be working on.

If I was doing an American project on top of that because of the nature of my research, I needed to look at them and look at immigration groups in across four continents. I was looking at immigration to Manchuria, which is in North Asia in the Philippines, in Southeast Asia. I was also looking at immigration in Canada, in Hawaii, in the United States, and so the scope became really quite large. And Brazil, actually in fact, all the Brazil stuff has all been digitized in the last like five years, which is really exciting. It became a real challenge and that's where the digitization actually meant the most to me, because I wasn't. I didn't have time to go to São Paulo, right?

Honestly, my Portuguese is not good enough to have spent a large amount of time in São Paulo. It's enough to read my documents, but not necessarily to hang out down there as much so I was able to access a lot of archival materials, particularly immigration stuff when I was there because I was doing this huge sucking up of information in Japan. I went out of my way to see where are their options were.

For example, huge amount of the Japanese migration documentation have been purchased and are on microfiche by the Mormons, so I was able to call all of these national database records from Mormon temples because they keep them all in Salt Lake and then look at them in local Mormon temples, which was not somewhere I thought I would wind up finding resources, but it worked well and I was able to take extra with funding. I was able to take trips to Vancouver and throughout Canada. Also, I did some of UBC. I spent four months down in the Philippines in Manila and then taking trips down to Davao, which was where the majority of Japanese migrants were. And there I looked at traditional documents, but a lot of the Philippine documents actually have been destroyed because of the war.

I learned a lot about studying and researching silence in the Philippines. The absence in the records and the ways you could understand that. And so, it's a combination of the fact that now a lot of the National Diet Library in Japan is online. They have all their major collection and they've worked up through the show era. We can get a lot of these materials locally, but I think the experience of being in these archives of touching the actual documents and seeing how they're organized and the thought process that's put forth in capturing and maintaining these collections really help me order my understanding of the world.

I somewhat regret that many of my students don't have that experience because when it all just becomes just a click of a button and you don't feel the old paper and you don't experience the miles and miles of folders you don't, I think have the same kind of understanding of the space of research that's done. The short answer is a lot of memoirs. A lot of books. A lot of government documentation and a lot of letters home.

Alan B Delozier   20:33
That's wonderful, Anne and Kirsten. We like the long answers too, which is tremendous. And you know what the wonderful part is? I think your experience is that you really talked to the study of history, especially nowadays and the importance of going for primary source documents, but also you know what your own experiences are in being multilingual and also just being very thorough in your research. The added wonderful part about this is that you probably found some things that were either very cool and or very surprising. You gave a wonderful overview of what you found that were some of the individual things that you found that you took with you that you included within your respective works.

Kirsten Schultz   21:18
Go ahead, Anne.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   21:19
Thank you, Kirsten.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   21:19

Thank you, Kirsten. I am I think a huge turning point for me in my research was about two months into my stay in Tokyo. I was down at Westside University and I take I took a brief two week trip up to Sendai, which is the largest city in the Tohoku region, and while I was up there, I was just literally wandering the stacks in the Miyagi Prefectural Library because, as any historian will tell you, if you find a book you like, walk the stacks and see what the book is on either side of it. There's a good chance that there's more there that your search terms didn't show.

I was walking the stacks and I came across this book and it was the story. It was this collected self-published book by a local historian, and it was titled in English. It translates into the village that crossed the Tohoku village that crossed to America, and I went: “Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I want to do!”
 

I want to see and understand the international connections because the argument in my book is that modernity isn't something that is only found in Tokyo and then was dispersed throughout the country. The argument I made is that there are many kinds of modernity and that rural modernity and regional modernity is not something that was created from the Government of Japan. It was created actually by all these outside international mobility connections. So that's the argument I make.

So it's this book called the village from Tohoku, the cross to Canada. I went wait, what? I pulled it off the shelf and I started flipping through it, and it was written by a descendant of this men, Genzaburo, Aikawa.

He basically decided in his 40s to relocate to Canada and when he did, he decided he didn't really trust the other Japanese around there. They didn't speak the same dialect. He didn't really understand them in the same way.
 

He wanted to recruit people from his hometown and bring them over to work on this salmon cannery that he created on the Fraser River. He and his partner Satho, they go over and they do that and they basically have this long story of a stowaway trip. They weren't allowed to go over, so they all sneak on board. They got caught by the Canadian authorities. There are these great articles that come out and the Canadian Press about how there is this possible invasion of Japanese on the Fraser River, but ultimately, they were allowed to stay.

He went into his neighborhoods, into his town, and he talked among his family members, and he collected all these documents. So, he had historical narratives in the front half of the book, and the second half of the book were all primary source documents that he himself had collected by literally knocking on his aunt’s door and saying let me go through your closets. And that was the moment where I was just like what? This is the golden ticket. And you are always looking for the golden ticket silver bullet, that's what you want. What was even better is that on Addison was still not only alive, but was very, very active as a public historian in Tomales City.
 

I reached out to, and I emailed him saying: “I found your book. This is amazing. You do amazing work. I'd love to chat with you,” and he said: “Come, we're having a community theater production of the story of my great, great grandfather and his trip to Canada. So come experience it and we'll chat afterwards.”  It basically opened up this vignette that I use in my introduction. I also use it a lot in my third and four chapters of this idea of the performance of internationalism and the ways in which a single small city in a territory where people think is provincial and no one ever goes anywhere.

In the100-year history in Canada is to the point where they have all of their English language instructors that they bring over. It is required by the state that you have native English speakers, they come over, they make sure they're always from this area in Canada because they want those connections. That's probably the most influential moment for me. I mean, there's cool stuff you find, like, the cover of my book is this amazing picture of, like, these Japanese only holding knives, talking about internationalism. It's like those folklore meets internationalism. It's awesome, but like that was probably the number one moment for me was the community wandering the stacks followed by this community theater presentation.

Kirsten Schultz   26:08
Because I write on the 18th century, my subjects are no longer available for to invite me to cool events like that. I mentioned earlier.  One of the questions that I was in, I'm interested in this book is has to do with how, , perceptions of the territory of Portuguese America or Brazil change. I used as I mentioned a lot of official correspondence, but I'm one of my first trips to the Olivetta Lima Library, which I mentioned Catholic University. I found a manuscript. I that was, you know, I can't remember exactly the title.
 

Now I do actually, it was. It was called Discourses on Portuguese America and I was like, And it was from the 18th century. It was like, OK, this is certainly something that I'm interested in, and I discovered that the author was someone who was really, really, really well known, a man named Antonio Ribeiro Sanchez, who was a well-known physician reformer, spent most of his career outside of Portugal but was in contact with Portuguese. Official circles became very well known in his own lifetime for writing a very, very influential treatise on syphilis, but was interested in many, many things.

Right. Including it came as a surprise to me, the imperial economy. So, I read through his discourses and they were in fact very revealing of how engaged the Portuguese were, or Portuguese speakers writers were in a kind of broader European Atlantic debate about empire, about economy, about political economy, about demography and , so that was great. And then in a conversation with the Portuguese historian about this, she turned me on to the fact that she had seen some notebooks that the same author had written that were digitized once again and in the French National Library. I looked at these. And I discovered that also, you know Anne's, you know, talked about, like, you know, your dream document for someone who's interested in tracing the history of exchange and the exchange of ideas.

I discovered a version of that dream document in these notebooks, which he had kept, which were massive, which were incredibly detailed and where he wrote down what he was reading. He would copy passages from what he was reading.

He would comment on the passages, and the authors. He was reading all kinds of political economy and history and I was able to use those documents together to think about his intervention, what it was that he had been reading and critiquing that led him to be able to lay out in such a clear and concise way his thoughts, his discourses as he called them on Portuguese America.

Alan B Delozier   29:49

It is wonderful Kirsten and the joy of discovery and actually finding about these individuals either living or deceased. Yeah, they become part of your Viber in terms of family and sharing that with the world and you mentioned the international approach and Kirsten, just by going to Portugal, France and so forth, you're really are covering a good section of the globe and making history come alive in different places. With that said, in terms of the international approach, how do you think this work will benefit individuals in other countries, but also on a general scale? How have you found your the reception to your books so far? Locally, along with globally.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   30:35
It's for you, Kirsten.

Kirsten Schultz   30:37
Well, because my book has just literally just been published, I can't really say. I mean, I'm hopeful about the reception, but I have nothing to go on. I mean, I'll say this. So I my research field focuses on early Brazil or Brazil under Portuguese rule. And , as you mentioned, Alan, right to do this.

Of course, you know the research. Not only the archival research, but the research in in reading. What other historians are writing takes place primarily in Portuguese.

Right, a little bit in Spanish too and maybe a little bit in French, but mostly in Portuguese One of the things I had to grapple with when I was doing this research was that there are few people writing in English about this time period. There's in fact there's fewer now than there were maybe 50 years ago. Fewer historians of early Brazil in the United States and the UK. That is, people that that focus on this time period, on the other hand, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Brazilian historians and also Portuguese historians working on this time period.

So part of what I hope to achieve is. Along with my kind of engagement with the archival material, which we've been talking about, is also a synthesis of a lot of really, really important scholarship that's published in Portuguese that that speaks to questions that transcend the history only of Brazil.

Questions of imperialism and colonialism, political economy. The Atlantic world. Slavery, the slave trade. There's a lot of great scholarship written in Portuguese that illuminated the questions that I was asking, and so I also tried to bring that forward into English for students. You know, as we've been talking about, right? I especially, you know, for undergraduate students, graduate students who might not be specializing in Brazil's history but are interested in some of the questions that run through the history of early Brazil as well.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   33:13
Kirsten brings up a really important point, which is that, one of the reasons I love studying East Asia as an area study, but also it kind of positions us within the university system in America as the global historians, right? We're the ones who are looking at non-European, although of course European and empire is critical within Kirsten's dialogue, but non-American because there's a lot of American historians, you know it's a relatively small cohort of us who look at Japanese history in English. There's a much larger cohort, of course that do so in Japanese, but for, you know, if I only were right, if I was in my mind, if I was writing a book just for historians of modern Japan who are interested in the northeast of Japan, there are like four of us.

I can think of four off the top of my head, maybe 6, although one of them's retiring. Maybe we're going to edit that part out. There are maybe four of four or five of us, OK? And so you know, we have to deal with bigger questions, right? And that doesn't mean that all historians don't do that. All historians absolutely deal with bigger questions, but our audience inherently isn't always located in our exact research field.

It's located in much larger conversations. , you know, for me the conversations are about population mobility. It's about ideas of what is modernity. How do we consider modernity to come about? What is the problem that we have with having these urban and rural nexus of investigation? What's the problem with really the provincialization of all of Japanese studies?

Japanese history is often a conversation about what happens on Japan proper.
The reason my book is called Tohoku Unbounded is because I study.
There are two chapters that are about Japan proper, but most of my chapters are not talking about that. They're talking about these people living elsewhere, and even the chapters about Japan proper are not about them living in that region.
It's often about them living outside of it, and so my work and the reception to my work, which was the original question. Is a bit fractured in the sense that the placement of where I was going to publish it in my book became a challenging question because it's a Japan studies book, but it deals with the historiography, the dialogue about three different continents.

It talks to American nests who look at ethnicity and migration studies, and Canadian scholars who do that as well. It talks to people in Southeast Asia about what happens there. There's, you know, materials in there about South Asia is in South America actually. And so it's, you know, there are chapters and parts of the book, but when I just when I created the book, I wanted to intentionally make it something that could be read as a whole, but could also be deconstructed so that the Americanists might be interested in my second and third chapter, the Japanese studies folks are interested in my first and my fourth chapter, the people who look at Northeast Empire, be interested in my fifth chapter.

It is part of a lot of different dialogues. My book, while it did come out less than a month ago, like not less than a month ago like yours, and it came out in December. I haven't had a lot of feedback yet because we had some issues with distribution with Brill, so I'm looking forward to getting some feedback. I have heard some feedback from colleagues who have read it and have heard me on other podcasts, and it's been positive. But right now, I think it's still in its infancy. So we'll see what happens. A lot of what we do. Is also takes place in conferences and international conferences, and the ways in which early works have of parts of my book have been shared that way, and the feedback of this village of international scholars really helped shape both the book itself and also my thought process on it.

Alan B Delozier   37:46
Right, this background is so important, and in Kirsten, and thank you and Kirsten, that was my secret reply. I know you're book just came out, but hopefully if you're gracious enough to come back on a future podcast along with you and for your next book will just keep that in mind. But I'm glad you provided like more details on you know the international effect and also historian work in terms of not only archives as you've mentioned throughout this podcast, but also the diaspora in terms of catching different individuals and different places based on your respective expertise in Japan, Portugal and so forth, Brazil. What will happen too? Which is wonderful is when your students have more exposure to your writings and so forth, along with the curriculum in general. This will be wonderful. So what are some of the things that maybe some of the way you mentioned some of the historians, the, the rarity and the uniqueness and specialists of having American study different cultures abroad, what are some of the things you tell your students in terms of what their specific interested are?

Do you have any who are interested also in Japan and or Portugal, Brazil and even just specific examples of what you teach your students in terms of how to follow or reads and what they want to study in the future? My long winded question to provoke your wonderful answers today.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   39:20
Learn the language. Spend every single second that you can in undergraduate, and then when you hit Graduate School, working on it because. Japanese is not an easy language, but it is a language that people are capable of achieving proficiencies in.
It's a joke among Japan studies folks. The historians are terrible at the language to which our responses. Historians, I'd like you to read this document from the 1840s, and then all of the modern language people are like, never mind. Uh, but we're readers. In many ways, before speakers, but when you're actually in Japan doing research, you hack a speak. You have to be able to navigate and negotiate those archives.

I've had some students in the past with a passion for Japan, also for Korea and China, and when they come and ask me about graduate studies, my first reaction is how much language have you had and how dedicated are you to continuing it?

I'm someone who the language was very hard. It does not come easy to me. Home to speak foreign languages. And so it was always a challenge. But you know, first and foremost, you know, as Kirsten and I just expressed, yeah, when I'm writing a book on Japanese history, the bulk of the conversations that I have to have both in reading and spoken form is in Japanese. That's where the primary sources are, but that's also where the secondary sources are. That's where the knowledge is, and I think that it's incredibly important to take that and to use the hard fought language abilities to share that with native English speakers or people who can read the English language. Books that Kirsten and I produce. It requires a deep level of dedication to doing that and also an understanding of your own limitations and abilities. So, I think first and foremost, if I was talking to an undergrad, I'd say you need to hang out in the language, literatures, and cultures departments, spend some time with them and get your fingers all pruny in the language, because that's where it starts.

Kirsten Schultz   41:37
So I will second that of course, right, I think it is, it's a, it's fundamental, right, UM, in, in, in the ways that I've described, right that you have the ability to. To follow your interests into sources that are not necessarily in English, I've noticed though, sort of going back to the student and you or the undergraduate classroom, I've noticed at Seton Hall. Especially in the last maybe five or six years. I mean, it's been emerging slowly, but in the last five or six years I've noticed many more students. Of Brazilian, and Lusophone ancestry of course.

We're very close to the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, which is historically a very important Portuguese immigrant neighborhood. That now is also home to many, many Brazilians, so I have students who have this personal uh connection that want to know, you know, more about Portugal and Brazil because they've heard they've heard stories, or they they've had the opportunity to visit. Returning to see family and so on. I teach a lot of courses that are framed around the history of the region of Latin America, and I also have a lot of students who have connections to that region. Personal connections to that region and one of the things that I also try to convey about how to approach it is particular to the region of Latin America. Is that Latin America is has been shaped by so many of the same forces that have shaped U.S. History. The massive enslavement of African people, the dispossession of native peoples, massive immigration as Anne has talked about.

And so, we are studying Latin America, you have an opportunity to sort of think about the things that have shaped the forces that have shaped the United States from a different perspective. As well as to, you know, to understand, you know, the divergences right where the experiences of people living in that region diverge from pharma, our own and of course, the intense connections, the historic connections between the United States and Latin America that shape the experience of Latinx people in the United States today. So, that's a that's a long-winded answer to your question, but that's some of some of what I how I think about the connection between my research and students in the classroom.

Alan B Delozier   44:36
Great. That's wonderful. Kirsten and Anne, I tell you from personal experience, but also when you say about language is so important and it's something that, you know, really brings it home in terms of the original documentation, the primary sources and the good part is in terms of not only teaching, but these individuals are also you're building. You know the historians for the next generation, so your efforts are really important. And so this really helps in terms of giving more perspective on what you do, not only through your teaching, but also through your writing and think, wading back into writing. What are some of the projects that you have on the horizon that are coming and come to the fore in the near future? So, we can read more about what you have discovered and want to share with the world at large. No pressure.

Kirsten Schultz   45:31
Yes. I'm reminded of a comment that a colleague of mine said to me many years ago after I published my first book was that it's congratulations. You've published your first book. Now you have to write another one, so here we are. Now I have to write another one, so I am you know, I think that that my current research project is still sort of taking shape. But once again, as was the case with this book, by the questions I'm thinking about now are based on things that surfaced while I was doing the research for this book that I just felt were too large or that deserved their own sort of treatment. I didn't get a chance to really think through was as thoroughly as I wanted to. Now I'm thinking about the relationship between gender and mobility in the Portuguese Empire.

I'm trying to decide whether or not I will make that a sort of broad chronological story or whether or not I'll settle again around the 18th century. One of the reasons I got interested in that question has to do with encountering some archival correspondence and some scholarship about women that went back and forth between Portugal and Brazil, both enslaved African women, but also Portuguese born women and how they had to manage assets in some cases or how they had to manage, especially assets in the context of widowhood. So, I'm thinking of how I will combine. My interest in the relationship between political economy and other experiences, social cultural experiences. In this case focused or through a more gendered analysis.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   47:50
For me, I got the same advice as Kirsten, which is your book is out great.

Where you going next? Kirsten is where I had the second book out, and but where I am is I kind of have been dividing my next step research in two different ways.

One thing is an ongoing research project that I have with a member of the Anthropology Department faculty here at Seton Hall Dr. Cheree Quizon. She and I are working on a project where we're thinking about the way of archiving and using archival methodologies on very contemporary, or at least within the last for historian, it's contemporary. Then the last ten years or so, issues relating to natural disasters, so the project that we're doing is looking at for me actually it was a disaster that happened during my research.

I was not. I had just come home from Indonesia and a research stint in Indonesia and the Philippines, so I wasn't present, but there was a huge earthquake and tsunami and nuclear meltdown in the Tohoku region of Japan, which is the region that I, of course, wrote the book on what happened in 2011 and the questions that Dr. Jason and I were talking about was how do we get to the voices of? Populations that are usually unheard of. How do we get to hidden voices behind the day-to-day experience of these natural disasters? We're pairing that disaster in Japan with the Super Typhoon Haiyan or Yolanda as it's called in the Philippines, and we wanted to see if we could use digital humanities to create an archival database where we might be able to access some of these voices.
 

We've hit some bumps in the road, but moving forward we're hoping to continue to work, particularly on the Philippines side with that to see if there are any ways that we can do that and building off of that project. Actually, I think I'm going to incorporate it into my next book project. A part of it,  for me, I spent about a decade in Graduate School living and working abroad. My partner and I both are historians.
 

He's a historian of Southeast Asia, and so we time shared our archival research, which allowed me to live in between that and him working abroad at me, working abroad.

We lived in about 7 countries over the span of a decade, and I began to really think about expatriate identity. What does it mean to be an American who has lived in all these different places? Because you never really can go home in the same way. So my next project is looking at expatriate identity, trying to understand over the span of about 70 years using thematic chapters. What it means to be abroad and how that shapes identification with your native place.

And so one chapter is going to be looking at natural disasters and the experience of natural disaster while abroad. , because as somebody who is not from Japan, I did experience the Tohoku disaster abroad and seeing the towns that I had lived in be absolutely decimated and the school used to turn to work in become a morgue very much shaped my own experience. Not that it's in any way equivalent, but it was still something that I was talking to other friends of mine who are Japanese, who were not there when that happened. You know, how does that help shape your understanding of your nation while you're abroad?

So, one chapter will be looking at natural disasters over a long delay looking from 1905 up through 2011. One chapter is going to be about dark tourism. The experience of visiting historical sites abroad, where perhaps your nation has culpability and how that helps shape identity processes of experiencing in these other spaces. Political disruptions when you are not at home and how people experience that, but it's it will be looking through the lens of the Japanese, both immigrant groups as well as Japanese and Japan proper. The experience and immigrant groups within Japan of how they experience this. That's my next project.

Alan B Delozier   52:31
I'm just hopeful and wishful in terms of having more scholarship from both of you.
So that's the thing too, in terms of following up in terms of your next steps and in terms of like offering further scholarship, I mean  within their fields of expertise and then sharing that again in the public, I'm all about sharing in terms of perspective. So, this is why I'm really happy to talk with both of you in more detail.

My major question is basically where can we find the books and also how do we find you online or whoever might want to contact you to gain further insights not only from this podcast but also in terms of other works that you have written and will write in the teacher.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   53:18
Well, you can walk into Walsh library and you can go to the second floor and you can go to the faculty books and the library has indeed procured a copy of my book there. So, I would recommend that, , if you're trying to get a copy of Tohoku unbounded. You also can go to through Seton Hall. You can look at my faculty profile page and there you're gonna see the contact information for me.

I am thrilled to have anyone who is in the Seton Hall community drop by my office. We can chat about Japan or about, I don't know, whatever you feel like, I suppose hopefully related to history because otherwise I'll be very confused. You can always reach out to me at anne.gedacht@shu.edu. You also can find on there a list of my publications, which you're welcome to utilize the links there to find them.

Kirsten Schultz   54:24
You can swing by the 3rd floor of Fahy Hall on our lovely South Orange Campus where you will find both Anne and I in our offices. Often, we all, as Ann mentioned, have faculty profile pages. So, you can find mine by searching my name and the search box on the website. You can email me kirsten.schultz@shu.edu my book is available from Yale University Press. You can go to their website and other booksellers, and I understand that the Seton Hall Walsh Library has also ordered a copy.

It will be soon joining hands on the faculty publication shelf, and I like Anne. I look forward to any comments or conversations that you'd like to have about Brazil.

Alan B Delozier   55:24
Thanks so much for your plugs and Kirsten, it's always good to come to Walsh library and this commercial message has been brought to you by these wonderful faculty who have taken their time and have shared their expertise with us and just even on a personal note, Kirsten and are two of my favorite individuals who I've worked with extensively over the last few years. And in addition to being top flight scholars, they're just wonderful individuals.  Dr. Gedacht, Dr. Schultz, and hopefully we'll have you on in the future episode, but in the meantime, my name is Alan Delozier Thank you for joining us for this edition of Zet Forward.

Kirsten Schultz   56:24
Thank you, Alan.

Anne Giblin Gedacht   56:25
Thank you, Alan.