From Dissertation to Book, and Everything in Between: A Discussion on Academic Writing
This is a virtual event on April 21, 12pm Eastern.
This event will feature two recent winners of the UHA Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History. We'll be discussing their successes and struggles at crucial stages in the dissertation process, from framing the question, conducting the research, finding funding, getting it written, and defending it, to the reworking and publishing process that happens once you graduate. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion with attendees Bring stories of your own dissertation woes and triumphs!
Featuring:
Andra Chastain
Washington State University
Katz Award Winner 2018, “Vehicle of Progress: The Santiago Metro, Technopolitics, and State Formation in Chile, 1965-1989”
Bio:
Andra B. Chastain, assistant professor of history at Washington State University Vancouver, is a historian of modern Latin America interested in questions of urban space, infrastructure, expertise, inequality, and lived experience. Growing up in Oregon as the child of urban planners, she has long been interested in questions of cities and urban space. She earned her BA in English at Reed College, MA in History at the University of California, Berkeley, and PhD in History at Yale University. She also worked as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Concepción, Chile, before graduate school. Together with Timothy W. Lorek, she co-edited Itineraries of Expertise: Science, Technology, and the Environment in Latin America’s Long Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and the Conference on Latin American History and has appeared in the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of Transport History.
Dissertation:
Her dissertation, now book project, is titled Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City and is under contract with Yale University Press. It examines the history of the metro system in Santiago, Chile, to show how this monumental urban transportation system became a key site to build and contest power under democracy and dictatorship. It draws on archival research in Chile and France and oral histories conducted in Santiago.
Current Projects:
Currently, she is completing revisions on her book manuscript, which is due to the press in June. She is also developing a new research project that aims for a social and cultural history of urban smog in the Americas with case studies of Southern California, Mexico City, and Santiago. She will be going to Santiago in August to begin preliminary research on this project.
Adrián Lerner Patrón
Consortium for the Global South at the University of Cambridge
Katz Award Winner 2020, "Jungle Cities: The Urbanization of Amazonia”
Bio:
Adrián Lerner Patrón obtained his BA and Licenciatura from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and his MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University,all in history. At Yale, he was also part of the first cohort of the Mellon Interdisciplinary Concentration in the Humanities, centred on “The Technologies of Knowledge”.
He is currently a Philomathia Fellow in the Consortium for the Global South at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on “Ecologies in Place,” and a lecturer and research associate in Global History at the Free University of Berlin (on leave).
Before moving to Europe, he was the Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Urbanism and the Environment at Princeton University and a researcher at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.
His research and teaching deal with environmental, social, and political issues in Latin America and from a global perspective.
Dissertation:
My dissertation Jungle Cities: The Urbanization of Amazonia, studies how during the twentieth century the Amazon rainforest became a predominantly urban region. It does so through the parallel and divergent socio-environmental histories of Amazonia’s most important cities: Manaus (Brazil) and Iquitos (Peru). Jungle Cities is a comparative history that documents a central tenet of the modernization project of local, national, and transnational elites: the attempt to overcome nature, and to displace the lifestyles and peoples associated with it. The social processes they unleashed, instead, revealed pervasive interactions between cities and jungle, the complex technical and scientific challenges they imposed, the agency of local peoples, and the combination of resilience and precariousness that characterized urban life in the Global South. The dissertation encompasses the rubber boom era of the late nineteenth century and its long aftermath, the processes of what I call “precarious urbanization” and “environmental marginalization” that followed it, the formation of waterlogged shantytowns in periodically flooded areas, the comparative developmental politics of authoritarian military regimes during the Latin American Cold War, and case studies on extended urbanization and the relationships between settler colonial urban projects and the indigenous peoples and landscapes of the Amazon.
Current Projects:
I am currently working on turning Jungle Cities into a book and on a series of spin-off articles from the research for that project. I am also working on several collaborative projects: two journal special issues: one on new histories of modern urbanization in Peru and one on Latin America, as well as on a two-volume edited book about Peru from a global perspective.
My next major research project is a modern history of the Amazon River. This book continues the agenda of analyzing Amazonia not as a “wilderness” but as a region shaped by the forces of capitalism, state formation, scientific ventures, and indigenous societies as active shapers of physical and historical trajectory of the world’s greatest river.