Berkeley Carroll is proud to announce that Upper School history educators Madeline Lafuse, Sam Markwell, and Chris Whitehead all recently defended their dissertations and completed their doctoral programs!

Upper School History Teacher and Department Chair Amber Thomas, congratulated her colleagues stating, "Everyone in the History Department is incredibly proud of Chris, Sam, and Maddy! As teachers, we strive to instill a lifelong love of learning and a spirit of endless curiosity in our students, and it’s inspiring to see our colleagues embody those values through their doctoral achievements.” Thomas adds, “All the faculty members of the History Department have such varied interests, diverse pedagogical approaches, and areas of expertise that help our department thrive. It's great that Chris, Sam, and Maddy will continue to help deepen the knowledge, research, and perspectives brought to the courses and electives offered by the US History Department."

Please read the following abstracts below to learn more about our colleagues’ doctoral research:

Madeline Lafuse defended her dissertation, “Poison in Marie Laveau’s New Orleans: A Cultural History of Food, Freedom, and White Supremacy, 1718-1946” at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. 

Abstract:
This dissertation traces the life and legend of Voodoo leader Marie Laveau to illustrate how poisonings have captured the imagination of New Orleanians from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. Rather than simply expressing racial anxieties, these fantasies of poisonings in fact supported the violence of enslavement, disenfranchisement, and imperialism while also providing slim opportunities for people of color to achieve greater freedom. When confronted with abolitionism, enslavers in New Orleans spread paternalist narratives that enslaved people loved their enslavers and would never harm them. People of color who sold food to purchase themselves or who poisoned their enslavers invoked such fantasies to disguise their resistance. Similarly, Laveau made a career out of organizing Voodoo feasts and dances for an elite white clientele, feeding into their hunger for experiences of racial Otherness. It was only after the Civil War that fears of poisoning spread and cast Laveau and other people of color as practitioners of witchcraft. The dangers of so-called Voodoo poisonings then justified the oppression of Black political progress and the occupation of Haiti in 1915. As the politics of freedom transformed, so too did poisonings evolve within a white supremacist imagination that constantly attempted to contain these threats.Yet people of color still used their culinary labor to poison white supremacy from within and get away with it.

Click here to learn more about Madeline's work!

Lafuse is currently teaching Modern World History to the 9th grade, Cultures in the Caribbean to the 10th grade, and works with students who are a part of the AdvanceSeniors Scholars Program. 

Sam Markwell defended his dissertation, “Unsettling Flows: Colonialism, Soil Erosion and Watershed Governance in the Pueblo Homelands,” at New York University. 

Abstract:
U.S. colonial settlement in the Pueblo homelands following the construction of the railroads in the 1880s generated social and environmental insecurities in the form of dispossession, soil erosion and devastating floods. By the early twentieth century, confronting the ecological and social damage caused by settler expansion potentially called the U.S. colonial project into question, giving rise to a vibrant array of Native and settler critiques of colonialism. This dissertation demonstrates how these criticisms animated the Indian New Deal, which was connected to wide-ranging efforts to reckon with the insecurities generated by capitalism and colonialism. Pueblo Indian and non-Native leaders and reformers sought to craft policies that respected tribal sovereignty and returned land and water to Pueblo tribes to ensure their security and well-being, while also creating new relations between people, land and water in the form of ecologically sound watershed governance intended to secure the well-being of Native and non-Native communities.

However, even as these critical alternatives emerged, dominant settler colonial forms of infrastructure engineering and social and environmental exploitation continued. While these dominant infrastructural formations, tethered to the rising national security state, emerged as the victors of this mid-century struggle, the history recounted here helps us to understand how that victory can be understood as both pyrrhic and incomplete. The costly social and environmental fallout from industrial, and now nuclear-powered, settler colonization accumulates and generates new and intensified insecurities in the region. By returning to the archives and debates of these watershed moments, this dissertation develops through lines from the past that shape our present moment of planetary insecurity.

Click here to learn more about Sam's work!

Markwell is currently teaching Modern World History to a section of the 9th grade, Modern China to the 10th grade, and The Social History of Truth, an advanced history class for seniors. 

Chris Whitehead defended his dissertation, “The Lake Between: Kinship and Conflict in the Lake Champlain Valley, Creations - 1775,” at the University of Virginia. 

Abstract:
This dissertation examines the transformation of the Lake Champlain Valley from a boundary between the Abenaki and Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) worlds into an imperial borderland. With their semi-nomadic lifestyle and dispersed kinship networks, Abenakis relied on seasonal migrations to sustain their people. The Kanien’kehá:ka thrived in permanent villages, cultivating staple crops and establishing a clan system to manage conflicts. The clash between these differing cultures led to frequent warfare as each people competed for resources along the borders of their overlapping territories. European officials mapped their rivalry for the Champlain Valley onto competing Native kinship systems in the region, leading to the decline of Native populations and the erasure of their homelands. Despite their marginalization, however, both the Kanien’kehá:ka and Abenaki peoples have persisted in asserting their rights to their ancestral lands.

Click here to learn more about Chris’s work!

Whitehead is currently teaching Holocaust & Human Behaviors to a section of the 10th grade, But Make it Fashion: Clothing and History to a section of the 10th grade, and Advanced American Studies with Erika Drezner to a section of the 11th grade. 

The Upper School History Department at Berkeley Carroll provides a wide-ranging curriculum that centers on critical analysis, historiography, and inquiry. As emerging historians, our students develop causal reasoning skills, understand change over time, and hone source evaluation skills through the study of history. We help students better understand the present and improve the future as critical, ethical, and global thinkers.