Twenty-Five Years of Ohio Valley History: Filson Institute Roundtable | In Person

Showings

The Filson Historical Society Fri, Jun 27 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Description

The Filson has offered research fellowships for decades; these fellowships provide the opportunity for scholars to do history by exploring the historical narratives available in the archives at the Filson and presenting their findings. This year we have recrafted the program to a create a more supportive environment for the fellows through a one-week cohort program, the Filson Institute. The week will culminate in a public round table, ensuring that the Filson’s community benefits directly from the work of these scholars in the Filson’s rich holdings. This year’s Institute topic recognizes that in 2025 the Filson commemorates a quarter century of institutional commitment to studying Kentucky in relationship to its neighboring states in the Ohio Valley, as marked by the publication of Ohio Valley History, the Filson’s peer-reviewed academic journal co-published with the Cincinnati Museum Center and the University of Cincinnati.?Join us on Friday, June 27 at noon for a public roundtable which will pose questions about new discoveries in the Filson records, the broader context of the fellows’ larger research projects, and—most importantly—the contemporary community relevance of the research.  

The Filson Institute 2025 cohort includes:

Dr. Joe Lockard, Associate Professor in the English Department at Arizona State University. His project seeks to open an informed discussion of early literary culture and its historical development in the Ohio Valley through the lens of George Dennison Prentice’s often forgotten legacy as a poet who cultivated a literary circle in Louisville and Kentucky.? Prentice’s nature poetry, the work of an intellectual raised in Connecticut and encountering a new landscape, sought to territorialize an early ‘west’ amid US geographic expansion. 

Dr. Patrick Doyle is an historian of the United States Civil War who currently holds the position of Lecturer in Modern American History at Royal Holloway, University of London, in the United Kingdom. His research project, “Officers at War: Rethinking Southern Masculinity, Honor, and Violence in the Civil War Era,” will offer the first in-depth study of this culture of conflict by examining a number of duels/feuds, their wider context, and their postwar legacies. He plans to microhistorically investigate four or five particularly compelling and illustrative feuds and situate them within the wider milieu of the mid-nineteenth-century US South, addressing wider questions about the contested nature of masculinity in mid-nineteenth-century America, the South’s honor culture, and honor-based violence more broadly.  

Anna Henderson is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Northern Illinois University, currently completing a dissertation on resistance against slavery among older enslaved people in the early republic and antebellum United States. Her project will examine flight and resistance in the borderlands of Kentucky and Ohio, revealing the level of resistance by detailed evidence on how older enslaved people resisted in various circumstances and under a myriad of personal factors such as physical ability and familial obligations from the mid-eighteenth century through emancipation in 1865. She will assess how the quotidian and extraordinary acts of resistance of older enslaved people impacted their communities and the system of slavery. 

Sammy Roth is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation is the first critical ethnographic study of competition dance and first full-length scholarly project to center adolescent performers in the US South and the Ohio Valley region specifically. Following dance and performance studies approaches to the performativity of race and gender, her analysis foregrounds complexities in local practices, which both incentivize performing according to racial and heteropatriarchal power to win dance competitions and provide joyful opportunities for self-expression and community-building. Competition dance then demonstrates how oppressive social hierarchies can be naturalized and implicitly expressed through trained bodily habits, aesthetic ideals, interpersonal expectations, and political economic investments.