In this talk Professor Benton-Cohen examines the global impact of the Phelps-Dodge family and copper mining empire over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of the extended Phelps-Dodge family and their giant copper-mining corporation reveals a social, environmental, and labor history of global capitalism and philanthropy. PD (as it was known by its employees in its many company towns) was one of the US’s most important copper mining companies, until the largest mining merger in history, with the gold-mining company Freeport McMoRan in 2006. The extended Dodge family’s wealth and influence connect places and people seemingly worlds apart—the US-Mexico “copper borderlands”; the elite institutions of the Ivy League and New York; and US influence in the Middle East. Yet little is known of these connections, thanks to the alienation of labor and wealth, and the understated manner of the Dodges. In this talk, Benton-Cohen will discuss in particular the company’s influence on Arizona and how it used its “quiet money” to spread its influence.
Katherine Benton-Cohen is professor and director of doctoral studies in the department of history at Georgetown University. She is the author of Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard, 2018) and Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard, 2009). She also served as historical advisor to the nonfiction feature film Bisbee ’17 , winner of the American Historical Association’s O’Connor 2019 prize for best documentary film. Benton-Cohen has held fellowships from Princeton Library, the New York Public Library, American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and elsewhere, and has been a visiting scholar at Chuo University in Tokyo. She has appeared in a variety of media outlets including “Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien,” the BBC, NPR, and PBS American Experience. She is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer, on the Board of Modern American History, and on the Scholarly Advisory Council for the Wisconsin Historical Society. Benton-Cohen is currently writing a global history of the Phelps-Dodge copper-mining family, whose capitalist and philanthropic links between New York, the US-Mexico Borderlands, and the Middle East profoundly changed each region.
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As settler countries contend with the complexity of Indigenous sovereignty and land-back movements, reconciliation, and the fallout from colonial schools, the relevance of Indigenous resurgence is rising on a global scale. This presentation considers how contemporary Indigenous novels from seemingly disparate Indigenous nations in North America, Oceania, and South Asia represent resurgence: the everyday practices that seek to regenerate and re-establish Indigenous nations (Simpson 2017). Accordingly, this research asks: what do literary representations of resurgence reveal about how diverse Indigenous contexts are (re)imagining Indigenous worlds? What might be gained by a comparative approach grounded in the understanding that distant contexts and peoples are connected and responsible to one another?
Vanessa Evans (she/her) is a settler scholar and Assistant Professor of Indigenous Literatures at Appalachian State University in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Her current monograph project investigates how contemporary Indigenous novels from North America, Oceania, and South Asia represent Indigenous resurgence. This research makes a case for the essential value of comparative, cross-cultural frameworks by reading trans-Indigenously across literary constellations of coresistance comprised of novels from seemingly disparate Indigenous nations. Vanessa’s recent essays appear or are forthcoming in Studies in the Novel (2022), The International Journal of Online Pedagogy and Course Design (2022), and Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers (2024). A co-edited collection with Mita Banerjee entitled Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept was published with Transcript in early 2024. Vanessa is also a Co-Managing Editor for the Journal of Transnational American Studies.
You can download the poster for the event here.
FREE ADMISSION
The Obama Institute cordially invites everyone to a screening of Bisbee ’17 and its introduction by Katherine Benton-Cohen who served as the film’s historical adviser. Blending documentary and Western, the film explores the community reconciliation effort of the people of Bisbee, Arizona. With the event’s upcoming centennial, the town stages a reenactment of the 1917 deportation of striking Mexican and Eastern European migrant laborers to the New Mexican desert, awakening old resentments, shifting perspectives, and probing the relationship between truth, memory, and history. The film won the American Historical Association’s O’Connor 2019 prize for best documentary film.
Katherine Benton-Cohen is professor and director of doctoral studies in the department of history at Georgetown University. She is the author of Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and Its Legacy (Harvard, 2018) and Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard, 2009). Benton-Cohen has held fellowships from Princeton Library, the New York Public Library, American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, amongst others. She has appeared in a variety of media outlets including the BBC, NPR, and PBS American Experience, and is currently writing a global history of the Phelps-Dodge copper-mining family, whose capitalist and philanthropic links between New York, the US-Mexico Borderlands, and the Middle East profoundly changed each region.
You can download the poster for the event here.
This class will explore the relationship between environmental and cultural crises. What happens to culture when a keystone landscape, a landscape that is fundamental to a people’s existence and cultural identity, is damaged or even destroyed due to climate change? How does the culture respond to this crisis? How should it respond? How well can it respond? To answer these questions, we will look at the impact of disappearing glaciers in Iceland on Icelandic culture in the autobiographical text “N64 35.378, W16 44.691” by the Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason. We will also look at melting permafrost in Russia and sea level rise in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay region to assess adaptation strategies in different cultures. In doing so, we will see that there is no “one size fits all” answer to these difficult questions, and that the responses are often dependent upon the very cultural attitudes that were shaped by these keystone landscapes.
Dr. Pincikowski is environmental humanist, professor of German, chair of the Department of Global Languages and Cultures, and student of Environmental Biology at Hood College. His research focus has been on medieval German culture and literature, and now explores how different cultures perceive nature and the environment. He is the author of Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue and co-editor of End-Times in Medieval German Literature: Sin, Evil, and the Apocalypse. He is currently working on a chapter on tree nationalism in German culture for his book project on memory and the German Middle Ages. He was Fulbright Visiting Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences in at the University of Innsbruck, Austria in 2014 and Visiting Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
You can download the poster for the event here.
What are the environmental humanities? What role do they play in solving environmental issues? This lecture explores the problem of climate change through the lens of the environmental humanities. The talk will investigate American cultural attitudes towards the environment and how these attitudes impact the response to the climate crisis. In addition, we will investigate how different modes of cultural expression, such as literature, film, music, and art, suggest new ways for thinking about climate change and afford opportunities for imagining a more optimistic future. To pursue such an investigation, this lecture will introduce key concepts to the environmental humanities such as NatureCulture, the Anthropocene, and post-humanism. Ultimately, this talk will focus on the role that cross pollinating the natural sciences with the humanities will play in affecting the cultural paradigm shift from the consumerism of late capitalism to the sustainability of a green society that is willing to adapt to the global climate crisis.
Dr. Pincikowski is environmental humanist, professor of German, chair of the Department of Global Languages and Cultures, and student of Environmental Biology at Hood College. His research focus has been on medieval German culture and literature, and now explores how different cultures perceive nature and the environment. He is the author of Bodies of Pain: Suffering in the Works of Hartmann von Aue and co-editor of End-Times in Medieval German Literature: Sin, Evil, and the Apocalypse. He is currently working on a chapter on tree nationalism in German culture for his book project on memory and the German Middle Ages. He was Fulbright Visiting Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences in at the University of Innsbruck, Austria in 2014 and Visiting Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.
You can download the poster for the event here.
