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That Ginger, Anna

That Ginger, Anna

Tag Archives: UNT

Part 1: Why the Jews and Perché Venezia?

07 Friday Oct 2016

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in School and Work

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

academics, bronx, fate, God, grad school, graduate school, historian, history, history student, jewish, jewish history, jews, judaica, judaism, MA, NYU, religion, sephardim, six degrees, student, texas, Thesis, UNT, venezia, venice, writing

So, as usual, I didn’t get to follow the schedule I’d planned for starting this new series because life and that paper chaseee. But here we are now. Ok, this first post will mostly be a background about why this Catholic, Army-brat from Georgia became interested in Judaica studies (didn’t even know that was a thing until 2011) and how a seminar paper from 2012 became a thesis chapter in 2013 and has impacted my life more than I could have ever fathomed. This initial post is more about me than about Jews in Venice (if that’s all you’re here for, just wait for part two-there will be no personal stuff in that one), but I will link to my original paper and the L.A. Times article about the same topic from last year. Part 2 will be an updated summary of my paper/thesis chapter with some new material and commentary.


I am going to start by saying I knew NOTHING about Judaism. Zero. Zilch. Nada. I knew Hitler killed millions of “the Jews” in the Holocaust, that Jews didn’t believe in Jesus, and that they didn’t eat pork, but that was the extent of it. I know about Christianity because that’s the religion my parents are and therefore how I was raised (mom’s Baptist non-denominational and my dad is a non-practicing Catholic). I know about Islam because I had several Muslim friends (see also: hung out with an Imam’s son in the back of his coffee shop after school for a few weeks my Junior year) in Tulsa and I became more curious about that religion when my dad was deployed to Iraq. I’ve learned about Christianity in Sunday School since I was 3 years old and I learned about Islam through independent study, friends, and a couple of university classes. But guess what? In all my travels and all the moves, I had not ever met a Jewish person-to my knowledge.

Circa 2006 or 2007, I went to Alabama with my mom and we had lunch with her uncle. He knew I was interested in history and gave me a jump drive with our family tree on it. He was an amateur genealogist and had traced my mother’s, father’s, mother’s family tree. I never looked at the jump drive, but he passed away in the Summer of 2011 and I thought I’d better check it out. I opened up the document and to my surprise, he traced the family back to the 15th century in Bassano del Grappa, Italy! After some Googling, I saw that research had been done by other people who thought the family were exiled Jews from Spain or Portugal. I obviously thought it was cool, but didn’t really dig any further. When I started graduate school in 2011, I took a class about Venetian History and learned about the ghettos and a little bit about the Jewish population there. A new student arrived the following Fall and we became friends-it turned out she was Jewish. It just so happens that I signed up for a History of the Reformation class with her and the professor was Jewish too (hold on to your shorts, this will get trippy in a little bit). We had to come up with a paper topic and since I always tried to piggy-back my research paper’s off one another, I thought I would expand upon research I’d already done about Jews in Venice.

**Grad School pro-tip: I highly suggest finding a broad topic you like before you start graduate school and using that to guide all of your seminar papers. It turns out my broad topics were Italian Politics and Judaism. I went to two universities and took 25+ classes and was able to spider-web my papers and expand upon a few core topics each semester. (Obviously, I took unrelated courses like Carribbean History and Russian Cinema for which I wasn’t able to research anything related to these topics, but you get what I mean.) If I ever got nervous about using my own prior work, I’d just cite myself and link to my paper on Google Docs, but as far as I know there is no academic dishonesty in this approach and it will cut down your workload tremendously because you’ll be familiar with a group of sources and have already researched a topic that you can just expand or reframe in your next class.**

As a result, I wrote a seminar paper entitled: Jewish Life in Early Modern Venice: Migration, Segregation, and the Economic Necessity of Jews in Venice. I worked really hard on this paper and was proud of it. (SN: This paper contains the least amount of passive voice I could possibly use-so if you have issues reading things written in passive voice you best skidaddle on out of here now…also, this was my first real seminar paper, so excuse the errors and also realize I am NOT AN EXPERT of Judaica-sorry in advance). After some issues with my thesis committee and topic, in 2013, I decided to build upon this paper and some research I’d done about Venice in another course. This paper became a chapter in my thesis (I wrote more about it during my trip to Italy in 2014) and I got into the Ph.D. program at UNT shortly afterward. I left UNT, I had this chunck of research/writing, and a tangential connection to some family history. So, that’s the end of it, right? Nope.

In 2014, I went to Italy and got to visit all the places I’d talked about in my thesis. From the place the first Venetian settlers came from, to the town where my family came from, all the way to the Jewish ghetto itself! Later that year when I got to New York, I quickly found a job in Riverdale, an affluent-and largely Jewish-suburb in the Bronx. I began working for a family as a companion to a lady with Alzheimer’s. I soon found out that her daughter-in-law was from Fort Worth, Texas. The following year, upon meeting her in-laws, I asked them if they knew the Jewish professor who was on my thesis committee (not just because he was Jewish-I’m not that redneck-but because I knew he was an active member of the Jewish community in North Texas) and helped guide my research. It turns out my new bosses’ in-laws were very well aquainted with that professor I took the class with way back in 2012. Then, early this year, I logged into Facebook and had several notifications. 3 or 4 friends that knew about my seminar paper and thesis had linked me to the L.A. Times artilce about the history of Jews in Venice! I found out shortly afterward that I wasn’t accepted into a Ph.D. program, so I really thought that was the end of all this history stuff, but it turns out I wasn’t quiteee done.

As part of my job, I go to a Jewish Senior Center multiple times a week and earlier this year I met a member of the senior center who is an Afghani-Sephardic Jew from Israel. We became close friends, and in the past 6 months my research about Judaism has increased ten-fold (peep my IG if you’d like to see my interactions with the Jewish community in the Bronx). While I’ve branched out beyond Venice, I am still finding new sources which connect to my thesis!

So, a family tree given to me in Alabama in 2007 and viewed in 2011, led to a seminar paper in Denton, Texas in 2012, and a thesis chapter in 2013. An application to a Ph.D. program using this chapter as a writing sample brought me to New York City in 2014, where I found a job with a connection to two Jewish families in Fort Worth, Texas and the Bronx, New York. This new job led me to a Jewish Senior Center and a new friend from Israel, who just so happens to be an expert in the field of Judaica. Here I am, 4 years after writing that first paper and just last week I found yet another connection between Venice and “the Jews”…

*Next up: Let’s talk about the modern day divides within Judaism and the history of Jews in Venice/their importance to the Venetian economy!

*Probably next weekend…

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The Grad School Struggle was Real…

21 Wednesday Sep 2016

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in School and Work

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Academia, brexit, college, eu, europe, european, european union, grad school, grad student, graduate school, italian, italiano, Italy, nationalism, NYU, politics, separatism, state, supranational, transnationalism, UNT

So, I’m annoyed, y’all.

First, let me tell you a lil’ story. I grew up in Georgia and Hawaii. Two states with a rich history of separatism/self-determination movements (Georgia in the Civil War, obviously, and Hawaii after the overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani). Growing up in these two states (and with my mom’s family being from Alabama), I was well versed in the idea that people often do not feel represented/enfranchised under the rule of national governments. I remember seeing Mililani Trask on Oceanic public access programming and realizing there were many people in the United States that wanted self-determination and did not particularly feel like a national government satisfied that need. Fast forward 10 years. I went to Spain in 2008. When I got back one of the guys who I went on the trip with changed his Facebook profile picture to the words “Sinn Fein”. I was like, what is that? I found out it’s an Irish political party that advocate(s/d) separation from the U.K. and the establishment of an independent Irish nation. So, I obviously kept researching and realized separatism and dissatisfaction with national governance is a huge issue all over the world. There are separatist political movements everywhere, even in Italy. I went to Italy for the first time in 2006 and I’ve been back three times since. I fell in love. I want to live there and plan on retiring there if I don’t get to live there in my younger years. Anyway, through my research I learned that there was an active culture of separatism in Italy-both Eurosceptic movements and movements which advocate the separation of northern Italy from southern Italy. In 2011, I was accepted to UNT for their M.A. program. I concentrated on Modern European History. I was dead set on studying post-World War II European Political History and specifically the history of regionalism and the rise of separatist, self-determination movements like the Basques, Catalans, Padanians, Irish, etc.

Well, I went into graduate school completely ignorant of the process. I didn’t know anyone that had gone to graduate school for any degree other than for early childhood education. I thought I was going to be taking classes from experts and they were going to lecture me regarding what they knew about historical events and help me explore my interests. I thought it would be several hours of fascinating lectures a week, about different geographic areas and eras and then independent study about my interests. I didn’t realize my studies would be dependent on what area the faculty focused on in their own studies and I also didn’t realize my studies and pursuit of my interests would be dependent upon the faculty’s publication schedule, sabbaticals, conference presentations, travel, etc. I also was unaware I would be expected to digest 300-600 pages of historic texts every week and churn out book reviews about topics that I was not particularly interested in or that I knew little to nothing about previously, with very little lecture time (where my auditory learners at, yo?). So, I wanted to study Contemporary (see also: post-WWII) Italian Political History and it turns out no one in my department focused on that. One professor worked on WWI and WWII Italian Military History, but that was the extent of it. My favorite professor focused on Medieval Italian history and said she could stretch to Early Modern, so that’s what I went with. After writing a really interesting seminar paper about Jews in Venice for a Reformation course (I am going to tell y’all all about it in another post soon) and taking a class about crime in Venice, I decided on Venice for my thesis. I wrote about the decline of Venice leading up to Napoleon’s takeover in 1797, including the importance and decline of the Jewish community in Venice. You can guess what that meant: no study of separatism in post-WWII Europe and no Political History outside of the context of Military History.

I got into the Ph.D. program at UNT but after a few personal issues, a lack of funding (which the University has since remedied for current Ph.D. students, thankfully), and the realization that I wasn’t going to get to study the topic I wanted to study, I left after two semesters. I applied to several other Ph.D. programs but wasn’t accepted to any of them. NYU accepted me to their M.A. program in World History so I took the plunge and moved up here. NYU had tons of classes about Contemporary Italian History and Politics and several other interesting areas like Fascism, Labor History, etc. While schedule conflicts with required courses and my job kept me from taking many of the classes I would have liked (like this kickass Italian History through Film class regarding Fascism w/Dr. Ben-Ghiat), I got to take several fascinating courses. My experience at NYU was much more rewarding in that sense. I still had to read 500+ pages a week and write book reviews about topics I didn’t care about, but I got to spend much more time on topics I liked and had many more resources for studying those topics. I will say, my time at UNT really saved me when I got to NYU! Having a firm grasp of the Habermasian Public Sphere and the importance of the Enlightenment on society and politics in Europe (I was so lucky that this was my first class in graduate school way back in 2011) as well as knowing how to “graduate read” and churn out reading responses was a godsend. My first class at NYU was a Ph.D. level course (unbeknownst to me and the other M.A. student that signed up) and I wrote an end-of-term paper about the failure of transnationalism in Europe and in Italy in particular. This paper became my Masters Essay (a mini-thesis NYU requires for History M.A. students). I took other courses about the ambiguity of the definition of Europe/European, the rise of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and a seminar course about American Labor History. I wrote several papers about Italian-American Fascism, Fascism in South America, European identity, and many other interesting topics. I again applied to several Ph.D. programs before I left NYU and was not accepted to them, so that was it.

So, why am I annoyed? I got my degrees, I got to move to New York City, I have a job… Well, fast forward a few months more and guess what? Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg.com, Boingboing.net, The New York Times, and The L.A. Times have all published articles about which topics? The history of Jews in Venice, the failure of transnationalism, the coming referendum in Italy, Fascism (both the ambiguity of the definition and Italian-American Fascism), and Brexit (aka the failure of the European transnational project). All things that directly relate to or overlap with what I wanted to study or have studied and written about over the last half decade! I’m annoyed I wasn’t accepted to a Ph.D. Program since the topics I’ve written about all relate to things that are obviously publishable and would have helped advance current discourse. Please be sure to check out those articles because they are all interesting. But, now that I know my interests and ideas are valid and relevant to current discourse (one of my thesis committee members at UNT strongly disagreed, so that L.A. Times article gave me life, haha!), I want to keep writing about them, even though I am no longer a student. In the coming months, I will post links to my original papers from 2011-2016 and then summarize, fix, modify, rehash, and expand upon my theses. All of the papers relate to the current political environment in Europe and Italy specifically or historical events that I find interesting.

So, now that you know about my academic journey in graduate school, join me! Let’s talk about stuff and *things!

*1. I will write in passive voice. 2. As you’ve already noticed, I have issues with comma placement and other thangsss (Hawaii public schools for the win!) so feel free to let me know if I make a grammatical error; know that I am aware of my ignorance and the probability that I’m going to master commas or anything else is pretty slim at this point in my life. 3. I will engage in debates and appreciate corrections. 4. If you attack rather than converse that’s fine and dandy but I won’t respond. 5. These posts will not be on a schedule and I do have another travel series planned which will interrupt this one in December/January!

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Cosmopolitan Girl, Living in a Metropolitan World!

01 Friday Aug 2014

Posted by That Ginger, Anna in School and Work

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Academia, aingle, baltimore, dallas, graduate school, moving, New York City, NYC, NYU, roadtrip, student, Travel, UNT

Hey! How has everyone been? As you’ve noticed I’ve been MIA since I got back from Italy. I told you guys a few times during my trip that I had a big announcement that would kick off my next blog series, so here it is:

I WAS ACCEPTED TO THE M.A. IN WORLD HISTORY PROGRAM AT NYU AND I WILL BE MOVING TO NYC AT THE END OF AUGUST!

I will kick off the new blog series this weekend! I am renting a car and driving up there to apartment hunt this weekend and next week, before coming back to Texas for one more week.

The road trip should provide some good material to write about and I am going to try to do some Geocaching and I am going to an Oriole’s game on Sunday!

Stay tuned for an awesome 18 to 24 moth blog series which will follow my move to New York and all of the challenges that come along with graduate school and moving out on my own for the first time!

Let’s do this thing! 🙂

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