{"id":48,"date":"2021-03-30T09:41:05","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T09:41:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/?p=48"},"modified":"2021-03-30T14:55:34","modified_gmt":"2021-03-30T14:55:34","slug":"meet-a-fellow-danielle-stubbe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/2021\/03\/30\/meet-a-fellow-danielle-stubbe\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet a Fellow: Danielle Stubbe"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Headshot<\/a>Danielle Stubbe<\/strong> is\u00a0the 2020-2021 Mona C. Frederick Graduate Student Fellow from the\u00a0Department of History\u00a0studying the modern intellectual and cultural history of the United States. She will be giving a public lecture on Thursday, April 1 at 2 PM<\/a> entitled “Cultural Credibility: U.S. Anthropology from the Field to the Archives, 1930-1980.”<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

What is your research about and why does it matter?<\/b><\/p>\n

My\u00a0dissertation\u00a0research\u00a0puts\u00a0disparate strains in the History of Anthropology\u2014its discursive history, its intersections with domestic and international statecraft, its\u00a0ties to indigenous politics\u00a0in the 1960s and 70s, and its influence in local, state, and national museums\u2014into conversation. I reckon with the anthropological concepts of\u00a0culture<\/i>\u00a0as they manifested\u00a0differently\u00a0in each of these sites\u00a0in the postwar United States.<\/p>\n

Sometimes\u00a0as many as\u00a0fifty years on, indigenous people\u00a0kept writing\u00a0to the anthropologists\u00a0with invitations to community gatherings, inquiries about historical information, and requests for object loans, among other things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anthropologists in the 1960s in particular found that they had to confront an undergirding tension in their\u00a0discipline: that much of their institutional legitimacy\u00a0in the study of culture\u00a0had been derived from their empowerment through state\u00a0warfare, which\u00a0implicated them in\u00a0a litany of Cold War colonial projects abroad and had\u00a0increasingly\u00a0caused their research subjects in American Indian communities in particular to reject their scholarly authority.<\/p>\n

This disciplinary history all unfolds contemporary to parallel and intersecting debates among museum officials and\u00a0indigenous\u00a0activists, who oftentimes overlap with academic anthropologists, about the ownership of cultural objects and information that had\u00a0historically\u00a0been housed in\u00a0museums.<\/p>\n

Describe a discovery or a moment in your research that excited you.<\/b><\/p>\n

During the summer before I\u00a0wrote and defended my prospectus, I spent about a month\u00a0in the reading room\u00a0at the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution with the intention of following a small\u00a0group of female anthropologists who had studied under Franz Boas in the 1920s and 30s. My interest at the time had been in how different\u00a0anthropologists\u00a0approached their cultural research in the field\u00a0while\u00a0discursive ideas about\u00a0culture\u00a0itself\u00a0changed in theory.<\/p>\n

As I sifted through their correspondence, however, I was stunned by how many remained in contact with former research subjects\u00a0in the\u00a0decades after the studies had\u00a0concluded.\u00a0Sometimes\u00a0as many as\u00a0fifty years on, indigenous people\u00a0kept writing\u00a0to the anthropologists\u00a0with invitations to community gatherings, inquiries about historical information, and requests for object loans, among other things. This led me to a new question about the history of anthropological culture:\u00a0How had ideas about the ownership of cultural material changed for scientists and subjects during\u00a0the twentieth century?<\/p>\n

What was your first job, and what lessons did you learn from it?<\/b><\/p>\n

My\u00a0first\u00a0job was as a co-instructor of analog photography\u00a0to\u00a0grade school students.\u00a0The program was part of a camp hosted by the city in which I grew up that offered accessible\u00a0curricula and facilities for disabled students in the district.\u00a0Although photography is ostensibly an art form,\u00a0the job also\u00a0tasked us to\u00a0teach the students a\u00a0series\u00a0of technical steps\u00a0to operate a camera and develop their own prints manually.\u00a0As a university instructor, I\u00a0wonder\u00a0if we\u00a0might\u00a0also\u00a0teach history in this way:\u00a0with undergirding\u00a0knowledge and\u00a0skills (dates, maps,\u00a0how to read primary\u00a0sources)\u00a0used in service of a broader humanistic or artistic project. I am still seeking the right balance between the two.<\/p>\n

\n

Danielle Stubbe<\/strong> is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of History studying the modern intellectual and cultural history of the United States. Her dissertation project interweaves the midcentury histories of the advent of competing social scientific concepts of culture for American anthropologists, the institutions that supported their work, and their living research subjects from indigenous communities in the U.S. Against a backdrop of cultural politics in the 1960s and 70s, she follows cultural information and materials as they moved between American Indian communities and those whose professional status depended on them. Danielle grew up and completed her undergraduate studies in the suburbs of Boston.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Danielle Stubbe is\u00a0the 2020-2021 Mona C. Frederick Graduate Student Fellow from the\u00a0Department of History\u00a0studying the modern intellectual and cultural history of the United States. She will be giving a public lecture on Thursday, April 1 at 2 PM entitled “Cultural Credibility: U.S. Anthropology from the Field to the Archives, 1930-1980.” What is your research about…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8541,"featured_media":342,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-rpw-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8541"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":346,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/346"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/rpwcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}