To break down isolation among graduate students and promote the sharing of knowledge, the Colonial Society periodically convenes a forum during which graduate students give progress reports on their research thus far and seek advice from an audience of fellow graduate students and their advisors concerning problems they have encountered with their research.

The Program for the 2009 Forum

Colonial Society of Massachusetts
Graduate Student Forum,  May 1, 2009
87 Mount Vernon Street

Panel 1:  9 to 10:30
Restless Souls: Dissent and Conflict in Church and State
Charlotte Carrington, University of Cambridge, “'Secular' 'Dissent' in New England, 1620-1689”

Christianna Elrene Thomas, Ohio State University, “‘In his Arm the Scar’: Medicine, Disease, and the Social Implications of the 1721 Inoculation Controversy in Boston”

Phillip Luke Sinitiere, University of Houston, “‘The Sad Tendency of Divisions and Contentions in Churches’: Popular Religion and Pastoral Dismissal in British North America”

Panel 2: 10:45 to 11:45
Relying on the State: Government Aid to Individuals and Corporations in Massachusetts
Angela Miller Keysor, University of Iowa, “Down But Not Out:  Examining Poverty in a Time of Scarcity: Charlestown, Massachusetts, 1730-1820”

Dong Yu, Nankai University and University of Georgia, “The Early Development of Business Corporations in Massachusetts”
Comment:  Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut

11:45-12:45:  Lunch

Panel 3:  12:45 to 1:45
Experiments in Constitutionalism and Federalism
Kenneth Owen, University of Oxford, “Violence and the Limits of the Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania”

Cheryl R. Collins, University of Virginia, “New England Conventions: Experiments in Interstate Coordination”

Panel 4:  2 to 3
Crossing the Boundaries of Gender
Shannon Huggins, Auburn University, ‟The Power of Speaking:  Female Identity, Legitimacy, and Leadership in American Quakerism, 1700-1776”

Cassandra Good, University of Pennsylvania, “‘A Golden Mean’: Heterosocial Friendship and the Formation of Political Culture in America, 1770-1830”

3 pm.
Reflections and Comment