Second Conference
Faculty CONFERENCE convened by Professor Susan PEARSON on “Paper People: Documentation, Identity, and Citizenship in U.S. History”—Friday and Saturday, May 2-3, 2025 in Harris Hall 108 (Leopold Room), 1881 Sheridan Rd., Evanston campus
This conference is conducted WORKSHOP style and requires ADVANCE REGISTRATION.
Panelists will not present their papers. Instead, papers must be read by the audience in advance. If you wish to attend some or all of the conference, please register here. Once you register, you will receive a link to the papers.
REGISTER: here
Paper People: Documentation, Identity, and Citizenship in U.S. History
PROGRAM
FRIDAY, MAY 29:00-11:00 Panel 1
- Sara Egge (Centre College), “Gatekeepers of Citizenship: Clerks of Court and Naturalization Documents”
- John Cheng (Binghamton University), “Beyond Naturalization: Asian Exclusion and the Racial Precarity of Citizenship and Marriage in the 20th-Century United States”
- Rachel Rosenbloom (Northeastern University School of Law), “Documents at the Border: Proving Chinese American Citizenship in the Final Decades of the Exclusion Era”
- Corinne Field (University of Virginia), “`Five Dollars for telling my Age’: Sojourner Truth’s Fantastical Age Claims as a Black Feminist Critique of Identity Documentation”
- Dale Kretz (United Teachers Los Angeles), “Papering Over Emancipation: Freedpeople as Undocumented Citizens”
1-1:45 Lunch Break
1:45-3:45 Panel 3
- Anna Pegler-Gordon (Michigan State University), “Resisting Registration, Travel Documentation, and Restrictions on Nikkei Mobility During World War II”
- Vivien Tejada (UCLA), “The Passport Business: Immigration Law and Nation-Building in the Confederate Capital”
- Emily Yankowitz (Yale University), “Witnessing Citizenship: New Orleans Seamen Protection Certificate Applications, 1796-1821"
- Levi Vonk (University of Virginia), “Bodies of Work: The Role of the Corpus in Making Migrants’ Race, Gender, and Nationality”
- Andrew Wender Cohen (Syracuse University), “`If you please sir, I want…a certificate that I am a man’: Legitimizing Gender in Nineteenth-Century America”
SATURDAY, MAY 3
9:00-11:00 Panel 5
- Kathleen Belew (Northwestern University), “Sovereign Citizens”
- Nick Syrett (University of Kansas), “Proof of Age and the Erosion of Martial Age-of-Consent Laws in the Twentieth-Century United States”
- Victoria Cain (Northeastern University), “`To Prevent Outsiders from Horning In’: Commerce, Control and the Student Identification Card”
11:15-12:45 Panel 6
- Miriam Pinski (Shared Use Mobility Center), “Recordkeeping”
- Magdalena Krajewska (Wingate University), “The REAL ID Act at 20 Years: Challenges and
Strategies in Achieving Final Implementation”
1-2pm Lunch Break
2:00-3:00 Plenary Discussion