Mary Greenfield
As a westerner stranded on the East Coast, I was delighted to be able to continue my graduate studies in western history, begun at the University of Montana, Missoula, here at Yale. In my first year I began thinking about borderlands, pushing so far west that I tumbled into the Pacific Ocean. I now study technology and culture in the making of the Pacific World. My dissertation, “The Generation of Steam in the Pacific, 1836-1908,” traces the flows, linkages and overlaps between cultural, economic, political and physical power. I am inspired by postcolonial theory, transnational cultural history, new institutional economics, and the steampunk movement. Nevertheless, I seek to write this as a reasonably accessible narrative history of American power and Pacific markets. My dissertation director is John Mack Faragher. Seth Fein, Jonathan Spence, and Fabian Drixler make up the rest of the committee and are forever helpful with the intricacies of diplomatic, Chinese and Japanese history.
My teaching fields include U.S. Frontiers and Borders, International and Transnational Cultural History, Material Culture and the Pacific World, and Environmental History. In Fall 2009 I taught a Yale undergraduate seminar, “Wilderness in the North American Imagination.” My publishing credits include “Bordering Reality: Trade, Tariffs and Illegitimate Capitalism in Sumas, 1846-1919” (Columbia Spring 2010) and “’The Game of One-Hundred Intelligences’: Mah Jong, Materials, and the Marketing of the Asian Exotic in the 1920s” (Pacific Historical Review, August 2010). In addition to my mainstream academic work I served as the Director of the Jarbidge, NV Archive for three years. Over several summers, with wonderful grant assistance and a stellar, dedicated staff, we stabilized and organized the papers of that delightful, remote, high-desert goldbust town.
2010-2011 is my sixth year. I am taking my dissertation writing fellowship and dividing my time between New Haven and my home in Brooklyn, NY.
