Rebecca Tinio McKenna
My scholarly interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. culture and political economy. Since my undergraduate years at Barnard College, I have been fascinated by culture and capitalism—their histories, the relationship between them, how they are expressed and experienced in space and across non-human nature. I now follow these themes across the Pacific as I write my dissertation, “‘The Baguio Scheme’: United States Designs on the Philippines, 1898-1921,” and excavate the formal dimensions of “informal” empire.
I tell a history of colonial nation-building and market-making by way of Baguio, the Philippine counterpart to India’s Simla. Progressive-era urban planner Daniel Burnham, best known for his 1893 World’s Fair White City design in Chicago, plotted this hill station north of the Manila capital for U.S. administrators, military officers, and their families. I analyze the construction, use, and meanings of this retreat in colonial correspondence, private journals, photographs, postcards, architectural renderings, among other sources. Chapters visit labor on the colonial road to Baguio; a government headquarters for regiments of colonial clerks; the raising of a marketplace, advanced as an architecture of liberation; a country club and homes for colonials where officials attempted to win consent for the U.S. regime.
Jean-Christophe Agnew and John Mack Faragher direct my dissertation; Seth Fein and Mary Lui complete my committee. I have conducted research as a visiting fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Thanks to support from the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders and The MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, I have also researched in collections at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and libraries in Baguio and Manila. I have presented papers at conferences in the United States and in the Philippines, including the History of Capitalism Conference at Harvard University, the First International Conference on Cordillera Studies at the University of the Philippines, Baguio, and in June 2009, the annual conference of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations.
