Research

Counter-Memory*

​With Dr. Stefano Tijerina, University of Maine
We are developing a research project based on Kentucky engineer Maxwell Waide Smith’s photography albums from a 1907 Mexican railway project and his later album recording his involvement as an engineer for the building of the Panama Canal. There is an opportunity within these disparate nature of these two albums to de-colonize historiography of U.S. expansionism in the early Twentieth Century through Smith’s depictions made within a period of rising American imperialism. With funding from the Kentucky Historical Society.

Tijerina, S. and de Laat, S.(2018). Constructing Modernity and Progress: The Imperializing Lens of an American Engineer in the Early Twentieth Century. Ipersotria, No. XI, Spring/Summer, 24-39.

*This project is currently in development.