CURRENTS: Nianshen Song (HIST) and Rebecca Adelman (MCS)

Associate Professor, History, UMBC

Dresher Center Summer 2020 Fellow

This presentation focuses on the western suburb of Mukden (today’s Shenyang, China), the capital of Manchuria, and re-examines the urbanization of this previously barren and marginal space in the early 20th century. From the lens of spatial economics and politics, Nianshen Song argues that the urban transition of this space was the result of the competition of two railway modernities: one colonial and the other nationalist. The competition eventually led to the 1931 Mukden Incident, the starting point of WWII in East Asia.

AND

Rebecca Adelman
Professor and Chair, Media and Communication Studies, UMBC

Spring 2021 Inclusion Imperative Faculty Collaborator

Alyssa Brumis
Ph.D. candidate, Language, Literacy, and Culture, UMBC

In mid-1917, during a massive popular mobilization for the war effort, a group of women artists organized themselves to learn and prototype the new technology of camouflage. We know that these women were among the pioneers of wearable camouflage for people and dazzle camouflage for ships, but much of the group's story remains, aptly, but frustratingly, invisible. In this presentation, Rebecca Adelman and graduate student, Alyssa Brumis, will discuss their efforts to uncover, reconstruct, and archive this history and begin to trace out the significance of the WRCC for understanding the intersections of gender, visibility, and militarization in the United States.