Mary Greenfield

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As a westerner stranded on the East Coast, I was delighted to be able to continue my graduate studies in western frontiers and borders, begun at the University of Montana, Missoula, here at Yale.  In my first year I pushed the border so far West I tumbled into the Pacific Ocean. I now study the U.S. and the Pacific World, with an emphasis on technology, culture, mobility and state formation. My dissertation, “A Generation of Steam in the Pacific: Ships, States, and Statelessness in an Industrializing Pacific, 1836-1922,” traces the flows, linkages and overlaps between cultural, economic, political and physical power.  I am inspired by postcolonial theory, transnational cultural history, material culture in the age of industrialization, and the steampunk movement. Each dissertation chapter is written as a close narrative study of a single, iconic Pacific steamship. My dissertation director is John Mack Faragher. Jay Gitlin, Fabian Drixler, and Jenifer Van Vleck make up the rest of the committee and are forever helpful with the intricacies of transnational and transpacific 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’: Mahjong, Materials, and the Marketing of the Asian Exotic in the 1920s” (Pacific Historical Review, August 2010). The latter was a 2011 co-winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Essay. I will also publish an article on the Pacific Mail Steamship Company’s SS City of Peking (1874) in the Winter 2012 edition of the Southern California Quarterly. In addition to my mainstream academic work I have an interest in local, public history. To that end 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.

I am currently finishing the dissertation and will submit in March 2013.