Pembroke Student Awarded Prestigious Research Fellowship by the Gilder Lehrman Institute

Congratulations to Pembroke student Benoit Mes (2021, History) who has been awarded a prestigious research fellowship by the Gilder Lehrman Institute! We asked Benoit to tell us more about this fellowship and his undergraduate thesis research topic. He shares:

"I am incredibly grateful and very excited to have been selected by the Gilder Lehrman Institute to receive one of their research fellowships in American History. The short-term research fellowship enables undergraduate students to conduct research in New York at the Gilder Lehrman Collection, a repository containing more than eighty thousand items documenting the political, social, and economic history of the United States.

As such, this summer I will visit New York to research interracial relationships and marriage in the United States. Specifically, I plan to investigate the origins and impact of the restrictions applied to these relationships in the American South prior to the Loving v. Virginia (1967) Supreme Court decision. I mainly aim to explore how individual couples navigated anti-miscegenation laws as well as the ways in which they were enforced. The law on interracial relationships varied across the US with the law in states that restricted relationships equally varied. Therefore, I plan to consider not only how couples navigated these restrictions, but also the impacts these variations had on families that crossed state lines and aspects of life like travel. Relatedly, I hope to explore the ways in which these laws were enforced considering instances of extrajudicial enforcement that may reflect wider social attitudes and state responses to interracial relationships, cohabitation, and marriage. On top of this, I also hope to investigate the origins of these policies.

Following a paper this year on scientific racism and eugenics I am interested in exploring the influence of concepts such as ‘racial integrity’ and ‘degeneration’. I am also especially interested in considering how understandings of gender influenced these policies. For instance, whether attitudes towards interracial relationships varied depending on the race of the man or woman in the relationship and if specific combinations had a greater influence on the development and maintenance of anti-miscegenation policies.

This is the topic I plan to focus on in my undergraduate thesis with the ideas behind it stemming from my personal interests and what I have learnt in my degree since arriving at Pembroke. The fellowship also covers research at other archives in New York and so I plan to visit the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Queens College Civil Rights Archive, and the Columbia University Archive and Center for Oral History. Therefore, this trip will allow me to complete extensive primary research that will be integral to my thesis.

Finally, I would like to thank my tutors, Professor Stephen Tuck and Dr Marilena Anastasopoulou, for their encouragement and support during the application process."

Read more about the fellowship here.