Presenter(s): Katilyn Champoux
Co-presenter: Veronica Jones, Paige Kosa, Hunter Moen, Gwynyth Pass, Maddie Pellman, Camille Titus, Tabitha Todd
Faculty Mentor(s): Dorothee Ostmeier & Ian McNeely
Oral Session 5 O
Step into Greenwich Village in the year 1913 and become a bohemian thinker! Eight students from HST 411 “Reacting to the Past,” co-taught by Professors Dorothee Ostmeier, German and Folklore and Public Culture, and Ian McNeely, History and head of GERSCAN, will simulate vivid debates between the labor movement, women’s suffrage and bohemian intellectuals around 1913. Our lecture hall will turn into Polly’s restaurant at Greenwich Village, and Polly Holladay, bohemian business owner and anarchic thinker, and Mabel Dodge, salonniere and wealthy American patron of the arts, will invite their bourgeois cliental (audience) to witness the debates between union and feminist activists. While searching for true meanings of liberty and free speech everyone at Polly’s is eager to move bourgeoise sympathizers towards actions that overcome censorship, social and political threats to freedom and civilian rights. In the end, the audience will be invited to vote for empowering suffrage or unionists.
Our program will conclude with comments and reflections of individual students about their critical experiences with the game, how it inspired their research and how research and game are connected to productively develop a deeper and more personal understanding of a particular moment in time.