Historians & Their Histories Live
This episode features the first-ever live audience taping of the MHS podcast Historians & Their Histories. Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, from the MHS Research Department interviews special guests about their journeys to becoming historians. Betsy Klima, Professor of English at UMass Boston and recipient of the MHS NEH Long Term Fellowship, discusses her biographical research on Susanna Haswell Rowson, an 18th century best-selling author whose family experienced the Revolutionary period as loyalists, and her broader project examining women’s power and literary influence in early America. Arthur Kamya, a PhD candidate at Boston University, shares his work on examining the Winthrop family's legal practices and discusses how the Massachusetts government was funded through licensing fees and other “sin taxes.” Camden R. Elliott, an Assistant Professor of History at Auburn University, describes his environmental history of the Anglo-Wabanaki wars, analyzing how the non-human world shaped these conflicts from the 1670s through the 1760s. Madeline DeDe-Panken, PhD candidate at the Graduate Center at CUNY and recipient of the Mary B. Wright Environmental History Fellowship, discusses her dissertation on the history of foraging, particularly women’s roles in late 19th and early 20th century mushroom foraging cultures and questions of whose knowledge was legitimized as scientific. The conversation explores their unexpected archival discoveries, what being a historian entails, and the challenges of doing historical work in current times.
Madeline DeDe-Panken is a recipient of a Mary B. Wright Environmental History Fellowship.
C.R. Elliott is a recipient of a Samuel Victor Constant Fellowship from the Society of Colonial Wars in Massachusetts and a fellowship from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.
Arthur George Kimera Kamya is a recipient of a fellowship from the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.
Betsy Klima is a recipient of the long-term fellowship sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Massachusetts Historical Society. She also received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship from the MHS.
To learn more about MHS fellowships and how to apply, please visit this page.
Episode Special Guests:
Madeline DeDe-Panken is a PhD Candidate in US History at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research examines histories of culinary and scientific foraging through a gendered lens in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. She currently serves as Historian-in-Residence at the Jewish Heritage Center.
Dr. C.R. Elliott is an environmental historian of Native North America at Auburn University. He is currently working on his first book, an environmental history of the environmental dimensions of warfare and colonization in the early American northeast. His work has been generously supported by MHS and the NERFC, among other organizations.
Arthur George Kimera Kamya is a legal and cultural historian whose recent PhD dissertation at Boston University, Policing for Profit: Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1630–1690, explores the entanglements of law, coercion, and political economy in early New England. Now based in Kampala, Uganda, he is expanding his research horizons toward East African archives, heritage collections, and the global histories they illuminate.
A Professor of English at UMass Boston, Betsy Klima was an NEH-MHS Long-Term Fellow in 2025. She is working on a book called Guilty Pleasure: Charlotte Temple and the Business of Books in Early America.
This episode uses materials from:
Colocate by Podington Bear (Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported)
