Congratulations to Katie Fapp and Sarena Martinez on passing their DPhil vivas
The RAI congratulates two of its Postgraduate Members, Katie Fapp and Sarena Martinez, on passing their doctoral vivas.
Katie Fapp's examiners, Katharina Rietzler (University of Sussex) and Stephen Tuck (University of Oxford) noted the following about Fapp's work: '“To Clasp Hands … Across the Ocean” is a well-conceptualised thesis which explores the internationalist discourses of American suffragists who, between 1893 and 1928, devoted their attention to the Pacific region. In a departure from much of the existing literature on the transnational activist and intellectual connections between women who promoted woman suffrage across the Atlantic, the thesis proposes that it was actually the Pacific, a region marked by diverse forms of European, US and also Asian empire and colonialism, that should be seen as a laboratory where the implications of effectively doubling the pool of eligible voters by adding those of the female sex were fully played out.'
Sarena Martinez's examiners, Daniel Rowe (University of Oxford) and Devin Fergus (Claremont McKenna College) write, 'Urban Power, Black Politics is an excellent thesis that interrogates governance and coalition-making in 1980s and 1990s Baltimore. The thesis seeks to understand how and why Baltimore's first Black mayor, Kurt Schmoke and his allies achieved modest victories in some arenas but not others. This research puzzle is examined through four different policy battles—auto insurance rates, needle exchange programmes, school funding, and affordable housing provision. Sarena compellingly shows that there was no single consistent powerbroker in Baltimore in the late twentieth century. She contends instead that the 1980s and 1990s were decades when political power was fluid, and latticed between different interdependent (public and private) groups.
Urban Power, Black Mayors is an interpretatively nuanced, deeply researched, and generally outstanding doctoral thesis. Its analytically minded narrative is rich in historical detail, and micro and macro contributions to the study of urban governance, federalism, neoliberalism, racial capitalism, and other areas of scholarly inquiry. Historians, American Political Development scholars, and many others would benefit greatly from reading this insightful work.'
