Monday, April 27, 2009

Invitation to a Phi Alpha Theta (History honor society) event on Wednesday, April 29 (6-7:30 pm)

Dear Grad Students and others subscribed to this blog. Thought you might be interested in this event if you can make it:

Uncovering the Past through Archival Documents and Artifacts: A Personal Account of How a Student of History Became a Historian-Scholar”

Melisa Galván, Ph.D. candidate, UC-Berkeley

April 29, 2009
3rd Floor SETB Lecture Room
6:00-7:30 PM

How one goes from being a student of history to becoming a historian in pursuit of previously unknown or under-studied documents is the subject of this talk by Melisa Galván. She will talk about the historiographical pathway that led her to the Casamata archives in Matamoros as well as her own personal evolution that drove her to pursue a career as a professional historian. Galván’s passion for lower Rio Grande Valley history began as an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, when a professor suggested that she become acquainted with a Xeroxed collection of documents from Matamoros. She quickly realized that the region played an important role in the economic development of Mexico in post-independence Mexican history, which is the subject of her dissertation research on the port of Matamoros and its ties with New Orleans, especially during the early 19th century.

Melisa Galván, a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at the University of California, Berkeley, also has bachelors and masters degrees from Berkeley. She has written extensively on the history of Matamoros and the lower Rio Grande Valley. She is currently living in Matamoros, where she is a resident researcher/scholar under the Fulbright-Hays program. Born and raised in Santa Monica, California, her father’s family is from Weslaco, and she has visited the Valley numerous times since she was a small child. Her current dissertation project examines the developing political economy of the port of Matamoros during the 19th century.

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