The following is an interview with Alison Korinek, conducted by Spencer Moffat in October 2019. Alison Korinek graduated from Rice University in 2012, where she majored in history and linguistics. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in history within the Institute of French Studies at New York University.
Spencer: What was the most memorable history class you took at Rice as an undergraduate? What made it so memorable and how did it prepare you for your current Ph.D. work at NYU?
Alison: It’s so hard to say. Many of them are memorable in distinctive ways. But if we are talking about the one that most influenced my career and set me on this path to graduate school, I think that one would have to be the class I took with Professor Boles my junior year. This class focused on the history of Rice University. It was my first chance to be a historian in my own right. A lot of history in high school consists of synthesizing facts about events and people or analyzing a primary source. And this class on the history of Rice University was my first upper-level seminar, and it was the first time that I got to pick my research project and go after sources myself. I ended up writing about a memorial, in the Rice Memorial Center, that is dedicated to ten Rice Navy ROTC members who died in a plane crash in 1953. Dr. Boles had seen this plaque and didn’t know the history of the event, even though he himself is a historian of Rice University. He thought it would be really cool if someone took it on, and I did. It was the hardest thing I had done to that date. I spent some time in the Woodson Research Center going through the archives of Rice University. It was a very difficult story to trace. I found a few yearbooks and I found a few newspaper articles in the Rice Thresher. I found a couple other random pieces, but I didn’t know how I would be able to write a 20 page research paper on that topic. And I went to Dr. Boles office and I told him how I did not know if I would be able to complete the research project by December. As professional historians, projects can take as long as they take but [undergraduate] students have to finish a project within a given semester. And as luck would have it, Dr. Boles was recruited for homecoming the following week to give a talk on the University to the class of 1955. It was their big 55th reunion. And a majority of the students who died in the plane crash were from the class of 1955. Dr. Boles was incredibly generous and offered to mention the project to see if anyone would know anything. And through his graciousness as well as the graciousness from that graduating class, I ended up conducting about a half-dozen oral interviews. The woman who had been the class president invited me to her home to see all sorts of memorabilia that she collected from the time around the accident. I spoke to someone who was a roommate of one of the men who died. One Rice student also survived the plane crash and he agreed to talk to me about his memory of the experience. They gave me all sorts of leads that eventually brought me back to the Woodson Research Center. It’s a very long story, but the project has stuck with me because it was my first chance to ask my own historical questions and I found that incredibly gratifying having to grapple with the incompleteness of the archive and finding out what story I could tell. I really got to connect with people and history really came alive for me in that class. It was the first time that I thought of history as something I wanted to do in a more permanent way. I eventually did the honors thesis and I took a number of upper-level classes my senior year. Through the support of a number of professors at Rice, I ultimately pursued graduate work here at NYU.
“It’s a very long story, but the project has stuck with me because it was my first chance to ask my own historical questions and I found that incredibly gratifying... I really got to connect with people and history really came alive for me in that class.”
Spencer: Could you speak about your current Ph.D. research at NYU where you are focusing on the establishment of empire in North Africa, but specifically in Algeria, and the mobilization of language there as a communicative aid and a coercive tool? What were the factors that led to the pursuit of this research topic?
Alison: On the one hand, [my current research] looks nothing like what I did at Rice. My senior thesis at Rice was on urban renewal in 19th century Paris. Through an exploration of the Paris boulevard system, I argued that [Georges-Eugène] Haussmann's unique contribution to Western modernization projects lay in his willingness to imagine new forms of administration, finance, and social capital. Haussmann capitalized on the particular political moment of the Second Empire to push through a series of administrative reforms, giving new life to urbanization proposals that had previously stalled. I stayed in the 19th century, but everything else has changed. [In the] first few years of graduate school, you take a lot of courses. You read a lot of new things and you ask a lot of questions. But I really think my experience as a language learner, which is something that does go back to my time at Rice, was fundamental to articulating my [current research] project.
I started studying French as a freshman at Rice so when I decided to study abroad in the spring of my junior year, I had the bare language minimum that you can have to enroll in a French university. But my professors in the French department at Rice were incredibly supportive so I [applied]. The thing that has really influenced my project was that I had studied French in a university classroom for a couple of years. It was a lot of memorizing vocabulary and essays and exams that focus on your grammatical understanding of a language. For all intents and purposes, I had mastered French up until the level that I had taken it. And then when I went to France I just could not communicate with people. I couldn’t think fast enough because I was too worried about getting the right grammatical form. I was thinking about how to conjugate when someone at the bakery only wanted to know what pastry I wanted. And I never learned how to pronounce any of the things at the bakery because in class we talked about politics and things that were not the language of everyday life. And a similar thing happened for me while studying Arabic at NYU. There was a disconnect between how we learn language in a classroom and the way that we use language in the real world. At NYU, I was taking classes on French empire at the Institute of French Studies and History Department. I started wondering how this happened back then. We tell this story about soldiers from France in the Army of Africa who arrived on the shores of Algeria in the summer of 1830. The troops were pulled together in a matter of months and it was a very hasty decision. The story we tell is that they showed up and militarily defeated the Ottoman bey, who was ruling at the time. We learn that they imposed French rule. All of this assumes that Algerians learned French and, also, that they were able to communicate all of this to the people who were largely, but not exclusively, Arabic speakers...living in Algeria at the time. And as I looked into this, there were a number of interpreters in the army but, according to the archive, they were remarkably bad at their jobs. In part, for the same reason that I had experienced. They trained on classical Arabic, exclusively in Paris, in erudite institutions. Thus, the language they mastered had nothing to do with their everyday lives or the security details that they suddenly needed to communicate with Algerians. The project really unfolded from the question of how these imperial forces go about communicating their hegemony and installing themselves as the superior force.
Spencer: Was there one history or linguistics professor that had a profound impact on you at Rice? If so, who was the professor and what made that professor so valuable in helping you develop as a historian?
Alison: I feel indebted to a number of professors at Rice, but Dr. Caldwell most indelibly marked my experience. I didn’t meet Dr. Caldwell until my senior year, and I was picking classes on a whim from Paris to register for the next fall and there was this class on modern revolutions with this professor I had never heard of—Dr. Caldwell. I was studying French and I was interested in the French Revolution so I signed up for his class. It was a 400-level seminar and it was overwhelming in the most amazing way.
His class was hard and he knew it was hard. It was intentionally that way, but I never felt that what he was asking me was beyond what we, together, could make happen. He pushed me in a way that no other class at Rice quite had and he engaged with my writing in a way I had never seen. I was fortunate that someone warned me that you should expect your papers to come back covered in [his] writing. He was really invested in the process of writing and taking ideas apart and examining them, and putting them back together. I felt like my writing improved dramatically at the time, and he taught me that engagement with your writing is a constructive criticism, but it is not critical. I think that opened me up to the research community that I am now currently a part of where I welcome the opportunity to discuss my ideas and pull apart my writing. If Dr. Boles’ class really shaped my love of the archive, Dr. Caldwell was the one who really taught me what it means to be a historian and [how] to write like a historian. He pushed me beyond what I thought I could do, but he was also incredibly supportive. When I decided I wanted to go to graduate school, he was the first person I spoke to and he was also incredibly supportive in that process, so I give him a lot of credit for where I am now.
“If Dr. Boles’ class really shaped my love of the archive, Dr. Caldwell was the one who really taught me what it means to be a historian and [how] to write like a historian. He pushed me beyond what I thought I could do, but he was also incredibly supportive.”
Interview by Spencer Moffat in October 2019 for the Rice Historical Review Student Feature