Lee presented research from his senior thesis entitled “A Jurisprudence of Exception: Indian Indentured Labor in the Straits Settlements (1867-1884),” at the American Historical Association’s (AHA) Annual Meeting in Chicago.
This January, I attended the American Historical Association’s (AHA) Annual Meeting in Chicago, to present a chapter from my senior thesis. The chapter, entitled “A Jurisprudence of Exception: Indian Indentured Labor in the Straits Settlements (1867-1884),” solves an important though understudied puzzle in the legal history of Indian indentured labor in the British Empire. If indentured labor was a globalized form of migration, and the Indian government passed standardized laws to regulate indentured migration, then why did they exempt the Straits Settlements (present-day Malaysia and Singapore) from most of these regulations? My paper, then, demonstrated how and why colonial administrators framed the Straits Settlements as this site of legal exception, one where Indian indentured migration was cast as different from elsewhere in the British Empire.
At AHA, I presented my work in the panel Transnationalism, where undergraduates like myself had three minutes to explain the importance of our work in a pithy and accessible manner. As someone who works in an esoteric research field, I found it particularly rewarding to persuade the audience participants on the importance of Southeast Asian and colonial perspectives on international law, especially since most of the panelists were working on topics relating to American history. A big highlight for me was working with my co-panelists to facilitate constructive discussions on thematic questions relating to migration and legal regulation that transcended the geographical boundaries that our research tends to be rooted in. I also received incisive feedback from audience members, particularly professors and ABD graduate students, on how I can transform my chapter into a professional journal article, a particularly satisfying experience to know that the academic community values my research.
I especially enjoyed attending conference panels outside my field. Each day, I intentionally chose to spend half my time attending panels on topics that I was broadly interested in, which ranged from human rights history during the Cold War to the left-wing precedents of conservative constitutional originalism. Although I attended these panels out of pure curiosity, I quickly realized that a lot of the panel insights could be applied to refine my thesis methodology, and am currently in contact with some of the panelists to exchange research insights. Attending these panels also gave me the opportunity to network with scholars pursuing a wide range of topics and career paths: I gained deep insights into the vastly different ways that researchers communicated their findings across fields, positioned themselves as scholars with unique contributions, and adopted diverse approaches to study similar questions.
As a senior entering my final semester, I have been giving a lot of thought into postgraduate plans, on how I can forge a career path that aligns with my passions for research, scholarly communications, and thinking about the relationship between law and immigration. To that end, I arranged meetings to talk with graduate students, early-career scholars, and professionals working in public history (museums, publishing, libraries etc.) to learn more about their career trajectories and perspectives for discerning and succeeding in their fields. I was pleasantly surprised by how candid they were in talking about their experiences, and their willingness to help me with my own postgraduate discernment, especially in terms of connecting me to their colleagues. In particular, my conversations with three JD/PhD scholars really inspired me to pursue a similar path as them: to combine experience on how the law is practiced with how it is discussed in academic discourse. This was a path that I had briefly considered and rejected in the past. But now, I have a much more nuanced understanding of how I can use this specific career path to combine passion with purpose. My time at AHA was a process of discovery, of finding connections where I least expected, and of reigniting interests in new and unexpected ways.
Photo credits: Paul Ashenfelter, Notre Dame Press.