Gabriëlle La Croix’s Semester Abroad in Pittsburgh, USA
By Gabriëlle La Croix.
As the academic semester is coming to an end, so is my time in Pittsburgh. Over the past almost 4 months I got to spend time at the history department of the University of Pittsburgh. In particular I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Pernille Røge, with whom I had many fruitful conversations that were incredibly useful for my research. As part of my stay, I also participated in her graduate course ‘Seas, Peoples, and Empires’. Besides this, I found myself in a pretty vibrant PhD community across several departments, with many of whom I got to explore the city and have some great conversations about my research.
In terms of my own research, I had a lot of time to dive into the archives, sort through my notes and do a good amount of writing. During my stay I worked on two chapters that will become part of my PhD thesis. Firstly, I was working on a chapter about the role of women within the Heyliger family. I especially focused on the first part of this chapter which concerns marriages. In October I was able to present these draft pages during a department work-in-progress event, where I received great feedback from Dr. Alexandra Finley as well as others from the department. After this, I continued to work on the next chapter which concerns inheritance within the family. For this chapter, I dived back into the Dutch and Danish colonial archives and uncovered even more wills and other documents of inheritance than I had before.
Besides my academic activities I also managed to see a lot of the city of Pittsburgh and take some trips to surrounding places. One of my favorite museums that I visited in Pittsburgh was the Heinz History Center, where I learned a lot about the history of the city and the surrounding area, as well as connections between this history and slavery, which for me as a historian of the Caribbean was interesting to learn about. Besides this, I was also lucky enough to visit Fallingwater, the house designed by America’s most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.
All in all, I had a great experience during my change of research environment and would highly recommend visiting a U.S. university to other PhD Students. If you want to hear more about my experience, listen to PhD student Nawel Cotez (French department, Pitt) interview me here.