Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The UF Synergies series features informal talks by the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere’s Rothman Faculty Summer Fellows, Tedder Doctoral Fellows, and Rothman Doctoral Fellows. Fellows will speak for 20 minutes in length about their funded work, leaving ample time for questions and discussion. Talks are paired across disciplinary boundaries to stimulate discussions about threads and connections across research areas and allow for synergies of ideas to emerge in interdisciplinary conversations.

Kaitlyn Muchnok (History) “Sentenced but Not Silenced: Female Juvenile Delinquency in Mid-Twentieth Century Florida”

Kaitlyn Muchnok’s talk will examine Florida’s female juvenile justice system from 1945 to 1970. Throughout the period, the state opened the Forest Hills School for Girls—the first reformatory for delinquent young black women—and expanded its existing reformatory for young delinquent white women—the Florida School for Girls. By the time the institutions integrated in 1967, Florida officials had expanded their authority over young women substantially and committed thousands of girls to both state reformatories, mostly for “sex offenses” or “social interaction problems.” To explain this, she explores the larger social issues affecting Floridians: anxieties over shifting gender roles, the decline of Jim Crow Segregation, and changes in youth culture in the post-World War II decades. She argues that state officials increased their power over female adolescents as a way to maintain traditional, southern gender and racial hierarchies. By placing the young women officials committed to both reformatories at the center of her study, she emphasizes the ways seemingly unrelated societal changes in southern culture influenced Florida’s leaders to construct a gendered definition and handling of juvenile delinquency.

Kyra Rietveld (Art History) “Iconography of the Cult of Artemis in the Greek Classical and Imperial Periods”

At the end of the war against Persia in 479BCE, a momentum towards a universal Greek identity arose. Parallel to the socio-political shift, imagery of the goddess Artemis divided into two representations: the huntress, and a fertility goddess. The former representation responded to the new desire for a unified Greek identity, while the latter maintained traditions. Through a series of case studies, Kyra Rietveld interrogates the conflict of representation between the “universal” huntress Artemis, and localized “cult” Artemises. She hypothesizes that the latter promoted geographically specific aspects of her cult that resisted the universalizing trend.