Vivianne Rhyner‘s award-winning BA seminar project (which I had the pleasure to advise) made it into the UZH annual report––with a well-deserved appreciation of her remarkable research achievement!
Vivianne won the Spring 2024 Semester Prize for her brilliant seminar paper “What Makes a Guano Island? The Navassa Island Riot and the Geography of Guano Labor” written for my course “Mapping Pacific History.”
Walking the reader through a substantial set of primary sources, Vivianne examines how late 19th century labor protests on a Guano island in the Caribbean attracted public attention to the social and racial relations on America’s resource frontier, and raised questions about U.S. sovereignty over a remote, otherwise uninhabited, island mine. By connecting these observations to the greater context of global guano labor history, Vivianne’s paper makes a rare, original contribution to the field –– one I haven’t previously seen in an undergraduate research paper.
