Chelsea Cohen is a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Fellow, a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a museum educator. Her dissertation research focuses on the relationship between British maritime culture, agroforestry, and the development of port cities in the 18th-century Chesapeake. Trained as both a historical and maritime archaeologist, she combines terrestrial and underwater methods to connect the land and sea.
Q: How did you become interested in your dissertation topic?
Cohen: My dissertation topic and my interest in Early American studies happened by chance. I came to work as an archaeologist with an interest in how colonialism articulates across watery spaces, but my focus on the 18th-century Chesapeake was the result of a contract archaeology job I had been working right before starting at Penn. I was brought in as a consulting maritime archaeologist during the excavation of three ships that were reused as part of a historic wharf in Alexandria, VA. I spent most of my time at the site acting as a technical expert in ship construction, but I could not shake the question of why these ships had been so purposefully reused in this wharf. The more I looked, the more it became apparent that this reuse was one piece of material evidence of a much larger set of changes to the landscape that followed Euro-American development in the Chesapeake region. Now, several years into researching a question that started with a six-month consulting contract, my work has expanded to look broadly at how maritime landscapes impacted the physical and social geography of the region.
Q: If you could see or visit any historical artifact or site, what would it be and why?
Cohen: I think I would like to see HMS Terror from the Franklin expeditions in the Arctic. The shipwreck now sits in Terror Bay in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The frigid water means it is remarkably well-preserved, which satisfies the ship nerd in me. The vessel is also storied from a naval perspective, serving as a British bomb ship during the War of 1812. What I find interesting about Terror’s story, though, is that for over a century and a half, researchers were looking for Terror and its sister ship Erebus while disregarding Inuit oral tradition that preserved knowledge about the vessels. Some 160 years after the Franklin expedition, it was an Inuit Canadian Ranger who led fellow researchers to the vessel. Alternately ignoring and relying on local Indigenous knowledge is nothing new in archaeology, but Terror is an example I remember because its relocation happened during my training. It would be remarkable to see how this site was integrated into the Arctic landscape in such a way as to become a part of Inuit social memory while being missed by scientific research teams.
Q: What is the primary source you’ve most enjoyed using in your research?
Cohen: The concept of primary sources is murky for me because my primary sources include documents, old ships, pollen, and dirt. I want to interpret this question broadly and say that the primary sources I’ve most enjoyed are the wood samples with which I work. The wood as I sampled it came from the ships I helped excavate, but it was also part of a forest ecosystem that grew around both colonial and Native land management practices before the trees were harvested for construction. After the ships were discarded and buried under wharves, the wood also became part of the foundations for urban Alexandria. There’s a remarkable mix of human and natural history in this wood, and being able to trace that as landscape data has given a different kind of life to the naval timber contracts I use in the archive.
Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the field of early American studies?
Cohen: I don’t think there’s a single “biggest challenge,” but the challenges that are foregrounded in my work are accessibility and fostering greater public understanding of the scholarship of early America. Remarkable work is being done to address understudied histories and the violences perpetuated by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and other fields. Not enough of that work makes it out of the academy, though. Even when it does, I think that across fields and institutions, scholars often publish and present to audiences already interested in or receptive to their research. Putting out scholarship with open-access data and publications is a start, as are public engagement events and trade press monographs. Still, truly accessible scholarship means having difficult conversations in new and uncomfortable places to meet people who might otherwise never engage with these histories and their contemporary relevance.
Q: What are you most enjoying about your Fellowship at the McNeil Center?
Cohen: Without question, the most enjoyable part of this fellowship is being in community with scholars from different disciplinary and personal backgrounds. This cohort of fellows represents such diverse disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological engagements. I have already learned an incredible amount from my peers here at the McNeil Center, and I am certain that as I continue to learn and draw inspiration from this remarkable set of expertise, my dissertation and my scholarship writ large will be all the better for this experience.
Chelsea Cohen is a Marguerite Bartlett Hamer Fellow, a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and a museum educator. Read more about her dissertation on her bio page.