Education

Ph.D., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, 2021
M.A., York University, 2014
B.A. Spec. Hons., York University, 2013

About

Dr. Marlene Gaynair is currently a social and cultural historian of the modern Black Atlantic at Washington State University. She specializes in the histories of the United States, Canada, and British Caribbean during the long twentieth century. Her research interests cover popular culture, identity, citizenship, diasporas, public memory, immigration, transnational studies, and urban histories and spaces.

She is also the architect of “Islands in the North,” an ongoing digital exhibit which (re) creates Black cultural and spatial identities in Toronto. She continues to engage in digital histories and humanities to explore other dimensions of historical scholarship and public engagement.

She is currently working on her book manuscript, which is a transnational study of Jamaicans in Canada, the United States, and the Black Atlantic after Emancipation.

Academic and Research Interests

Publications

“A Riot Is The Language Of The Unheard: Centering Black Caribbean Voices in Crown Heights.”  Journal of American Ethnic History (Forthcoming).

“’She Wiggled Her Body In The Most Suggestive And Obscene Manner’: Sexuality And Respectability In The West Indian Labor Day Parade.” Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History, April 27, 2021.

“Black Women Were Vital to the UK’s Black Power Movement Even Though Guerrilla Doesn’t Show It.” EBONY Magazine, April 12, 2017.

Review of David K. Wiggins, Kevin B. Witherspoon, and Mark Dyreson. Black Mercuries: African American Athletes, Race, and the Modern Olympic Games. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023. Journal of Sport History (Forthcoming).

Review of Marcia Chatelain, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. “Marcia Chatelain. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2020. 336 pp. ISBN 978-1-63149-394-2 $28.95 (cloth).” Enterprise & Society, Summer 2022.

Review of Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. “Stuart Hall: ‘Familiar Stranger’ of the Black Atlantic.” Black Perspectives, African American Intellectual History Society, July 6, 2018.

Education

Ph.D. Washington State University, 2021

Academic & Professional

Dr. Booth specializes in the history of the US in the nineteenth century and early twentieth up to World War I. His two primary interests are in Indigenous and military history. He teaches the early US history survey to 1877, Civil War & Reconstruction, US military history survey, and courses for history majors. He is also part of the WSU Native Programs faculty and teaches a special course for the Tribal Nation Building Program, which focuses on the training of future tribal leaders. In 2019-2020, Dr. Booth served as a Fulbright-Nehru Fellow based in Kolkata, India. Dr. Booth (Keahu) is a member of the Upper Skagit Tribe in NW Washington.

Research Interests

Dr. Booth is currently revising his dissertation, “Crossed Arrows: The US Indian Scouts, 1866-1947,” into a monograph. His dissertation explored the military service of two tribes, the Northern Cheyenne & White Mountain Apache, as representative of the complicated story of US Empire, the martial race theory, and military service as a means to greater Indigenous self-sufficiency.

Stemming from some of his earlier interests and connection with the Jesuits, Dr. Booth has been working on a project to research Jesuit Native American Boarding Schools in the Pacific Northwest. This project is part of a larger effort by the US Department of the Interior to examine the historical legacy of the boarding schools and to help identify gravesite locations and student identities within historical archives.

Peer Reviewed Articles:

“Fort Keogh’s Commissary: A Global Market on the Great Plains” in Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Spring 2020)

Reviews:

Raymond Callahan & Daniel Marston, The 1945 Burma Campaign and the Transformation of the British Indian Army, Modern War Studies Series (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2021) in H-Net (https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/10246889/booth-callahan-and-marston-1945-burma-campaign-and-transformation)

Nina Sanders, Apsáalooke Women and Warriors (Chicago: Field Museum, 2020-2021) in The Public Historian 43:4 (November 2021): 93-96.

William C. Meadows, The First Code Talkers: Native American Communicators in World War I (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) in Journal of Military History 85:3 (July 2021), 823-825.

Jerome A. Greene, January Moon: The Northern Cheyenne Breakout from Fort Robinson, 1878-1879 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) in Nebraska History 102:2 (Summer 2021), 99-100.