GSLIS invites you to a reception to mark the publication of Dr. Johnathan Thayer’s book, "Citizenship, Subversion, and Surveillance in U.S. Ports: Sailors Ashore".

Thursday, April 18
5:30pm
President’s Conference Room 2 (RO-525)
Fifth Floor, Benjamin Rosenthal Library, Queens College

Citizenship, Subversion, and Surveillance in U.S. Ports: Sailors Ashore

The forces of industrialization that transformed ship technology simultaneously transformed the working-class lives of merchant seamen, intensifying class conflict and producing collective networks of subversion and resistance within the urban borderland spaces of sailortowns in which sailors fought to maintain control over their mobility, agency, and rights. Given their social, cultural, economic, geographic, and legal marginalization, merchant seamen have occupied essential roles at the parameters of US urban, legal, labor, immigration, and wartime history. The constellation of these histories, embedded in the encounters and negotiations that merchant seamen provoked along the nation’s coastlines and sailortowns, collectively represents a unique and essential perspective on the history of US citizenship. These arguments are advanced by Johnathan Thayer in his book Citizenship, Subversion, and Surveillance in U.S. Ports: Sailors Ashore, available in hardcover and ebook formats from Springer: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-45618-3

Dr. Johnathan Thayer is Assistant Professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, City University of New York (CUNY). He holds a PhD in History from the CUNY Graduate Center and an MLS from Queens College. He is a former Graduate Fellow in Labor Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and is a recipient of the E. P. Thompson Fellowship in United States History. Dr. Thayer is a maritime studies researcher and a public history and archival studies educator. His previous works include the co-edited volume Negotiating Masculinities and Modernity in the Maritime World, 1815-1940 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). He has worked in maritime libraries and archives for more than twenty years and has sailed as a Voyager on the nineteenth-century whaleship Charles W. Morgan, as oral history interviewer on the liberty ship SS John W. Brown, and as Ship’s Librarian on SUNY Maritime’s training ship Empire State VI.