Doctoral Student and Teaching Assistant Our September Spotlight on Inclusive Excellence features doctoral student Chris Choe. Chris recently developed a history film series, Visions of the Past, open to the university community, which began this month. This series is designed to provoke curiosity and get students wondering about how the historian’s craft can leap out of books and the written word. Each month, a historically significant film is introduced by a faculty expert in the research area. Films include themes about diverse populations and character backgrounds, and may include documentaries or fiction. The next film (October) is scheduled to be Tokyo Spring, with an introduction from Dr. Timothy Yang, the Director of UGA's Institute for Asian Studies. Chris Choe earned his M.A. in History at the University of Georgia, under the supervision and direction of Professor Stephen Mihm. His thesis, "Under New Management: U.S. Administration of the Panama Canal Zone, 1904-14," analyzes the changes to the institutional structure of the American governing regime on the Canal Zone. By comparing American control to French control in the 1870s and to the longer history of infrastructural development in the nineteenth-century United States, this research underscores the peculiarity of this experiment in state control and the ways the Panama Canal symbolized developments in the public/private distinction, the administrative state, and imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. His doctoral research is an extension of his M.A. research, which explores the organizational and administrative history of the Canal Zone in the period of unilateral American operation, roughly 1914 to 1977. His work explores the gaps in the literature in American Political Development and the literature on American imperialism, seeking to bring together these seemingly unrelated fields.
