This episode of Confluence is our discussion with Ph.D. student Elizabeth Barrs. In a delightful conversation, Barrs shares about her journey to the graduate program after a 20-plus-year career as an army military officer. We also discuss the validation of winning the Richard Drake Writing Award in 2022 for a chapter of her dissertation on aid to Armenia during the infamous genocide.

This is the first of a two-part series honoring our graduate student veterans during Veterans Week. On Confluence, we are proud to celebrate these veterans who bring their commitment to service, their discipline, and their support of their fellow human beings to their work as graduate students. The world is a better place when our veterans get the support they need to grow and develop when their service to our nation’s military is done. We are delighted to share their stories with our listeners.

Story Transcript

[00:00:00] Ashby Kinch: This is Confluence where great ideas flow together. The podcast of The Graduate School of the University of Montana, I'm Ashby, Dean of the Graduate School. On Confluence, we travel down the tributaries of wisdom and beauty that enrich the soil of knowledge on our beautiful mountain campus.

[00:00:19] Kyle Volk: Yeah, Liz is a true intellectual. She's drawn to the biggest of questions, the biggest of historical questions. She's not gonna be content doing a kind of small micro project. She's energetic, super curious, always asking questions about all sorts of things. Voracious reader never stops wanting to learn. She's also an excellent teacher.

[00:00:38] AK: You just heard the voice of Kyle Volk, professor of History, talking about his student Elizabeth Bars, one of the Bertha Morton Graduate Students Scholarship winners for 2023. This episode is part of a series recognizing the achievements of some of our outstanding graduate students.

The Bertha Morton Award, named for a great Montanan who dedicated her life to public service, was endowed to support graduate students by recognizing the distinctive contributions they make in research, creative activity, and public service. In this episode, we talk with Elizabeth about her journey to the graduate program in history after a 20 plus year career as an army military officer, but also the validation at winning the Richard Drake Writing Award in 2022 for a chapter of her dissertation on aid to Armenia during the infamous genocide.

We discussed the complex interweaving of American foreign policy aid work by non-profit organizations and the for-profit industries like agribusiness that formed the tryout of relief work over the early to mid 20th century. We're proud to share her graduate story with listeners. Enjoy the float.

Welcome to Confluence, Elizabeth.

[00:01:53] Liz Barrs: Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here.

[00:01:55] AK: Yeah. So we're celebrating Bertha Morton winner. Yeah. So we'll just start by talking a little bit about that. Does that award have any special residence for you?

[00:02:03] LB: You know, it really does. It was a great honor. I was incredibly fortunate to be selected and it does, you know, I reading her story, it's amazing that this woman who worked hard her whole life, treasured education so much that she gave to you.

For this scholarship and, and you know, as, as a non-traditional older, much older student, um, much older. Much older. Yeah. That's not exaggerating. Yeah. Well, you know, I feel it every day. No, but you know, but really when I, when I retired from my last career, you know, what I wanted to do most was go back and, and, you know, get my PhD and, and get back into academia and, you know, because.

Especially at that point in my life, treasured, education much more than I did, perhaps as an undergraduate, a long time ago. So, yeah, I mean, the fact that she, you know, saved and, and worked hard, but then took her, her, you know, her money basically, and, and put it into other people's educational dreams, I thought was just incredibly, incredibly rich story.

[00:02:59] AK: Yeah, it's a story. You don't hear a ton anymore too, that it was, um, nobody had cultivated. This came out of nowhere. I know. You know, it wasn't, and you know, that used to be a little bit more common that I think I don't, you know, I, I always feel like the back in my day guy these days, I'm getting older myself.

Right. But, but it seemed like there was an ethic of service. Yeah. That was, that people saw institutions as something to invest in and that they had this longer term value. And of course, Montana wouldn't exist if Farmer University of Montana wouldn't exist if farmers in the 19th century hadn't said, Yeah.

Super important to have a. , you know, And so I always like to make that message clear that institutions have this history of we invest in them because we, their continuity and their ability to connect us to the past, um, are important to maintain. So, yeah, that's part of it for me is, is for the Bertha story, you know?

[00:03:47] LB:Yeah. You. No. Absolutely. And you know, obviously, you know, as a, as a, in the history department, obviously I, I tried to research more about her, his personal history cause I was so interested. I wondered, you know, did she want to go to school but couldn't because she had to support herself and was this her way of saying, you know, I want others who want to go to school to be able to do this.

And I couldn't find a lot of, a lot of detail about her. But yeah, it, it really does resonate again as someone who's gone back to school. Yeah. Well, so

[00:04:12] AK: let's talk about that. How, what's your Montana story? How did you end up here in the history department at um, well,

[00:04:17] LB: So I retired. I, so I was an active duty, uh, army officer for 21 years, and I retired, uh, in 2008.

And so I had connections to Montana through family and basically moved here in 2014 to, uh, and my, my two sons were still. Pretty young and, you know, promised them that we'd no longer keep moving with the military wanted, especially my older one to be able to go to, you know, one high school. Um, he'd moved so much in the military.

So yeah, we, I've al I'd always loved Montana had visited for, you know, a couple decades before that. And so, yeah, we moved here in 2014 and, Very typical of veterans, which is another thing I, I work with, you know, you have to sort of recreate yourself when you leave the military at whether it's, you know, 25 or 35 or in my case, you know, I was about 42 I think, anyway, so, yeah.

[00:05:07] AK: So you've had this life that had so much structure. Yeah, exactly. And so much direction and everything is kind of, the choices is not, there's no choices, but they're kind of structured choices. And then all of a sudden you're out in the world and you're trying to figure out

what's next. Exactly. You know?

[00:05:21] LB: Exactly. And so many young people do that when they're 18 or 19 or 22. They're at a high school or college. But, a lot for a lot of people in the military, you have to sort of figure out what you wanna be when you grow up, when you're much older. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, moved here and then, and I really wanted to go back to school.

 A dream had always been to get my PhD, so yeah, I, I applied and the history department here is wonderful, and so I went back to. Yeah.

[00:05:46] AK: And so you have, uh, you have an interesting background. You had political science as an undergraduate, you did an MA in education, and so now you're in history and the transition.

A lot of what we like to talk about in the grad school Yeah. Podcast is, you know, what is it? What is the transition of level. Mean, what does it mean to go from an undergrad to a, a master's and then from a master's to a PhD? And you know, that, that you kind of sense, I mean, I'm a, an athletic background.

Mm-hmm. But you know, you reach a different level and all of a sudden there's a different set of expectations.

[00:06:14] LB: Exactly. Yeah. Well it is and and it is. And especially when you've done, I did my bachelor's so long ago, you know, was. Decades ago. And so it was not only transitioning, um, you know, from that background and also, you know, we do it, military education has a, we, we, you go to school constantly.

So you, you are in school a lot, but it's much more professional focused. Right? For, so for me it was not only the. Fact that my, my BA had been so long ago, but also I was switching from having been a political science, international studies, much more of that background into history. Mm-hmm. . So it, what was fantastic about our department is that my mentors there, um, my advisors really helped me with that because it's a, it's a very different way of researching and of, of looking.

So understanding how to do archival research, how to look, um, you know, how to. Primary documents and, and just approaching, um, research from a historian's perspective as opposed to more of a social science, in this case, political science perspective. So yeah, very, I had, I learned lots of, not only content, but lots of new skills in terms of, as a learner.

Yeah. And history as a discipline has that extra problem, I guess. Uh, you know, it's, it's, it's stranded a little bit between its social science methodologies and its humanities methodologies, but on the back end, Good history is also gonna tell a story, right? Yes. It's not gonna just be, you know, it's gonna be grounded in the archive, but it's gonna have a story to tell.

And so that bit requires writing and it requires having something

to say. It does. And, uh, yeah, and I, again, it does and wonder, I think what's great about our department is we are smaller than some of these huge history departments at other places. So we get that mentorship and, and my advisors particularly really focus on that narrative, narrative history.

We don't wanna. I mean, and, and quantitative history is important too. You need statistics and you need that type of history. But I think my, my approach and, and what I've been mentored in is so wonderful in, in, in making history come alive for the reader. It's not, shouldn't be, it should be something accessible.

 We have a public history, a program here as well. But history should be accessible to people who really want to understand these stories from the past. And that you're absolutely right, You have to be able to write well, not just, you know, collect data. So yeah, it's, Well,

[00:08:30] AK: and you, you're the recent recipient of the Richard Drake Writing Award, which, you know, I've been on that committee for years and, um, you know, it's, we take seriously the writing, you know, in other words, that it's a very serious part of the criteria.

That it's not just you're wowing us with great ideas, but it's composed and that really does reflect, Drake. Legacy. Right? I mean, he is such a, a fantastic writer and takes that part of his work so seriously. So that must have been kind of a nice honor.

It was an incredible honor. I, I absolutely respect, Professor Drake so much and I've, you know, been able to, you know, obviously know him through the history department.

Yeah, I was a wonderful honor. I was, I put a, a paper I had written, which will form a chapter of my dissertation. And it was a great honor because you know, you, you don't know, You know, I, I write and you rewrite and you edit and you rewrite and you hope you write well. But to, to receive that honor was wonderful.

Well, let's talk about the paper itself, cause that sounds kind of fun. What, what's it on, what, what's the topic and how does it relate to this bigger dissertation project that you're working?

[00:09:26] LB: Yeah, I'd, you know, be careful asking someone. I'll go on forever about my research, but no, so this was when I was trying to figure out again, what I wanted to do for a dissertation.

And I didn't, because of my military background, I didn't want to necessarily, um, do military history just because I wanted to do something different. Try something different. Yeah. Yeah. And my, my husband actually has worked in aid work his whole life. He's done worked in aid work all over the. And I was reading Samantha Powers book at one point, and this was right when I had gone back to school and it was this part of in for books about Near East Relief.

It was the main American aid organization, that supported victims of the Armenian genocide at after World War I primarily. So, I was really fascinated by this because I'd never heard of this relief group. You know, you hear about the big ones, you hear about Care and Catholic Relief and, and Mercy Corps and others.

So anyway, I, I started researching this group nearest relief and just, it was such a compelling, uh, history and I thought at the time that I would write, Much about, I was very interested as a, you know, have, with my background, I was very interested in the sort of the diplomatic history, you know, how to aid organizations overseas work in terms of American power abroad.

And that is still a, a, a part of my, of the dissertation. But what I really became fairly fascinated with very quickly is every time I looked up anything in primary sources about nearest relief, I would see car syrup ads. Yeah, believe it. Or you know, or, or bored and milk ads. And what quickly became apparent was that, you know, and even non-profits still need, you know, revenue, revenue.

They're still businesses. They still need to have injects either of donations or of good relationships with businesses to get good deals. So this nearest relief was, was feeding at the time, you know, tens and tens of thousand. Orphans, primarily in the Near East, everywhere from the caucuses down to Egypt.

Well, they needed food stuffs. They needed to feed these poor, you know, these traumatic, you know, affected children. And so they were making a very strong. Relationships with a lot of food companies, American farmers, as well as processed foods. And so what, what grew from that was this chapter very much about how, uh, near East Relief and, uh, worked with some of these as particularly in some extent farmers, but particularly some processed food of manufacturers because these were fattening foods.

 Karo Syrup is a fattening food and. In the news right now with formula. That was one of the original baby formulas was

[00:12:01] AK: That's what I was just thinking. What an interesting resonance with today with this, this problem in our supply chain on Exactly. Baby formula. Yeah. And that must have been in the, in the, pardon the pun, infancy of the massive American agro business too, right?

I mean, in other words, we're talking about the twenties. Yes. Twenties and early thirties. Um, you know, American. Agribusiness was growing, but it must, it didn't have, of course, the market penetration it does today. Right. So were the businesses also vested, in other words, in, in finding these markets? Yes. In foreign,

[00:12:33] LB: Yeah.

So yeah, it was a little bit of everything. Part of it was, was, , you, a lot of these process food industries were. Growing in the 1920s. , absolutely. And marketing was growing. The marketing business took off. You know, advertising really took off, especially during and after World War I. So yes, these, these food industries were trying to make inroads into foreign markets.

So, you know, let's, if we give a taste for evaporated milk overseas, then children, you know, they'll buy more evaporated milk. But it was also convincing American consumers that the, their products were healthy. Mm. The focus of this chapter that I was, , fortunate to receive the, the, , Professor Drake Award for is very much about how, because near East Relief was using corn syrup, for example, to feed starving children overseas, that they could mar that, that corn products.

Manufacturers could market it as healthy for American children. Mm. So it's not a cynical, it's not meant to be a cynical story of marketing, but these are symbiotic relationships. Sure, yeah. Nearest relief, who did amazing work overseas, needed support, and the corn products industry needed someone to say, Hey, our products are healthy.

So it was a,

[00:13:43] AK: And of course, You know, we now are on the back end where we're, we think about, um, you know, king corn and the problems with the agribusiness. So we would, we would approach it cynically, but at the time it's a different, it's a different era, you know, when, but, but you're still, you're kind of describing a, a kind of quintessentially American story of the kind of ways in which, again, soft power projection Yeah.

But also our economic and our agricultural heartland are kind of being brought together.

[00:14:09] LB: Exactly, Exactly. The larger project, the larger dissertation is really. Poorest boundaries between for-profits, non-profits in the state. So, um, you know, the, the, the role of, of non-profit organizations in the, in US history and the American Political Economy and in this case of food.

So not only how it works within the United States political economy of food, and then how we've projected. Overseas to really affect how the entire planet eats. I mean, part of that, um, has really, a large part of that has really been done through our aid work overseas, exporting not just food stuffs, but our agricultural practices.

So later chapters get more into that. And the Green Revolution, you know, is, is a big part of that mass, mass industrial farming.

[00:14:56] AK: So it comes your decision comes. Forward to encompass the Green Revolution. And it does, and that's hugely important. You have not just the , the. Technology. Technology, but you also have all the machine work that goes with that.

In other words, to do that high intensity farming, you have to have mechanized, uh, agriculture. And that we, we do that at an industrial scale here, unlike anyone but maybe Russia and the Ukraine. Speaking of things that are back in the news, right, that the, the Russian. Block eight of the ports is gonna have a huge impact on the food market here in the

next six months, right?

Yeah. I mean, yeah, just in the news now. I keep, you know, tuning in and, you know, now talking about some of the worst food crises, uh, since at least in, you know, part, large parts of the world since, uh, World War ii. And the World War I and World War ii, the food crises at the ends of those wars drove so much of globe changed so much globally about how food is made and consumed.

 

Yeah. So there's something there conceptually about kind of. War and disaster and, and violence as, uh, drivers of change because now all of a sudden you have to solve a big problem at a large scale and that's gonna impact, uh, you know, all the systems that that interact with it. Yeah,

[00:16:12] LB: Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, war is such a huge driver of change in across, you know, societies.

But yeah, I absolutely, and. And yeah, I think, all this, you know, this played out across my, my dissertation focuses from the early 19 hundreds till about the 1970s. And, but you know, it can, the story continues across, there's ideas now of, of, of countries wanting more food sovereignty. In other words, they don't wanna be exported, you know, necessarily other countries, American, you know, food practices, they want more sustainable agriculture.

So, yeah, it, it, it definitely resonates every day today. Fantastic.

[00:16:48] AK: And so you'll be completing that in the next year or so, ?

[00:16:52] LB: Yes, I hope so. You know, one thing of being a history graduate student, or, you know, right now the pandemic is really, interrupted us because we have to go to archives, you know, our, our bread and butter as researchers is to get into archives and, and they all shut down for almost over two years, most of them.

I still, most of the archives that I need to get into, are just now opening. So yeah, I'm hop. and of course, life and work and things get in the way of, of, of dissertation work. But yes, my But you've made recent archival

[00:17:22] AK: trips. Yes,

[00:17:23] LB: I have. And a couple more on the horizon. A couple more on the horizon.

Yeah. I have about a chapter and a half left to right and, some major research, which the Bth birth of Morton is very much helping with. So I have, I've just gotten back from the National Archives a couple weeks ago, and I'll be spending time at a several different archives this summer.

[00:17:40] AK: Fantastic.

Yeah. And then when you wrap. Where, what do you think we're headed? Uh, post bd?

[00:17:45] LB: You know, that is a great question. I would love to teach. And you know, those, you know, the, the market for history, professors, you know, is, is interesting and I'll learn more about that. Yeah, it is interesting.

[00:17:56] AK: Yeah. In the Chinese, curse sense.

May you live an interesting times.

[00:17:59] LB: Exactly. Humans. Scholars, you know, we all have our challenges. I, I would love to teach, I would love to research more and write. So honestly, I don't know. And I still have, you know, three kids at home that need to get to college and go through college. So, looking at, you know, tuition and, and where they're gonna go to school.

So as a, yeah, as a working parent, trying to navigate my own career and taking care of, you know, helping with the family and, and getting kids through college. Yeah, we'll see. It's a lot of juggle, so it's a bit of juggle. but I would love to, I, I want to, I want to teach and I want to stay in the history world.

I also, you know, work at, and have a wonderful job, so we'll see if I can mesh those, you know. Yeah.

[00:18:42] AK: Well, fantastic. Thank you for joining us on

[00:18:44] LB: Well, thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it.

[00:18:52] AK: If you like what you've heard, you've got Kate Lloyd to thank. She's a student in our MFA program in Media Arts. Her deaf ear and keen editing touch have created the sonic landscape through which you're floating. We'd like to thank UMS, College of Arts and Media for providing studio space and talent to support this production.

Confluence is brought to you by the Graduate School of the University of Montana Innovation Imagination Inec, to serve the state, the region, and the world. You can subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google by searching Confluence University of Montana, or click a link at the Confluence.

www.umt.edu/grad on the telling our story tab. You'll find podcasts, videos, and other media that help us share with the world the groundbreaking research and creativity happening at the University of Montana. Enjoy the float.