Jenny Elkus – Department of History
In September 2018, Elkus entered the University of Rhode Island hoping to determine what, if any, historical importance was held in a large cache of documents that she had recently inherited. Hoping to identify an archival home for the Bettelheim Family Papers, Elkus set out to investigate the 19th century family that had produced them. Rather than expand outward from the several available Bettelheim protagonists, Elkus’s research became focused on a singular event in which young Dr. Felix A. Bettelheim attempted to obtain 5,000 Chinese contract laborers for the construction of the Panama Canal. The work ended up as a case study in ethnic relations and identity formation which asked how Felix Bettelheim, as a Jewish migrant and a member of a persecuted minority himself, could attempt to control the movement and migration of Chinese laborers, oblivious to the parallels that existed between his own experiences and those of the people he sought to exploit — ultimately seeking to understand how his venture contributed to the construction of his own sense of identity and belonging as an American. Elkus was awarded her masters in December 2022, but her research has only opened new lines of inquiry, leaving Elkus not with answers about the Bettelheim family, but only with questions of “what next?”