Tracing history’s long forgotten footprints would be a monotonous task to some, for Emily Berquist Soule, it’s a thrilling adventure. Berquist, an author and historian of colonial Latin America and an associate professor of History at Cal State Long Beach, is the first in the College of Liberal Arts to receive the Research and Sponsored Programs Internal Research Award at CSULB.
The $10,000 award will fund the continuation of research for her book in progress, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in the Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire;” a book she has been working on since 2007. Berquist has always had an interest in Latin America and the slave trade during colonial times in particular.
“As an undergraduate, I did my junior year abroad in Spain,” Berquist said. “After that I decided I wanted to travel, I didn’t want to be stuck in the United States for my work so I decided to do a Ph.D. in Latin American History so I could get out and around the world.”
Since her initial venture through Spain while in college, Berquist has returned several times to pour over old archives, attempting to connect the pieces to a lost puzzle.
“The main archive where colonial Spanish Americans sent their documents back is in Seville,” Berquist said. “It is every document they got for the slave trade for over 400 years and it’s only been looked at in bits and pieces.”
Berquist says she will use a part of this research grant to travel to Spain next summer so she can work closely with these documents. Findings from this trip will be her most important work yet.
She has already written one book focused around Spanish interactions with indigenous people, “The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru,” and now she will continue the correlation in her second book.
In her research, Berquist aims to shed light on unanswered questions regarding how modern empires were built using slave trade and subjugating people of color.
“After writing my first book, which was about how the Spanish treated or viewed indigenous people, I started to wonder what the corollary was with people of African descent,” Berquist said. “What did they do to try to help them or hurt them?”
This will be the second research grant Berquist has received for her work, but the very first to be issued to a faculty member of the College of Liberal Arts.
“Previously, this grant was only open to people in the sciences and business where they get bigger grants and expend more money for labs and research assistants,” Berquist said. “I requested for faculty in the humanities to be able to apply as well, because our research affects students’ class experiences, and it’s equally important to the mission of the university.”
Eventually CSULB did allow berquist to enter for the research grant and after being denied the first year, she was finally awarded the grant after entering the competition for the second time.
“I hope that CSULB continues to recognize that research in the humanities is just as important to a university as research in the sciences,” Berquist said.
Along with a funded research trip to Spain next summer, the grant has also provided funding for two graduate students of CSULB to work as assistants.
Grad students Eric Cohen and Carlos Mayerstein are currently working to help Berquist sift through countless boxes of Spanish documents.
“We’re sort of doing detective work,” Mayerstein said. “We create a brief summary of each document and if there is something that Dr. Berquist finds interesting we will do a full transcript.”
Both grad students have taken this opportunity to work with Berquist to enhance both their Spanish and research skills.
“When you do come across an interesting exchange between two people, it’s exciting,” Cohen said. “It feels like you’re unraveling a mystery or you have the backstage pass to what was really going on back then.”
Berquist says she hopes to have the book completed by 2020, and will continue to teach classes at CSULB alongside her ongoing research.
“She’s a fairly young professor and she’s really impressive with the amount of research and writing she’s already done,” Cohen said. “It’s going to be a very interesting project onces it’s done.”