• Royce Fellowship
Royce Fellow Leela Berman
Leela
Berman

Concentration 

History

Award Year 

2021
“Safety on Paper and in Practice: Contested (National) Security in the Archives”

Leela Berman ’23 spends a lot of time thinking, reading, and thinking about the books she keeps meaning to read. Leela grew up in Seattle, Washington and is concentrating in history with a focus on the comparative study of colonial projects across the world. She is interested in networks of global solidarity and how they resist western power structures and dreams of the post-pandemic day where we can cook big dinners for people to eat together.

Project: 

Leela’s research examines the competing discourses around safety and security developed by radical anti-imperialist projects, the media, and politicians in the 1960s-1970s throughout the Pacific Northwest, especially but not exclusively in her hometown of Seattle. Through exploring newspaper and government archives, Leela will examine how national security discourses were utilized to publicly vilify movements, especially global Black radicalism, within and beyond the United States. At the same time, the project will investigate how definitions of security were negotiated by radical organizers themselves. This work will culminate in a primary-source driven curriculum which fosters a historical interrogation of modern colonial notions of (national) security and considers what truly provides communities with safety.

Advisor: Geri Augusto