MSc research published

MSc student’s research published in American Indian Quarterly

We are pleased to announce that Frank Vitale IV has published ‘Counting Carlisle’s Casualties: Defining Student Death at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918’ in American Indian Quarterly out of the University of Nebraska Press, which you can find here.  Frank completed his MSc in HSMT in 2018.  His master’s dissertation won the Charles Webster MSc Dissertation Prize that year under the title ‘Counting Carlisle’s Casualties: Multiple Methods for Measuring Mortality at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918’. 

Frank explains: ‘My dissertation, and the article, provides a comprehensive mortality census of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and explores how this information can help inform our understanding of the social history of the school and its students. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the US federal government's first and flagship school for off-reservation education and assimilation of Native American youth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The MSc programme challenged and improved my skills as a historian, giving me the advanced research skills necessary to support my investigations. My MSc group, and the entirety of the Wellcome Unit community, was also an integral support network for me both personally and academically.’

Frank is currently finishing a Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archival Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He works closely with the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, the digital humanities project at Dickinson College that facilitated his access to the primary sources for his research.