By Anu Sawhney (CAS ’20)

Anna Stroinski (CAS ‘19) first arrived on campus with a keen interest in political science. Throughout high school, she loved history and figured political science was the logical application of that passion. As she established her college career at the College of Arts & Sciences at Boston University, however, she found herself reconnecting to her past experiences through her academic research. That led to her changing her major and in the process, engaging with the legacy of her home.

One of the first classes she took freshman year was in comparative politics, which discusses the contemporary political developments of various nations, with Assistant Professor Alexis Peri. It was there that Anna realized she found the political histories of the countries she was learning about far more compelling than their contemporary institutions. After taking a history class the next semester, she switched her major to history.

 “I jumped ship pretty quickly,” she acknowledges. “But I don’t regret the decision I made.” Anna viewed the switch as a change in how she approached the same subject matter.

“I’m still dealing in politics because history is political. Aside from political history, taking control of any narrative and questioning it, revising it, adding to it, whatever the case may be is a way of exercising power, of being political.” Additionally, she added philosophy as a second major after taking a WR100 class focusing on totalitarianism and utopia, which then led her to the subject of her undergraduate research. “I was interested in intellectual history because I thought it was a good middle ground between my philosophical interests and my historical interests,” she says.

Changing major direction

Anna was able to easily make this change and tailor it to her academic interests partially because of the vast academic and experiential options and opportunities available through CAS. To that end, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) at Boston University gave her the creative space and guidance to explore this interest to a much greater—and more personal—extent. Her UROP research focuses on the rich political past of a place near her hometown of Paterson, New Jersey. In particular, Paterson is famous for its silk strike back in 1913, which involved work stoppages at the many silk mills in the city. The workers banded together for a five-month strike to demand better working conditions. As a child, Anna was aware of this local history. “[Growing up], I had gone to all the museums with my dad,” she says.

Over the summer of 2018, Anna received funding through the UROP program to travel across the country to conduct her own research and study the various ideologies that shaped the strikes. She spent a lot of time in the local archives, including the Paterson library, but also went to Detroit to look at Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) records. Most of her sources were newspapers that helped her contextualize the ideologies of the workers and the important figures involved in the 1913 Paterson silk strike.

“What I ended up doing was trying to look at the community dimension of the strike … and how the Paterson community tried to exercise local control over what was going on in the strike in a way that was importing particular values about what Paterson should look like, who should belong to Paterson,” she says. “Workers were changing a city socially, culturally, and industrially in a way that really made Paterson authorities uncomfortable.”

Striking out on her own

Most of her work was remote, so her faculty advisor, Associate Professor Sarah Phillips, would check in biweekly via email. It gave Anna an independence she hadn’t currently felt in her academic career. “It was the first time that I was out on my own without the hand-holding that sometimes happens when you write research papers. There was no stressor and I had to find my own stressor, which was good because I got to exercise my time-management skills over the summertime.”

The 1913 Paterson Silk Strike isn’t the only place Anna’s historical and philosophical interests meet. She recently completed a documentary on the memory of communism in Poland, which was funded by the Philosophy department at CAS through the department’s Karbank Fellowship. With graduation approaching and a keen understanding of how to view social change, Anna plans to take a year or two off after graduation to work in politics, publishing, or at a nonprofit before pursuing a graduate degree in American history.

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Anu Sawhney (CAS’20) is a senior majoring in philosophy and political science and minoring in journalism. She’s interested in cultural reporting and spends a lot of her free time reading, tweeting, and on the hunt for Boston’s best restaurants.

(Photos: Anna Stroinski)