With the support of two weeks paid research leave from Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, I was able to participate in two research seminars over the past month that will help me move forward my dissertation research into new projects (more on those soon!)
For the moment, I’m using Storify to share the conversations started in Worcester and New York:
June 21-26, 2015
Reading Children: Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in American Culture (#PHBAC15)
American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA)
June 29-July 2, 2015
2015 Summer Institute in Digital Humanities
New York Metro American Studies Association / New York University (New York, NY)
[View the story”NYMASA 2015 Summer Institute: The Digital City” on Storify]
Now that I’m back at Bryn Mawr for the rest of the summer, I’ll be working on my new course for the Department of HIstory, “History in Public” (Spring 2016) and continuing research for Black at Bryn Mawr, the project that inspired this course. There’s a Storify for that too: view “Black at Bryn Mawr” on Storify.
Monica L. Mercado, Ph.D. 
[…] Next month, I will join the faculty of Colgate University as Assistant Professor of History, teaching in my subfields of U.S. women’s, gender, and sexuality history and public history. My fellowship experience led me to apply to both tenure-track jobs in history as well as library and archives jobs; by moving full-time into a History Department, I can return to my own research, instead of spending the bulk of my time supporting the research of others. It’s a significant shift, in some ways, but most of the time it feels like exactly what my particular fellowship set me up for, because of the hybrid nature of my role, in the library, and in an academic department. My fellowship contract even gave me research time — 10 days a year, nothing fancy — but it allowed me to get back to my own projects from time to time, and attend last year’s fantastic AAS summer seminar, “Reading Children.” […]