Attending AAR 2022 or AHA 2023?
We’re celebrating the publication of our Material Religion collection on eBay (see “eBay Method and the Study of Religion,” here, and my contribution, Postcards from the Convent).
Join us in Denver or Philly for some show & tell, and to continue the conversation in person.
I wrote a short piece for AHA Perspectives Daily on the state of gender history at the annual meeting, and it’s out today.
Continue reading “Taking Stock of Gender at AHA19”
This week I’m in Baltimore for the NCPH annual meeting, “Challenging the Exclusive Past,” co-organizing the working group Campus History as Public History with Caitlin Cohn (University of Minnesota), LaQuanda Cooper (UMBC), and Anne Mitchell Whisnant (UNC-Chapel Hill). Representing nearly 20 campus history projects from Massachusetts to Oklahoma, and many points in between (see our map), the working group is a first step in imagining how to offer resources for public historians working in a variety of institutional contexts–from K-12 schools to public and private colleges and universities.
For me, this group has already provided an opportunity to reflect on the projects I’ve worked on and advised at the University of Chicago and Bryn Mawr College, including On Equal Terms, Closeted/Out in the Quadrangles, and Black at Bryn Mawr. Follow our NCPH conversation with the hashtags #ncph2016 #campushistories (which I’m collecting using Storify), and read the group’s case statements over on the NCPH blog, History @Work. Continue reading “#campushistories #ncph2016”
“College Women: A Collaborative, Cross-Institutional Archives Portal,” the DLF Forum talk I gave with Rachel Appel (Bryn Mawr College) and Joanna DiPasquale (Vassar College), is now available online via The University of British Columbia Open Collections repository. Our presentation begins at 00:14:50.
I spent the middle of October back in the Midwest at the Oral History Association annual meeting and the Loyola University Chicago conference Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014. Read more at the following sites:
The AHA has come and gone for another year, and as I recover from the inevitable post-holidays/post-travel/post-conference flu, I’ve been catching up on some of the sessions I missed. Over on Prof. Hacker, Jennifer Guiliano posted a great recap of digital history offerings at the conference, asking readers to think critically about the frequent slippage between digital history and public history. It’s worth a read. [link]
This year, for the first time, I was able to attend the Coordinating Council for Women in History Friday night reception as well as the Saturday awards luncheon, where Crystal N. Feimster blew us all away with her talk, “‘The (Civil) War on Women’: A Case for Women’s History.” I went home and renewed my CCWH membership right away; 2014 marks its 45th anniversary year:
Continue reading “Generations of Women’s History at AHA 2014”
Photo by Meghan McInnis.
It’s November, which means conference season is up and running! I had a great time in CIncinnati for my first National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting, where I took part in the Women of Color Leadership Project. That’s us above, ready to get to work on Day 1.
There’s always more work to do, so this weekend I’m off to the American Studies Association in DC, where I’ll be giving a lightning talk tomorrow morning as part of the Digital Humanities Caucus event “Digital Shorts: New Platforms of Knowledge and Dissent.” Follow along on Twitter: #2013ASA.
Of course, what would the weekend before Thanksgiving be without AAR? Luckily it’s in Baltimore this year, giving me the opportunity to conference-hop and catch up with American religion friends. There’s a hashtag for everything: #AARSBL.
This week, join graduate students and faculty at the University of Chicago conference “Invisible Designs: New Perspectives on Race and Consumer Capitalism,” organized by Ph.D. students Chris Dingwall and Korey Garibaldi. From the conference website:
This conference takes design as an object and a theme to gain new perspective on the study of race in American consumer society. How has racialized imagery sustained the work of capitalism and American dreams of the “good life”? Considering design in relation to problems of self-fashioning, material culture, immigration, urban and suburban development, and decorative commodities, we will engage with the latest scholarly conversations about race and capitalism and explore paths for future inquiry. Ultimately the conference aims to uncover the otherwise “invisible” cultural logics and historical processes that have woven racial difference into the fabric of American life.
I’ll be presenting some preliminary research on first communion portrait photography and the material culture of Nuyorican migration as part of the panel “Life Design” on Thursday morning, October 24. The conference and related exhibition, “Race and the Design of American Life,” will take place at Special Collections Research Center at Regenstein Library.
View the full schedule and register online. [link]
I’m delighted that a panel I organized for the 2014 Berkshire Conference on Women’s History (aka the Berks) has been accepted. Collecting on the Edges: Gender and Sexuality in the University Archive will feature not only our efforts at the University of Chicago to build new archival collections in gender and sexuality, but also the work of graduate students, faculty, and librarians at repositories including the Women & Leadership Archives at Loyola University Chicago, the Pride Library at the University of Western Ontario, and the Transgender Archives at UVic.
Through collection profiles and explorations of queer and archival theory, we will highlight how sexuality has been hidden in established University archives, and can become a new collections priority at our institutions. In doing so, we hope to explore issues of public engagement in LGBT history, the role of archives in mediating knowledge of this history, and the challenges and opportunities of partnering with University repositories.
See you in Toronto next May!
Last month I took part in the inaugural Women’s History in the Digital World (#WHDigWrld) conference of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education at Bryn Mawr College.
My paper, On Equal Terms? The Stakes of Archiving Women’s and LGBT History in the Digital Era, and many others have been archived in the Greenfield Digital Center repository and can be viewed online here. I’m looking forward to revisiting the many of the talks:
Michelle Moravec created a Storify to archive conference tweets and reflected on our weekend at her blog, History in the City.
For more on the conference, see Arden Kirkland’s post Women’s History, and…Metadata?!
Monica L. Mercado, Ph.D. 