Category: Research

Writing Women into the Catholic Summer School of America

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I’ve long been fascinated by the Catholic Summer School of America, the “Catholic Chautauqua” founded in the 1890s on the eastern shores of Lake Champlain just outside of Plattsburgh, New York. Thanks to a treasure trove of photographs made newly available by the Clinton County Historical Association archives in the early 2010s, and funding from Colgate University’s Upstate Institute just before the pandemic, my work on white women and the labor of leisure has finally made its way to print this month in Religion and American Culture (https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.8). Here’s a peek:

Fig. 1 Celebrating Feast of the Assumption (1910), courtesy Clinton County Historical Association, Image Number 95.033.0084b [link].

Latina/o/x Girlhoods

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Collection of the author.

As part of the ongoing Smithsonian National Museum of American History exhibition “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” I joined a team of scholars writing on Latina/o/x experiences.

Read more about the project here, and visit my contribution, “Picturing Catholic Girlhood” online at Smithsonian Magazine, in English and Spanish:

“Pretty, pious, prayerful–the photographs that I study offer a glimpse into expectations for faithful girls, and prompt us to ask what young women may have thought about these moments of religious formation…”  

The Convent Academy

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Loretto Academy postcard (1920), collection of the author.

Over at American Religion I wrote about my book; about driving to convents in rural Kentucky back when we could still travel; about a place I just can’t get out of my head. That place–the Loretto Community in Nerinx, KY–is just one of a handful of convent properties I’ve traveled to in the past year. Read more here:

To trace the stories of Catholic academy girls in nineteenth-century America—girls whose white skin and class privilege, I argue, made them symbols of both U.S. Catholic aspirations and anti-Catholic nightmares—I started making convent road trips. Even repurposed convent academies are often remarkably maintained, and I am drawn to their parlors, porches, hallways, and anterooms…

Loretto Academy (Nerinx, KY)

Museums and the Politics of Women’s History

Monica L. MercadoLeave a comment

The Politics of Women's History in Collections 14.3 (Summer 2018).It’s June 4th, 2019 — 100 years to the day that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

I woke to find the #19that100 hashtag firing up on Twitter, with historians and GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) highlighting the anniversary and histories of voting rights in the context of the suffrage movement. Of course, it took more than a year for the Amendment’s ratification, so look out for much more suffrage history to come in 2020. Continue reading “Museums and the Politics of Women’s History” →

Summer Research on Storify

Monica L. Mercado1 Comment

Exploring materials for child readers at the American Antiquarian Society, June 2015 (photo via @AmAntiquarian).

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)

[View the story “Reading Children: The 2015 Summer Seminar in the History of the Book in American Culture” on Storify]

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.

Recent Publications

Monica L. MercadoLeave a comment

Spring Quarter is here, and with it comes my dissertation defense and move to Philadelphia so this space will be pretty quiet for the next two months or so. In the meantime, I’m happy to have some new writing out in the world:

  • ” ‘Have You Ever Read?’ Imagining Women, Bibles, and Religious Print in Nineteenth-Century America,” in U.S. Catholic Historian 31.3 (Summer 2013): 1-21 [link to Project Muse]
  • “Demystifying Catholic Sisters in a Digital Age” for Sightings [link]

See you on the other side!