Tag: Archives
Writing Women into the Catholic Summer School of America
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:
Postcards from the Convent
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.
The Convent Academy
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)
Exit Report
Black at Bryn Mawr in the News
Black at Bryn Mawr and other campus history projects, including those represented in our NCPH 2016 Working Group “Campus History as Public History” are featured in Corinne Ruff’s June 21, 2016 article, “Historians of Slavery Find Fruitful Terrain: Their Own Institutions” for The Chronicle of Higher Education.
When I talked to Ruff at the beginning of June, the most important point I wanted to stress was the variety of campus history models emerging; not every project comes out of an R1 school with a commission, faculty support, or funding. That there are, in fact, a growing number of student-centered models for this work is one reason I’m disappointed that Ruff didn’t name the founders of our project at Bryn Mawr — Emma Kioko and Grace Pusey — whose dedication, research, and creativity fueled this project from start to finish, even after their graduation.
The article is only available to Chronicle subscribers, but I’ve made a PDF available here.
(Finding) My Archives
Research day at my old stomping grounds, Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago; a good reminder to finish organizing the Black at Bryn Mawr project files for the Bryn Mawr College Archives before my departure.
#campushistories #ncph2016
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”
Community Day of Learning 2016
For a second year, the Greenfield Digital Center will be supporting history programming for the 2016 Bryn Mawr College Community Day of Learning, In/Visible: Class on Campus, Class in Our Lives. Can new archives and historical research expand our notion of campus histories? Join us on Tuesday, February 23 during the first two sessions (room locations and session times will be updated online, here) Continue reading “Community Day of Learning 2016”
Digital Library Federation Forum Talk online
“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.
Monica L. Mercado, Ph.D. 