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].
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.
“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…”
This year, I’m teaching one course at Harvard Divinity School while finishing my book manuscript, and it’s the course I’ve always wanted to teach: Women and Gender in American Catholicism. Check out the syllabus online and let me know what you would add — I had to cut so much good, new, work in this thriving subfield off of the official reading list, but I hope my students will make a dent with their writing projects!
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”→
“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.
How do you teach campus history? In just a few week’s time, visitors will have access to a more robust course website; for now, see the course description here.
A topic I’m eager to explore in more depth is the built environment of religion on women’s college campuses — connecting threads I’ve pursued since my second year of graduate school, when I wrote pages and pages on the intersection of labor, education, and gender at Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for my religion and history classes while researching a seminar paper on Mundelein, Chicago’s “skyscraper college” for Catholic women.
As I work with the Bryn Mawr College Archives, and on the project team developing College Women: Documenting the History of Women in Higher Education (collegewomen.org) I often think of the questions that many of my students have raised about the role of religion in their college lives, and the ways in which religious and interfaith spaces on college campuses have developed.
In June, my Special Collections colleagues and I announced the launch ofCollege Women: Documenting the History of Women in Higher Education(collegewomen.org), a project of the seven institutions once known as the “Seven Sisters” colleges. With a one-year Foundations planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities — based on a grant proposal written by my predecessor at Bryn Mawr, Dr. Jennifer Redmond — we developed a collaborative archives portal that brings together digitized student materials drawn from the libraries of the seven partner institutions: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Radcliffe (now the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University).
Professor Samuel Clagget Chew’s Bryn Mawr College classroom, undated, via Triptych.
This semester I’m back in the classroom, teaching a History Department seminar, “Higher Education for Women: Bryn Mawr and Beyond.” With apologies to Professor Samuel Claggett Chew (pictured left), my class of smart Bryn Mawr third- and fourth-years looks absolutely nothing like the lecture class of old. We divide our time between the classroom, Special Collections, and a course blog** linking past and present.
That blog, along with links to my syllabus and digital resources, is now live:
Although my students aren’t tweeting this semester, I’m tracking my class prep on Twitter (reviving the hashtag #bmchistory) and I look forward to using this space for reflecting on teaching the course and the research that it inspires.
** Students were given the option to blog anonymously, although no student has yet to choose this option. On student privacy and class blogging (or other instances of student work online that may be publicly visible), I’ve consulted this list of resources collected by Whittier College DigLibArts.
Perhaps because our conference CFP is due later this week, I spent a lot of time at AHA thinking about how conferences bring us together, and about how we can support each other and build audiences for our work.
Monica L. Mercado, Ph.D. 