The Spring 2022 Pforzheimer Fellows and Projects
Each year, Harvard Library’s Pforzheimer Fellowships provide an opportunity for graduate students to work on a library project with a librarian or archivist. The fellowships are a chance for them to learn about library careers, advance their own research skills, and get to know a library from the inside.
Indigenous Peoples and Native Americans Exhibit
Kabl Wilkerson, PhD candidate — History
Baker Library, Harvard Business School
Library mentors: Melissa Renn, Christine Riggle
Baker Library Special Collections periodically showcases exhibitions on the collection’s holdings. This project coalesced materials and objects across the Harvard Business School Art & Artifacts Collections, Archives, and print collections for the upcoming Indigenous peoples and Native Americans Exhibition. The fellow conducted preliminary research on the objects, identified resources for a future library research guide on the topic, noted works and materials for priority digitization and provided guidance on descriptive language for such materials in the collections. This project enabled the fellow to work hands-on with curators and collection managers in the Special Collections department on a wide array of objects and visual and material culture from the colonial period to the present, including sculptures, paintings, trade cards, photographs, stereographs, prints, currency, and maps.
Harvard and HBCUs
Donald Brown, PhD candidate — English
Harvard University Archives
Library mentor: Jehan Sinclair
To uncover underrepresented histories of people of color at Harvard, the Harvard University Archives conducted a research survey to identify individuals with connections to both Harvard and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) between 1800 and 1945. These individuals attended, taught, or received an honorary degree at Harvard prior to 1946 and also attended, taught, or received an honorary degree from an HBCU. The initial survey identified more than 200 people: from well-known historic Black scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois to the less known Rose Butler Browne, the first Black woman to receive a PhD in education from Harvard. From the survey findings, the fellow structured and analyzed a dataset that was used to create visualizations and conclusions on the findings. These results and visualizations are now hosted online as a resource for researchers in African American and Harvard history uncovering ties between Harvard and HBCUs.
ACT UP Collection
Julia Harris, PhD candidate — American Studies
Widener Library
Library mentors: Carol Chiodo, Joshua Lupkin
The Americas, Europe and Oceania Division continues to build tightly focused distinctive collections of primary sources in LGBTQ history in support of research and teaching needs. These materials include LGBTQ posters, publications and print ephemera, and a significant collection of oral histories. The ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) Oral History Project is a series of 186 oral history interviews, recorded between 2002 and 2015, pertaining to AIDS activism in New York. Working closely with the Librarian of Collections and Digital Scholarship and the Charles Warren Librarian for American History, the Pforzheimer Fellow selected and reviewed video files and transcripts, using text analysis to enhance the use of the oral histories in teaching and research. These selections and further collocated segments from different interviews were then curated into a public-facing digital collection that highlights various themes across the interviews.
Finding Aids for Middle East Collections
Johannes Makar, PhD candidate — Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies
Services for Academic Programs
Library mentor: Sarah DeMott
Researchers often ask for ‘discovery tricks’ and ‘search strategies’ when using Harvard Library’s Hollis Catalogue. While serendipitous search terms can be successful, they are not consistent. Harvard Library’s Discovery Team created a virtual platform finding aid prototype. This project tasked a fellow to test the prototype on the Middle East Collections. The fellow curated the first series of virtual finding aids to assist researchers in highlighting regions within this collection. Through consultations with the library project team and user experience feedback, the fellow published a library guide for Middle East resources across Harvard Library. This project models the critical partnership between academic library and emerging scholar.
Urban Segregation
Gangsim Eom, PhD candidate — Anthropology
Harvard Map Collection
Library mentors: Dave Weimer, Belle Lipton
Urban segregation surrounds the lives of everyone in a city but often is not obviously visible on a printed map. The Urban Segregation project explores Harvard’s collections of urban maps throughout the world, animating the effects of urban segregation. By augmenting and deepening what is already available in the online collection, City Maps and Urban Environments, the fellow selected several specific, well-represented cities in our collections in order to show the different ways segregation is depicted on maps, and how maps and data about a city can help us understand the lasting effects of segregation. Combining research with paper maps and geospatial data, this project has also enabled the fellow to develop skills in digital and spatial history while also seeing how librarians collect, curate, and produce maps and geospatial data.