M. Carey Thomas, Bryn Mawr College’s first female president, is the subject of a new digital exhibit to be launched soon

I have been exploring my thoughts on women’s history, digital humanities, and feminism through two separate presentations in recent months, the first at the conference organized by The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, Women’s History in the Digital World (March 2013), and the second at the Five Colleges Mediating Public Spheres: Genealogies of Feminist Knowledge in the Digital Age conference (April 2013). In a presentation at the latter conference, titled Open Source Technology and Feminist Perspectives: Translating Sources on the History of Women’s Education to the Digital Age I explained my feminist approach to my work at the Digital Center, focusing on a digital exhibit on M. Carey Thomas that is underway and will be launched soon. This blog post represents a synthesis of the two papers, based on work and thoughts in progress… all comments and feedback welcome as I work through some of the concepts I’ve been grappling with.

My thoughts on the trifecta of feminism, digital humanities and women’s history are largely drawn from my experiences using the open source software platform, Omeka, and our institutional enterprise version of Word Press to populate different areas of the Digital Center’s site, in addition to my training as a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow. While I assume that neither of these tools were designed with feminist notions in mind, I’ve come to believe that they have large potential to be utilized for feminist outcomes, particularly Omeka, as I will explain further in this post. Primarily, the Center’s site aims to tell stories in the history of women’s education that emanate from different perspectives. As Hermione Lee has said in her collection Virginia Woolf’s Nose: Essays on Biography, “We all want stories”, and the demand for such stories in the digital age is no less (possibly more, in fact) than ever before.[1]

The digital age and the tools it provides allow for a different mediation of knowledge than standard forms of scholarly communications. As noted by Abby Smith Rumsey these new methods have brought “fundamental operational changes and epistemological challenges [that] generate new possibilities for analysis, presentation, and reach into new audiences”.[2] The exhibit format in Omeka is designed to allow for the easy presentation of original historical material, such as images, transcriptions and audio files. This allows for the greater sharing of primary source materials, itself a way to decolonize and break down barriers to research and access to rare materials. We have created a number of exhibitions on our site, some of which have been generated as a result of student work from a class I teach on the history of women’s education, some of which come from collaborations with other colleges, and some drawn from our own collections and created by me and my team (see here for the full range of exhibits we have developed so far).

Our endeavor to produce digital source material comes from a desire to transmit knowledge and awareness of women’s history to the broadest audience possible: fellow researchers, students, teachers, alumnae, digital humanists and those simply with a desire to learn more about the topic–in essence, the public sphere has expanded in the digital age, although there are still challenges to be faced in greater online access morphing into another form of the ‘digital divide’.

Upon learning the new software platform and becoming familiar with its characteristics, possibilities and constraints, I realized that the Omeka exhibit format allows for the subject matter to be presented in a deconstructed narrative, due to the free form it provides for creating the digital exhibit. This struck me as having strong feminist potential: while the structure allowed by the Omeka format is cohesive in terms of form and flow, the sectioning of a biographical narrative allows for the fragmentation of the story, and in my efforts, for the development of a kaleidoscopic view, or, to paraphrase Henry James, to let the “swarm of possibilities” that nebulously make up a person’s biography to emerge, rather than a “few estimated and cherished things”.[3] This is, in my view, one of the pivotal means by which to incorporate digital media in feminist scholarship and practice.

Image by klmontgomery licensed under a Creative Commons license and available here http://www.flickr.com/photos/klm_digital_snaps/1444968874/sizes/m/in/photostream/

In a feminist postmodern tradition, this approach posits that there is no ONE person for us to study, no One Truth we can ascribe to a person or their life history.  In this case, M. Carey Thomas, born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 2, 1857 to a prominent Quaker family. Thomas was the first Dean and later the first female President of Bryn Mawr College and a national leader in women’s struggle for access to higher education and the suffrage movement.  My feminist approach to her biography aims to be cognizant of the privilege in stories such as hers: the history of women’s entry into higher education is an elite history, and recognition of this is necessary so that the histories we tell are not merely celebratory without being interrogative.
Here I am focusing on Thomas as she was seen from different perspectives: her own (for example, her ambitious articulations for her education and career in the letters and diaries that span her time at Quaker boarding school, on to Cornell, Johns Hopkins and eventually a summa cum laude PhD from the University of Zurich), those of her contemporaries, lovers, friends and family, the public and the way in which she was memorialized after her death in 1935. I am focused here, however, not on the details of her biography (although this will be in the exhibit) but rather on examining the potential of an open source software tool to present critical historical analysis of this fascinating person. The ability to juxtapose different opinions by placing them on the same page is more visually and comprehensively impactful in a digital exhibition format than would be the effect of a written paragraph: in traditional biographical accounts such as an article or monograph, editorial and stylistic conventions would view such jumping around as incoherent, and yet it can be seamless in an online presentation.

Making sure our metadata is harvested by the major search engines and databases and using social media to reach both scholarly and public audiences will both be crucial in building up a new body of feminist genealogies and for tracing feminist work in the digital era. The metadata itself also needs to be cognizant of feminist principles in describing women’s identities in digital databases, as was mentioned by Professor Laura Mandell in her keynote speech at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference. 

It is also imperative that as we do work that mediates the public sphere in the digital age we think about its long term preservation. This requires that choices be made, funding be sourced and policies be formulated now – it would be the greatest tragedy of all if we found ourselves unable to trace back the exciting developments in feminist work that have been produced in online public spaces. The familiar academic mantra of ‘publish or perish’ might be usefully adapted in this context to be ‘archive or perish’. And, as I remarked at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference that was held at Bryn Mawr College, I believe fundamentally in the idea that the ‘add women and stir model’ for any kind of initiative, social, political education or anything else, rarely works.

Photo courtesy: www.hbdi.com

In the new era of digital humanities, women need a seat at the table while it’s still being set, not after the main course has been served. As I researched for this paper, I discovered that others in the digital humanities community have also used the “table” to describe the need to collaborate, critique and engage in new developments. Alan Liu has argued that digital humanists need to be equal partners at the table, not just a servant, when critical conversations are happening about the way forward for the humanities and cautions that digital humanists need to include more cultural critique in their work.[5] Moya Bailey extends Liu’s concerns into more explicitly feminist territory with her arguments that the “ways in which identities inform both theory and practice in digital humanities have been largely overlooked” and that moving from “the margin to the center” gives the opportunity to “engage new sets of theoretical questions that expose explicit structural limitations that are the inevitable result of an unexamined identity politics of whiteness, masculinity and ablebodiness”.[6] Alan Liu’s point was that the “digital humanities have a special role to play today in helping the humanities communicate in contemporary media networks”.[7] I would extend this argument to say that feminists have a special role in mediating the present and future public spheres, through their research, pedagogy and activism. Here the words of M. Carey Thomas are apt: reflecting on the success women had made of educational attainment in the first twenty-five years of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, she stated “The fearsome toads of those early prophecies are turning into pearls of purest radiance before our very eyes.”[8] Let’s hope it’s the same for us as we feminists navigate the new public spheres and create our own genealogies of knowledge.

Lilith: A Feminist History Journal – Call for Papers

The Lilith: A Feminist History Journal is seeking submissions for our next issue.

First published in 1984, Lilith is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes articles and reviews in

all areas of women’s, feminist and gender history (not limited to Australia). It is a valuable forum for both new and established scholars in the field. We particularly encourage submissions from Australian and international postgraduate students and early career researchers.

For details of our submission guidelines please see our website:

http://www.lilithjournal.org.au/

Submissions for the 2014 issue must be received by 1 September 2013.

The journal is produced by a collective of postgraduates and early career researchers from across Australia, along with a distinguished editorial advisory board of leading scholars in the field. New collective members are always welcome. Please contact the Lilith collective if you are interested in being part of our team:

lilithjournal@gmail.com<

The Importance of Learning:
Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective

Princeton University, 5-7 June 2013

Keynote Speakers: William Clark (UCLA), Anthony Grafton (Princeton), and Howard Hotson (Oxford)

It is an inescapable fact of contemporary life that the idea of a liberal
education, an education that aims primarily at the cultivation of the
intellect and sensibility rather than at preparation for a particular
vocation, is widely under attack all over the world. In country after
country, the idea of learning for its own sake is being swept aside, as
institutions of higher education are pressured to devote themselves
primarily to preparing students for careers in practical areas. The global
membership of the International Society for Intellectual History is in a
unique position to illuminate these questions from a genuinely historical
and cosmopolitan perspective.

This conference has been made possible thanks to the support of the
Department of Philosophy, the Department of History, the Humanities
Council, the University Center for Human Values, the Shelby Cullom Davis
Center for Historical Studies, and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty,
whose sponsorship we gratefully acknowledge.

Registration is free. For the programme and information relating to
registration, please see the conference website:
http://isih.history.ox.ac.uk/?page_id=595

Please feel free to contact James Lancaster
(james.lancaster@postgrad.sas.ac.uk) for more information.

Courtesy pbey 4103-ICT, http://wanzhafirah.wordpress.com/

The History Lab Seminar is now inviting papers for the 2013-14 academic year. These seminars are a great opportunity to present your on-going work or research conclusions to fellow postgraduates and early career historians in a relaxed and convivial atmosphere, and to obtain valuable feedback from peers.

Papers can be on any aspect or time period of historical study, broadly defined to include interdisciplinary topics from related disciplines. They should be around 45 minutes long, or, alternatively, we also welcome the submission of joint seminars with two papers of 20 to 25 minutes duration (even if the two topics are loosely related). All seminars are followed by a discussion session lasting around 15 minutes. If you would like to give a paper, but would rather it were the shorter length, do let us know and we will try to match you up with someone else in a similar situation in a related field.

The seminars are a great way to socialise with historians and postgraduates who are at similar stages in their careers, and as such the seminars always finish with drinks (and there are frequent post-seminar pub visits).

If you are interested, please send an abstract of between 250 and 350 words outlining your proposed paper to the seminar convenors at postgraduateearlycareerseminar@gmail.com. Please include some brief information about the stage you are at in your studies, your academic background, and your research interests. Seminars will all take place at the Institute of Historical Research (Senate House, London). We are able to podcast the seminars on our website – which is a great opportunity for public engagement. Therefore, please indicate in your submission whether you are willing to have your paper recorded.
The deadline for submission is Friday the 31st of May 2013.

Simon Parsons, Seminar Convenor for History Lab, History Lab, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Senate House, London, WC1E 7HU. Email: postgraduateearlycareerseminar@gmail.com Visit the website at http://www.flickr.com/photos/65984877@N03/8695998820/in/photostream

It is a conference for everybody.  Absolute beginners can turn up early, and find angels ready to help with the most basic questions, from the locations of the restrooms to logging onto the WIFI.

The theme of the conference, solidly grounded in a culture of open access, is “Projects for Anybody, Tools For Everybody.”  We have the most basic workshops and more advanced sessions.  Perhaps most importantly we have lots of spaces, and lots of time on the calendar for you to help others, get help yourself, and present your projects as you change your corner of the world. Because that’s the goal of the conference: to empower you to make a difference.

Our featured Speaker is Mike Edson, Director of Web and New Media Strategy at the Smithsonian. Our Exhibition “A Legacy Inscribed: The Collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg” will be on view also.

William Noel
Director, Special Collections Center
Director, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies
University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Tel: 215 898 9767
Mob: 267 800 6471
wgnoel@upenn.edu

Since the Second Wave Feminist Movement during the 1970s, Hollywood has
slowly begun to give prominent and leading roles to women.  However, the
intellectual representations of women are out of line with reality, in many
cases failing to reflect the successes and struggles that women have faced
in a resistant social and political environment.  This book considers the
portrayals of traditional myths about women’s intellect across film
history, as well as new myths and/or myth-busters that may have arisen
since the Second Wave.

When women are given space as “smart” in the media, they often find
themselves simultaneously undermined by stigmatizing qualities; finding it
difficult to gain and maintain a romantic connection, for example, or
watching her less intelligent friend/sister/colleague get all of the
attentions of others.  Some smart women are coded as nerds, and in many
other cases, intellect is conflated with madness, monstrosity, or
witchcraft, harkening back to the healer and the hag.

In what ways does Hollywood control expectations about the brains of women
by foiling their intellect with their own bodies? How are smart women cast
as threats to the social order? What do we make of cinematic strategies
that cast women as the counter-intellectual to men of superior intellect?
And what of those whom we don’t allow to display any characteristics of
the intellectual at all?

Women earn 77 percent of the salaries of all American men—and that is not
because fewer women than men are working. The reality of the American
workforce is that women cluster in poorly paid occupations. This stems from
the pervasive cultural maintenance of male privilege, something that is
still communicated to girls and young women through peer groups, the media,
and even the historical structure of education that educated women
differently than men.

Contemporary media exploits this hypocrisy.  More women go to college, but
they end up in overwhelmingly lower-paid jobs.  Women who choose more elite
career paths in medicine, science, or crime fighting are made less
threatening by an over-accentuation of their “womanliness,” thus
exceptionalizing their intellectual position.  If she is attractive, the
viewer can ignore her brain in favor of gazing at her body; if she is
average looking, or nerdy, viewers are offered ways to desexualize her in
order to accept her as an intellectual.

This Call for Chapters looks for scholarship that focuses on women’s brainy
roles in film and television since WWII.  Questions for consideration may
include, but are not limited to:

·      In what ways are women in film imprisoned by their intelligence?
·      In what way are women ostracized for it?
·      Are there cases in which women in film are set free, or live better,
as a result of intellectual growth?
·      How do female roles in film reinforce standards of beauty,
submissiveness, and silence, over intellect, problem solving, or leadership?
·      In what ways are smart women infantilized, or commodified, by their
intelligence in film (i.e.: chicks, babes, and honeys who are, despite
their appearance or place in society, intelligent)?
·      How does an actress’s personal standards of intellect in her real
life affect the way she is given roles, or seen on screen?
·      Are there successes (i.e. women in film and television who are
intelligent without also being objectified or villified)

2-5 page chapter proposals should be e-mailed to the book editor, Laura
Mattoon D’Amore: ldamore@rwu.edu<mailto:ldamore@rwu.edu>. Please include a
CV or brief biography with your proposal. The deadline for proposals is
June 1, 2013.  Contributors will be notified by June 30, 2013.  Final
drafts (5,000-7,000 words) will be due to the book editor by October 15,
2013.

Laura Mattoon D’Amore, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of American Studies
Roger Williams University
One Old Ferry Road
Bristol, RI 02809
401-254-3171
ldamore@rwu.edu

Call for Papers and Participants

Gendered Knowledges: An interdisciplinary workshop

The Gendered Knowledges project is holding a Gender and Sexuality(ies) Interdisciplinary Workshop on 12th June 2013 at the University of Warwick. Gendered Knowledges is a newly launched research project that aims to explore radical interdisciplinary pedagogies in relation to Gender and Sexuality. The project, funded by the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning (IATL), will ultimately result in creating an interdisciplinary MA module on Gender and Sexuality at the University of Warwick.

The workshop aims to bring together staff, research students, and post-doctoral researchers from different faculties and departments across the university who are engaged in research on gender and sexuality. It will bring together scholars from all disciplines and all faculties to discuss how gender and sexuality studies are understood and used in and across different disciplines, how we can conceptualize interdisciplinary approach(es) to gender and sexuality, and how can we promote an interdisciplinary community of researchers at Warwick, and beyond.

We are pleased to have Dr Rahul Rao (Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS) as the keynote speaker, who will discuss the topic: is there a Queer Question? If so, what does it look like? Who is asking it? And what does posing the Queer Question do to the very notion of questioning the place of troublesome groups in relation to a putatively common humanity?

We encourage staff, research students and post-doctoral researchers from all discipline across all faculties, whose research interests are related to issues of gender and/or sexualities, to present their research. This includes work in progress. We are looking for presentations that will stimulate a vibrant discussion around the themes of gender, sexuality and interdisciplinarity.

Each panel will be composed of a number of short presentations, followed by a facilitated session designed to stimulate roundtable discussion. We are looking for 5-7 minute presentations that relate to the following themes:

·         Interdisciplinarity

·         Bodies

·         Power

·         Queer

Please send an abstract of no more than 150 words to gendered.knowledges@warwick.ac.uk by 18^th of May 2013.

The aim of the workshop, starting from participants’ own research interests, is to provide an open space for participants to develop a meaningful conversation on the future and possibility of interdisciplinary research in gender and sexuality studies. If you would like to be part of the discussions but would not like to present a paper, please email us at gendered.knowledges@warwick.ac.uk , as places are limited.

Gender, the Refugee and Displacement (1900-1950)

Newcastle University, Friday 5^th July 2013

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

Professor Peter Gatrell (Manchester University)

Call For Papers: This interdisciplinary one-day symposium will interrogate the links between gender and displacement from the turn of the twentieth century, through both World Wars and into the post-war period. Addressing a crucial gap in scholarship surrounding displacement and gender within the critical canon of war studies, it asks how gender influences or impacts displacement during the two world wars and how, in particular, men and women experience and represent displacement differently?  It interrogates the historic association of the refugee with the female, existing outside the symbolic order and beyond the nation, particularly at times of war (Plain, 1994). It addresses the embodied experience of displacement, such as the tendency for refugees and Internally Displaced People to experience rape, torture and physical violence as well as other forms of emotional or physical hardship, as well as the representation of displacement in literary, biographical and historical works with relation to ideas around gender and empowerment during this period. In particular, this conference brings together academics working across the disciplines, looking at the intersections between gender and displacement in a range of discourses legal and historical, literary and political, artistic and geographical in and around the two world wars. It welcomes abstracts from across the humanities and social sciences.

Papers are invited on any aspect of gender and displacement during this period, including but not exclusive to:

·         Male/female experiences of displacement;

·         Male/female descriptions or representations of displacement;

·         Childhood and displacement;

·         The politics of displacement/ power and displacement;

·         The experiences of IDPs and refugees;

·         Race and displacement;

·         Histories/geographies of displacement;

·         Theories of displacement;

·         The UN Convention on Refugees and the legal aspects of displacement.

Please send 300 word abstracts to Katherine Cooper (Katherine.cooper@ncl.ac.uk) before 17 May 2013.

For more information: http://genderanddisplacementconf.wordpress.com/

This conference is supported by a generous grant from Newcastle University’s Gender Research Group.

Organised by: Katherine Cooper

 Katherine Cooper

PhD Candidate

School of English Language, Literature and Linguistics,

Newcastle University

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/study/postgraduate/students/KatherineCooper.htm

Gender, The Refugee and Displacement, 1900-1950 Conference

5th July 2013, Newcastle University

http://genderanddisplacementconf.wordpress.com/

The History of Education Society is accepting submissions for the Claude A. Eggertsen Prize for the dissertation judged to be most outstanding in the field of history of education. This includes work on schooling and educational institutions more broadly, and the dissertation may have a domestic or international focus. The next award will be presented at the 2013 meeting of the History of Education Society. The prize carries an award of $1,000 for the winner. Self-nominations are welcome. Qualified applicants must have completed the dissertation and graduated during the calendar year 2012. The deadline for entries is May 24, 2013. Entrants should send an electronic copy of the complete dissertation to each of the three prize committee members:

Ann Marie Ryan, Loyola University Chicago
aryan3@luc.edu

Laura Munoz, Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi
laura.munoz@tamucc.edu

Louis Ray, Fairleigh Dickinson University
louray5@fdu.edu

If you have questions or need more information, please write to the chair of the committee, Ann Marie Ryan at aryan3@luc.edu.

An American Educational Research Association List If you need assistance with this list, please send an email to listadmin@aera.net.

We have consolidated and added to our posts on the Column in a new digital exhibit that is now available to browse on our site. One of a host of digital exhibits that we have curated, this exhibit prefaces the text of the four posts with an expanded history of the two papers, the family who ran them, and the role of print in the fight for suffrage in the United States.

Head over to the The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Higher Education website now to view the exhibit and learn more about the Woman’s Column in the struggle to reform women’s rights!