This month the IWA held an event for area girls from ages 8 – 14. The girls learned about Iowa girls and women from decades past like Dora Martin Berry, the first black student to be named Miss State University of Iowa; Dorothy Fox Wurster, who joined the local boys 4-H club in order to competitively show cattle; and Phyliss Henry, Des Moines’ first police woman.
Using photocopies of what they found, the kids made their own mini-exhibits and decorated a quilt square about a girl or woman of their choice.
All who participated had a blast, and we hope to have a similar event in the future.
The girls examine our current exhibit “History as it Happens: Women’s March 2017Curator Kären Mason shows the girls some artifacts from IWA collections.Assistant curator Janet Weaver helps a girl write her exhibit caption, “And the women powered through it!”Quilt squares about Iowa women, by Iowa girls.
CHICAGO – Janet Weaver, assistant curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa, is the winner of the 2017 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Women and Gender Studies Section (WGSS) Award for Significant Achievement in Woman’s Studies Librarianship. The WGSS award honors a significant or one-time contribution to women’s studies librarianship.
A plaque will be presented to Weaver at a WGSS event during the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.
“The Awards Committee was greatly impressed by Weaver’s creation of the Migration is Beautiful website, which is a project constructed from oral histories and other archival material housed at the Iowa Women’s Archives,” said award chair Stacy Russo, librarian and associate professor at Santa Ana College. “Migration is Beautiful was developed from the Iowa Women’s Archives’ Mujeres Latinas project that launched in 2005. The committee especially noted Weaver’s level of collaboration with her colleagues and undergraduate students. The students selected documents for the website and also wrote vignettes. The introduction on the website reads: ‘Migration is Beautiful highlights the contributions Latinas and Latinos have made to Iowa history. Migration is central to understanding and interpreting the past, shaped first by Native Americans, and later by immigrants from around the world.’”
The Migration is Beautiful digital humanities project highlights the contributions of Latinas, their families, and their organizations to Iowa history. Visitors can navigate the site in multiple ways to access hundreds of digitized primary documents and audio clips from oral history interviews through historical topics, life stories, and a migration map.
“Weaver’s work has brought accessibility to primary source documents that were previously only available to visitors at the Iowa Women’s Archives,” continued Russo. “After its launch in 2016, Migration is Beautiful debuted with a travelling exhibit at the national League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) convention in Washington, D.C. In her continued emphasis on outreach, Weaver has made presentations to Latino groups around Iowa regarding the project. Her work has also been featured on Hola Iowa, a news outlet that focuses on Latinos in the Midwest.”
Weaver received her M.A. in Modern History from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Rachel Black, IWA graduate assistant completed her studies and graduated from the School of Library and Information Science. She will walk tomorrow at graduation.
Earlier this month, Rachel successfully defended her poster, “Community Building and Humanizing Social Media.”
Earlier we highlighted Rachel’s work on her blog, “@ Your Local Library.” You can read more about the project here.
Please join us in congratulating Rachel and wishing her the best in her future career.
Rachel Black is a graduate assistant in the Iowa Women’s Archives. As part of her graduate work in the School of Library and Information Science she has been working on a project called “@ Your Local Library.”
“@ Your Local Library” is a series of photo essays bringing to life stories of the important work going on behind the scenes in libraries around the area, and posting about them on a WordPress site as well as Tumblr and Facebook.
On the “About” page for her website, Black describes her goals:
“Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t aware of everything their local library has to offer. They see the books and the computers, but not the new programs or initiatives librarians are working to provide in order to create a happy and healthy community. I started this website in order to share with everyone the different ways librarians are working to benefit their communities.”
As part of the project, Black posted a six part series featuring librarians and staff from the Iowa Women’s Archives. The posts are embedded as a series below. Be sure to check out her pages to read all of the compelling stories of work going on in libraries around The Corridor.
From October 24th – 27th Trudy Huskamp Peterson, the former Acting Archivist of the United States, and Jane E. Schultz, Professor of English and Medical Humanities at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, will visit the University of Iowa.
A longtime friend of the Iowa Women’s Archives, Trudy Huskamp Peterson has made an international career of archives and human rights. Besides serving as the United States’ Acting Archivist, Peterson has consulted with truth commissions in South Africa and Honduras and worked for three years with the police archives in Guatemala. She is currently the chair of the International Council on Archives’ Human Rights Working.
On Monday the 24th Peterson will host an archival workshop for graduate students and researchers from 4:00 – 5:30 in 302 SH Commons. She will follow this on Tuesday the 25th with a public lecture entitled “What Every Citizen and Historian Should Know: How Governments Shape Archives.” The lecture will take place in 302 SH Commons from 12:30 – 1:45 and will include a light lunch.
Finally, on Thursday the 27th, the Universty of Iowa History of Medicine Society and the Iowa Women’s Archives will jointly present Jane E. Schultz. Schultz, a professor at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, formerly consulted for the PBS miniseries “Mercy Street” and has written extensively about women and the Civil War. Her lecture “Civility on Trial: Nurses, Surgeons, and Medical Extremity in Civil War Hospitals will take place in the Medical Education Research Facility (MERF) 2117 from 5:30 – 6:30.
The Iowa Women’s Archives is approaching its 25th Anniversary in 2017. In preparation, through a series of fundraisers our donors have helped make it possible to update the Reading Room with new paint, tables, and technology. Most everything is place though some finishing touches like hanging artwork still remain. Sincere thanks to all of our supporters. Be sure to stop by and see our new look.
Reading Room BeforeReading Room After
Work Room BeforeWork Room After
Below you can see a live video from just when the new furniture was put into place:
Dr. Annessa Babic, coordinator of interdisciplinary studies at the New York Institute of Technology and Dr. Tanfer Tunç of Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey are the most recent recipients of a research grant from the Linda and Richard Kerber Fund for Research in the Iowa Women’s Archives, a grant that helps researchers travel to the Iowa Women’s Archives.
Collaborators since 2008, Tunç and Babic met in graduate school at SUNY Stony Brook where each produced feminist scholarship. In 2008, the pair co-edited The Globetrotting Shopaholic: Consumer Products, Spaces, and Their Cultural Places. Since then they have continued to produce articles together and apart examining consumerism, nationalism, and Wonder Woman, among other subjects. Although the two collaborators had planned to travel to Iowa City together, the political unrest in Turkey stifled Tunç’s plans at the last minute. Nevertheless, Dr. Babic had a fruitful week in the archives hunting for places where feminism and food activism collide.
Annessa Babic at work in the IWA
Tunç and Babic’s current project will extend “common discussions concerning food waste, overabundance, and safety by connecting food activism to consumer activism and social and civil rights, particularly the environmental and women’s movements.” Babic believes that movements surrounding food safety and packaging are gendered due to the heavy marketing of food products to women. She and Tunç hope to explore the parallels they see between the environmental and women’s movements of the late twentieth century. Although this project is in its early stages, Babic and Tunç expect that it will result in an article that will put food activism in the cultural context of the United States from 1970 – 1990.
The duo were drawn to the Iowa Women’s Archives by its diverse holdings about grassroots movements as well as its collections of oral histories. Additionally, they were interested in exploring resources of the Midwest, a region less studied than the American coasts. Babic, who is also a travel writer, confessed that she had never been to Iowa before, and expects to produce work about the trip itself as well as the resources she found in the archives.
While here, Babic looked at the papers of farm activists such as Denise O’Brien, Carol Hodne, Ericka Peterson-Dana, and Janette Ryan-Busch, as well as the records of food activist organizations like the Mothers for Natural Law and the Women, Food and Agriculture Network. What was her favorite collection? With three days of research behind her, Babic said she most enjoyed reading oral histories from Voices From the Land, a collection produced as part of the Iowa Women’s Archives’ Rural Women’s Project. It includes interviews with rural women who were politically active in the 1980s farm crisis. Babic said she found the farm women’s take on that era interesting and refreshing. We look forward to finding both qualities in the future work of Tunç and Babic.
While these two fabulous ladies aren’t brand new to IWA, they both recently accepted positions as graduate assistants for the up-coming semesters.
Rachel Black grew up in the southwestern corner of Iowa in a tiny town that had more ponies than people. Now living in the Iowa City area, she hopes to graduate with a MLIS this December.
Her archives journey began last summer as a volunteer working on the Myrtle Hinkhouse papers. She is excited to tackle more collections this fall.
Outside of the archives, Rachel can be found knitting poorly constructed hand towels, messing up her kitchen while baking, losing arrows on the archery range, and just generally enjoying her life.
Katie Gandhi still doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up, but she does know she loves libraries, history, people, and archives. Other past-times include hiking, painting, weaving, and playing cello.
Since being hired in January, her primary focus has been helping Janet prepare content for the IWA’s “Migration is Beautiful” project Omeka site, which went live on July 5th.
Katie just finished an M.S. in Urban and Regional Planning and will be working to complete her M.A. in Library and Information Science this year.
July 12th was the kickoff for the 2016 National LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) convention. Janet, assistant curator here at the IWA, attended the conference to promote “Migration is Beautiful,” a new website featuring vignettes, oral history interview clips, memoirs, letters, and photographs from the IWA’s Mujeres Latinas Project.
The new website highlights the experiences and contributions Latinas and Latinos have made to the state of Iowa. It also hosts an interactive map that shows the migration of Latinos through Iowa during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Recently, Hola Iowa, a news outlet focusing on Latinos in the Midwest, featured a vignette and photos from the Migration is Beautiful website.
We are very proud of Janet, and can’t wait to hear more about the convention when she returns!
Last week, the Iowa Women’s Archives welcomes Lauren Feldman, a doctoral candidate in history from Johns Hopkins University. Lauren is the latest recipient of the Linda and Richard Kerber Fund for Research in the Iowa Women’s Archives, a $1000 travel grant to bring researchers to the IWA.
Lauren hard at work.
In her research, Lauren looks at the changing conceptions of marital engagement in the 19th century. She argues Americans worried about the future of marriage as divorce rates rose. She believes that in response to this fear engagement increased in importance and became a trial period for the marriages that would follow. Lauren wants to expand the scope of her research to include minorities, rural women, and sources outside of the Eastern United States. After finding the Kerber Grant on H-Net, she felt the IWA’s Kerber Fund would be a good fit for her research.
When asked at the beginning of her week here what her favorite documents were so far she admitted that she hadn’t had much time to read them yet. However, she couldn’t wait to sink her teeth into Van Voorhis White’s and Riggs Cosson’s courtship correspondences with the men who they would marry. It isn’t common to have both sides of a correspondence and, as Lauren says, “that’s exactly what I’m looking for.”
We were so happy to have Lauren visit us for the week as a Kerber Fund recipient, and cannot wait to hear about the scholarship she produces.
CHICAGO – Janet Weaver, assistant curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa, is the winner of the 2017 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Women and Gender Studies Section (WGSS) Award for Significant Achievement in Woman’s Studies Librarianship. The WGSS award honors a significant or one-time contribution to women’s studies librarianship.
Rachel Black, IWA graduate assistant completed her studies and graduated from the School of Library and Information Science. She will walk tomorrow at graduation.
Rachel Black is a graduate assistant in the Iowa Women’s Archives. As part of her graduate work in the School of Library and Information Science she has been working on a project called “
