Public Humanities
In addition to my doctoral research, I worked at the Hesburgh Library's Rare Books and Special Collections department as a Library Assistant. Under Dr. David T. Gura, Notre Dame's Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscript, I also undertook a Graduate Student Assistantship in 2022. This Assistantship began my training in the Rare Books curatorial world. The projects below are some of the results of that training.
Additionally, I am currently the Hesburgh Library's Rare Books and Special Collection's 2024-2025 Postdoctoral Research Fellow. See the "Rare Books and Special Collections" tab for more information.
Exhibit: Remembering Early England
This exhibit, co-curated with Dr. Gura, brings together diverse materials that reveal the power of memory. Featuring an eleventh-century coin, a fifteenth-century medieval manuscript, an early printed grammar book, and a Victorian map, this exhibit is a sample of the breadth of the Hesburgh Library’s Special Collections. Each object represents the different ways that each generation has depicted the early English period (ca. 449 – 1066), whether or not their version of history reflected reality. The exhibit ran during the month of April 2022, as the RBSC April Spotlight.
Digital Exhibit: Remembering Early England
This forthcoming digital exhibit expands on the Spotlight Exhibit of the same title.
At times characterized as barbaric interlopers, at others the noble ancestors of the English spirit, the early English and their history have been co-opted by many with their own contemporary vision. In fact, the early English period has been used by each generation to qualify contemporary values, romanticize a distant aesthetic, and envision themselves as belonging to a distant past. This exhibit traces these narratives from the medieval to the modern, reminding that history is a continuously evolving field in which the present has a greater impact on the past than we often realize.
