I am a storyteller. I stole my dad's camera at 4, began painting while in kindergarten, created and voiced fictional radio shows when I was 6, started dancing and playing organized sports in the 1st grade, sang in choirs all throughout my youth, and focused on fine arts, history, literature, and languages in high school. 

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As an adult, I set out to explore parts of Europe and to traverse the US several times over, pausing in Alaska, Washington State, and California. Then while living in Brazil, Costa Rica, and Argentina for several years, I studied Portuguese and Spanish, fostered a baby spider monkey, taught English and dance classes, learned to cook regional dishes, started a food culture blog, and took every opportunity to engage with people (locals and tourists) along the way.

Currently, I am a Master of Liberal Arts student in English at Harvard University (Extension Studies program) where I am also am Access Services Coordinator at Baker Library. I also hold a Master of Fine Arts degree in Film and Media Production from the University of Texas at Austin. I completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with a double major in Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of California at Berkeley.

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This blog is a testing ground for what I plan to create as a part of doctoral research: the creation of an interactive digital archive. This interdisciplinary PhD dissertation project will combine my research and writing backgrounds in film & media production, photography, anthropology, and cultural studies in order to help expand and enhance our understanding of women in global cultural history. Unearthing the existence of women’s material culture verifies a history of women obtaining degrees of agency over their lives. I intend to show how many women used their handiworks, available modes of communication, and social resources unique to their situations to produce objects that had multi-layered intentions and complex, even subversive, meanings below the surface.

The project can also advance the definition of material culture to include contemporary documentation techniques only accessible through adaptable digital platforms and be revised to include how material culture manifests within intangible and tangible heritage. This will help researchers and overall scholarship stay in touch with general research trends while ensuring the sustainability of the field in the future.

I see an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship as an advantage and I propose using digital platforms alongside physical artifacts as complementary examples of material culture. Separately, each tangible and intangible aspect of culture has narratives, but combined they weave a richer story with details that may have been missed on their own. My intention is that the digital archive will highlight objects from periods that often lack or have minimal visual records about women, or so we think. While the content and meaning of what each woman produced is significant, I am most interested in investigating the material culture, the textual objects of writing that the women made: the books, the pieces of parchment, the writing instruments, the works of art, and all of the things that women created.

In order to tackle the sheer size of content that could be amassed from the entire historical record, I consider the archive to be composed of two parts: (1) the PhD dissertation work as a concentrated case study of a specific time period and location, and (2) the longer-term research that will hopefully come after the dissertation and will encompass many more dates and locales to all women from before the 20th century and around the globe.

In the first iteration of the archive, I will focus on women writers from the United Kingdom who lived during the Early Modern Period (1550-1700 CE). I choose that time as it marked a significant moment of women dipping their toes outside of the private sphere and daring to go public with non-domestic and creative work. The United Kingdom is endowed with so many examples of women who crossed those lines and where their creations still exist today. The second iteration, after I complete my dissertation and begin my professional work, will be a larger archive that will include a world map of women from the entire global historical record who produced an array of material culture.

My methods of research will include multiple steps and I will utilize various resources for gathering tangible objects and intangible data. To begin, I will consult with other researchers, and explore institutional holdings in person. I will study the work of scholars who specialize in women writers in this particular time and then document and contextualize the women’s objects that are housed in libraries, physical archives, museums, and storerooms around the United Kingdom and the United States. For the intangible information, I will use various Digital Humanities applications to assist in searching for patterns, connections, and discrepancies in the digitized objects. I will also utilize crowdsourcing, or an open call to academic and general public communities to contribute ideas and insights to my project. The collaborative nature of crowdsourcing will add examples of material culture to my research that have been dismissed by previous scholars, and grant access to resources that I might otherwise overlook due to the logistical and budgetary restrictions of a single researcher working on her own. 

I see myself as a researcher whose role is to transcribe and archive these women’s stories, thereby making me a caretaker of this knowledge, a guardian. My viewpoints are not absolute, however, and I am primarily influenced from a Western historical perspective for the time being. To mitigate any internal beliefs and biases, I will defer to experts who know a particular culture far better than I. To verify the authenticity of the material culture, I plan to consult with various specialists who can certify the details of the objects throughout all stages of my work. 

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Welcome aboard on my journey to learn about our humanity in the present through an appreciation of the past and its stories that we have yet to fully appreciate.