14th Annual Conference
#DCConference20
via Zoom Webinar
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PANEL B
LGBTQ+ Collections in Context: The Politics of Representation
This panel will begin with each of the three panelists responding to a shared question: What does LGBTQ+ collection-building, outreach, and digitization look like at your institution? The panelists will share their experiences in a range of archives that include LGBTQ+ materials––a university-based special collections library focused on women’s history, a community-based non-profit documenting LGBTQ New England, and a transgender-themed digital collection. The discussion will also touch upon questions of access and accessibility, erasure versus visibility, privacy concerns and ethics, and navigating volunteer-run digitization efforts. There will be ample time for questions and discussion with the audience.
Panelists
Stephanie Yuhl is Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and Associate Faculty in the Critical Conservation Master in Design Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She specializes in the social and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, with emphases in public history, memory, gender/sexuality, and social movements. Her book-length treatment of Charleston’s cultural and touristic renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston, won two national awards. A practicing public historian and consultant, Yuhl has worked with museums, oral history projects, and in the Digital Humanities. She recently co-curated LGBTQ+ Worcester For the Record at the Worcester Historical Museum, and co-authored the accompanying catalog. At the center of this ongoing project is the building of an LGBTQ+ historical archive and a community oral history project.
Andrew Elder is Chair of the Board of Directors and a volunteer archivist at The History Project, a volunteer-driven community archives documenting
LGBTQ+ history in Boston, and Interim University Archivist and Curator of Special Collections in the Healey Library at UMass Boston. He regularly facilitates discussions and speaks about participatory and community archiving, the significance and contributions
of community archives, and institutional/community-based collaboration.
Laura Peimer is an archivist at the Schlesinger Library where she works with a wide range of LGBTQ+ collections. She has published and presented on the issues of description, privacy, and access in transgender-related collections. Most recently she participated on the Boston Seminar on the History of Women, Gender, and Sexuality panel, Transgender History and Archives: An Interdisciplinary Conversation.
K.J. Rawson is an Associate Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. He is also the founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an online database and digital repository of transgender-related historical materials. His scholarship has appeared in Archivaria, Enculturation, Present Tense, QED, RSQ, TSQ, and several edited collections.
