I am a second-year history MA student, focusing my research in museum studies and public history. I have a background in museum education, working at institutions such as the Penn Museum, Berman Museum of Art, Sunrise Mill, Brandywine Museum of Art, American Philosophical Society, and the Independence Seaport Museum. This work has cultivated an interest in the provenance of the exhibitions that I have been left to interpret; as a result, my current intellectual interests lie in humans remains collections in museums. My last research project explored the collections of nineteenth-century anatomical museums in Philadelphia, where my undergrad background in anthropology came in handy. I earned my undergraduate degree in anthropology from Susquehanna University, with minors in creative writing, history, and Spanish studies. My senior seminar project revolved around the Body Worlds exhibition (featuring the display of plastinated corpses) and its balance between education and entertainment, which laid the foundation for my current research. Most recently, I spent some time in Germany this summer checking out the original Body Worlds exhibition, so hopefully another anatomical museum project will be forthcoming soon! Through this course, I hope to learn more about the practice of oral history and the way that it is differentiated from similar practices in anthropology, where my primary reference point lies. I am most excited to learn the ways that oral history can be used to highlight and record the experiences of those marginalized by other methods of record-keeping, and am interested to learn more about the process of physical record-keeping/accessibility with oral history.
