Students and Faculty in the Archives

Connecting to Universities

The Brooklyn Historical Society has officially kicked off our Students and Faculty in the Archives (SAFA) project.  The BHS has long been committed to introducing students of all ages and backgrounds to our remarkable facilities and collections.

SAFA is a three-year, US Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE) grant that will create a replicable pedagogical model for collaboration between museums like BHS and institutions of higher learning.

In the first year, we will be working with local partners from New York City College of Technology; Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus; and St. Francis College.  First-year undergraduate researchers will have the chance to conduct archival research in the Othmer Library and to create physical and digital exhibits with BHS. 

Over 20 enthusiastic faculty collaborators representing a wide range of disciplines came to the February 25th SAFA planning meeting with ideas and energy to spare.  Deborah Mutnick, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at LIU Brooklyn, reported, “We all walked away feeling very energized and excited about the project.“

BHS Welcomes SAFA Staff

To help support this exciting new venture, BHS has hired two new staff members:

Robin M. Katz, Outreach and Public Services Archivist, was previously the Outreach Librarian for the University of Vermont Libraries’ Center for Digital Initiatives.  At UVM, Robin helped a wide range of constituents collaboratively produce unique digital research collections.  She has also worked to connect people to primary sources at Kent State University’s Special Collection and Archives Department, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library, and the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Gund Library.  She expects that SAFA will demonstrate the many benefits of incorporating primary source research in undergraduate education, and she hopes the project will inspire similar collaborations nationwide.

Julie Golia, Public Historian at BHS, is a scholar of American history, with interests in the history of women and gender, race, popular culture, and media.  Julie received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2010, where she served as a teaching fellow and wrote a dissertation examining the cultural and economic history of advice columns in early twentieth-century newspapers.  As a public historian, Julie has helped produce documentaries including the 2003 film “Tupperware!”   She has researched and curated exhibits at the New York Historical Society and the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  And she gives vibrant and informative walking tours in neighborhoods across Brooklyn and Manhattan.  She hopes that SAFA will continue to break down boundaries between academic and public history, and reveal the intellectual joys of using the BHS collections to a new generation of students.

Looking Forward

Robin, Julie, and the SAFA faculty will spend the next several months immersed in the BHS collections. A good deal of research, planning, and collaborating will occur during the upcoming SAFA Summer Institute at BHS. The result will be archives-based approaches for courses in History, Photography, English, Architecture, and many other disciplines. 

We are looking forward to sharing our discoveries and ideas with the BHS blog.  Check back soon for more updates on our work!