Select Projects & Collaborations

Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past

Research Assistant, 2021-2022

The Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past initiative is the Smithsonian’s first pan-institutional effort to understand how race and racism have shaped the United States, our communities, organizations, and the Smithsonian itself. Organized around thematic pillars like race and wealth, race and wellness, and race and place, the initiative is a collaborative, multidisciplinary platform to explore how race has informed each of our lives, regardless of our individual racial or ethnic identity.

As a researcher on the project, I helped curators identify and field a range of archival and collections images, objects, videos, and documents in support of mixed multimedia content. This work included locating digital assets for the Smithsonian’s award-winning Our Shared Future Forum, which explored the meaning of scientific racism and addressed race, wealth and wellness with participating experts, activists, and curators. I also helped develop pillar explainer videos and provided logistical support for 3D digitization, exhibition walk-through, and oral history components of http://oursharedfuture.si.edu.

African Americans in the Milwaukee Police Department

Creator and Interviewer, 2016-2018

The African Americans in the Milwaukee Police Department Oral History Project is comprised of twelve audio interviews with retired and current Milwaukee Police Department officers of African descent, as well as two current African American University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) Police Department officers. Narrators describe their experiences as Black people living and working in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in addition to earlier places of residence. I conducted the interviews between 2016 and 2017 at officers’ homes, the UWM Cultures and Communities Program office, Wisconsin Black Historical Society and Museum (WBHSM), and the University of Memphis. WBHSM Director Clayborn Benson provided assistance with recruitment and coordination.

200 Nights of Freedom: March on Milwaukee 50th Anniversary

Oral History Committee Chair, 2017-2018

Serving as chair of the March on Milwaukee 50th Oral History Committee, I led a collaborative effort to record unheard voices from the city’s 1967-1968 civil rights insurgency for open housing. Fifty years after the NAACP Youth Council led 200 straight nights of protest in support of a local fair housing ordinance, a team of archivists conducted more than twenty-five oral history interviews with a diverse range of participants and community members at dispersed locations. Our team titled these sites “listening posts” in honor of Black and allied organizational attempts to document police brutality in ’67 and ’68. They also asked people from the community to share physical artifacts or images from the March on Milwaukee demonstrations as part of three “History Harvests.” The committee was represented by five archival institutions: Wisconsin Historical Society, Wisconsin Black Historical Society, UW-Milwaukee Archives, Marquette Special Collections and University Archives, and Milwaukee County Historical Society.

In addition to recognizing past Black Milwaukee freedom fighters, archivists supported MOM50’s drive to re-ignite democratic engagement around issues of racial injustice from the grassroots. The oral history committee’s second harvest, for instance, partnered with the Wisconsin ACLU Youth Social Justice forum to record stories from contemporary activists alongside veterans of Milwaukee’s Black freedom struggle. This collection of oral histories is being cataloged by Wisconsin Historical Society and made available for online access, research, and educational use. Copies are being shared with all participating institutions.

Transforming Justice: Action Research from the Ground-Up

Project Assistant & Web Developer, 2014-2015

Working as a graduate assistant on the Transforming Justice research project, I helped support workshop development, community outreach, and project conceptualization in a collaborative effort to build a grassroots history of mass incarceration in Milwaukee. UW-Milwaukee scholars, filmmakers, and local community members collectively re-framed conventional narratives around crime, health, safety, and justice. Workshops for Liberation featured scholars and organizers working at the vanguard of prison and police abolition and rethinking community safety in an age of rampant carceral capitalism. They included Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and Rachel Herzing. The team’s Youth Video Collective, part of TJ’s counter media initiative, documented young people’s experiences with overpolicing, racism and mass incarceration through powerful, self-directed video narratives.

Transforming Justice not only documented and gave voice to the above, but helped people on the ground develop strategies for re-defining security and health from the perspectives of individuals, families, and communities directly affected by policing and public/private surveillance. I designed the website, researched, and led social media engagement. The project’s faculty directors earned UW-Milwaukee’s 2016 Fromkin Award.

Encyclopedia of Milwaukee

As a Graduate Assistant working on the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, I researched and wrote twenty-seven short-form encyclopedia entries for a National Endowment of the Humanities-grant funded project. Entries ranged from the Milwaukee NAACP chapter to Digital Milwaukee to the city’s Television history. In the process I learned how to write concise articles for a general readership, while meeting tight deadlines and collaborating weekly with project editors.

Stitching History from the Holocaust

Project Lead & Web Developer, 2013-2014

This digital exhibit marked a collaboration between UW-Milwaukee Libraries, UW-Milwaukee Digital Humanities Lab, and Jewish Museum Milwaukee. After Jewish Museum Milwaukee decided to tell the story of Hedy Strnad, a Jewish-Czech fashion designer who perished during the Holocaust, they turned to UWM information librarians and humanities scholars to help provide a broader context for understanding their exhibition’s artifacts. Stitching History from the Holocaust was the first community-partnered project to come out of UWM’s Digital Humanities Lab. Since its 2014 launch, the site has provided a roadmap for future cross-institutional, community-based projects.

The Omeka exhibit I helped develop created a new context for the Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s artifacts: one that interpreted Hedy and Paul Strnad’s experiences and shared her remaining dress designs with the world. Rather than merely create a public-facing website, the Digital Humanities Lab team built this exhibit using an archival repository structure. Items were tagged with descriptive information, or metadata, enabling further research and opportunities to construct new narratives around exhibition items. Many people worked on the project, all captivated by the Strnad’s powerful story of artistry, love, and survival.

Interpreting Enslaved Lives at Arlington House

Furnishing Plan Co-Developer, 2010

Years before Black and allied protestors sparked a national movement to remove monuments to the “Lost Cause” and other state-sanctioned symbols of white supremacy, American University public history students re-imagined the historical interpretation of enslaved life at the home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. “Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial” — whose former plantation grounds are also home to Arlington National Cemetery — had never told a full, accurate story of the Black men and women held in bondage at the National Park Service site. Our team’s job was to grant three of these families agency through a revised interpretation of the built environment.

Collaborators developed a furnishing plan that, through careful research and the employment of current public history methods, gave voice to the silenced Black men and women whose perspectives NPS had downplayed in the traditional narrative relayed to hundreds-of-thousands of annual visitors. My section of the plan re-imagined Arlington House’s “Winter Kitchen” as a dynamic site of Black resiliency, place-making, and cultural production. It explored themes of intra-racial class struggle, white paternalism, and Black resistance in the face of enslavement through ceremonial acts of conjuring and marketplace agency.

Note: This is a selection. Visit CV for full project listing.