Johns Hopkins UniversityEST. 1876
America’s First Research University
Data is ubiquitous, but what story does it tell? In Fall 2024 course AS.389.313 Data and the Digital in Museums, rather than creating new data, students examined the data and the metadata that already exists in museum exhibits. They chose five items from an exhibit and recreated it online in Omeka to explore the provenance […]
Students enrolled in Monica Kristin Blair’s spring 2024 course, AS.389.265 Hopkins History Through the Archives, updated three of the Sense of Place campus history signs that were originally created by Museums & Society students in 2013. The students updated three signs that relate to histories of the Homewood House, Homewood, The Orchard, and Farmhouse and Slave Quarters. Their new […]
JHU students in the community-engaged course Researching the Africana Archive: Black Cemetery Stories (AS.389.314), with instructor Gabrielle Dean, and in partnership with research professionals and scholars, the Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project, and with students in nearby universities (Morgan State and Coppin State), have teamed up to collectively research and share stories […]
Students enrolled in Heidi Herr’s 2022 Intersession course took a deep dive into a new university collection of romance comic books. Popular from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, romance comic books introduced teenagers to the joys and heartache of love. Featuring advice columns, fashion spreads, and allegedly true stories of romance, teenagers could be […]
Out In The Open is a collective oral histories project developed by Johns Hopkins University students through Joseph Plaster’s spring 2022 course Queer Oral History (AS.389.348). Johns Hopkins University students learned how to conduct oral history interviews under the instruction of Winston Tabb Special Collections Director Dr. Joseph Plaster. Engaging critically with modern queer and […]
Working under the direction of Lori Finkelstein, Director of Hopkins Museums, students in her M&S course Landscaping Baltimore (AS.389.347) researched the influence of Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Olmstead design firm, on the development of Baltimore’s neighborhoods and green spaces. They developed their findings into an outdoor exhibit at Evergreen Museum, now on view.
Housing Our Story (PIs: Jennifer Kingsley, Shani Mott, N.D.B. Connolly) engages in the practical ethics of building an archive about African-American staff and contract workers at the Johns Hopkins University. Undergraduates participate as student researchers as well as in courses. Archivists nobly aim to preserve the memory of the world, yet historically archives institutionalize the choices […]
Students in Jennifer Kingsley’s Spring 2017 class “Collections Remix” mined JHU collections for materials that reflect the experiences of African Americans. Students Madelena Brancati and Nia Josiah worked with a newly acquired artwork by Baltimore artist and MacArthur genius award winner Joyce J. Scott, identifying a site on campus for the sculpture, developing an installation […]
Students in Jennifer Kingsley’s Spring 2017 course “Collections Remix” mined archival, literary and cultural collections of the Johns Hopkins University for materials that reflect the experiences of African-Americans. One student team, Monika Borkovic and Lorna Henson, worked with Sheridan Libraries’ African American Real Photo Postcards Collection. Real photo postcards are photographs printed directly onto postcard […]
Why do we catalogue collections? What goes into writing a catalogue? In the Fall of 2016, students in Virginia Anderson’s seminar on collecting (AS.389.358) responded to these questions. Each student wrote a catalogue essay on a group of eight to ten works of modern and contemporary art, drawn from Connie Caplan’s important Baltimore-area collection. […]