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Graphic design by Brooke Stanley/Ohio University Libraries
A group of Ohio University students in the Margaret Boyd Scholars Program have curated an exhibit titled “Nevertheless, She Persisted Through Time,” which is on display now through the end of Spring Semester 2022. The exhibit on the fourth floor of Alden Library showcases items and materials related to women, gender, sexuality, women's history and women's contributions.
As part of the Margaret Boyd Scholars Program, all of the students in the program take a seminar together the spring of their freshman year. The course is taught by three members of the program’s advisory board. Dr. Miriam Intrator , special collections librarian at University Libraries, was one of the instructors in 2020.
“For my portion [of the class], I brought everyone into the Mahn Center so that each student could choose one item from one of our collections, do research on it, write a label and thereby collectively curate an exhibit,” she said. “Of course, the pandemic started in March 2020, right when we were doing this, but they were able to at least complete the process of selecting their item.”
Students were given many artifacts to choose from and ended up with an exhibit that broadly covered many women’s experiences in Athens and at Ohio University. Items on display include scrapbooks and photographs of women, artists’ books and art, activist texts, periodicals, information related to dorm life at Ohio University and much more.
The student curators had almost everything they needed, including the name “Nevertheless, She Persisted Through Time,” which they came up with as a group. Then, with the onset of the pandemic, it was their turn to be persistent and patient, waiting almost two years until Spring 2022 to put their items and exhibit on display.
The Margaret Boyd Scholars Program provides mentorship, opportunities and support to diverse undergraduate women from all colleges and majors. One item on display is Margaret Boyd’s Diary , included because Boyd was the first woman to graduate from Ohio University in 1873 and was the namesake of the program.
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Luvina Cooley, a Margaret Boyd Scholar and junior studying anthropology in the Honors Tutorial College, said that one of the best parts about being in the Margaret Boyd Program was the chance to be surrounded by a group of accepting and empowering peers. “We are always lifting each other up and throwing opportunities to each other, which has been a great community aspect.”
One of the additional benefits of the program is the seminar, where the scholars learn different skills and information to empower them through their time at the University. Throughout their experience with Dr. Intrator and the Libraries, the Margaret Boyd students learned more about archives, exhibit label writing and contextualizing history through exhibits.
“Learning how to do things like writing exhibit labels is difficult – you have to be so concise. Usually when you've done research into something, there's tons that you want to say about it, but you have to learn how to really narrow it down to only the most salient points,” Intrator said, adding that this skill is transferable to other situations, such as writing an abstract for a paper.
Items in “Nevertheless, She Persisted Through Time,” include a variety of materials from all four of the Libraries’ collections: Rare Books , University Archives , Documentary Photography Archive and the Manuscript Collection .
Documents about daily life in the dorms and yearbooks from years past contextualize the experiences of many women who have attended the University throughout its history.
Other items focus on aspects of Athens history, such as Lucy Thompson’s pick of a packet of intake forms and other legal documents for a woman who was admitted into the Athens Lunatic Asylum on The Ridges when it was a functioning mental health facility.
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“I was really intrigued by it because it's a part of OHIO’s history, but not in a way that immediately comes to mind,” Thompson, a junior studying geography and environmental studies in the Honors Tutorial College, said. “I think that there was also an aspect to the asylum documentation that was a little bit more insidious…”
Cooley chose to display two items side-by-side: “Wrongly Bodied: Documenting Transition from Female to Male,” told the story of a trans man’s experiences, and “Wrongly Bodied Two,” the story of an African American woman who was trying to escape slavery and had to pose as a white slave owner.
“I have a big focus on queer studies,” Cooley said, “and I didn’t know about racial passing [attempting to “pass” as another race] in order to escape slavery, so I thought it was really interesting to learn about that and make it relevant for broader populations.”
The exhibit is free and open to the public and may be especially interesting to anyone studying history, literature, women, gender and sexuality studies, the history of women at Ohio University, as well as those interested in bookmaking, book arts, rare books and archives in general.
For more information on the exhibit, contact Dr. Miriam Intrator .