{"id":140,"featured":1,"modified":"2026-06-22 17:45:52","latitude":30.634579776325860933638978167437016963958740234375,"longitude":-97.665907142634523552260361611843109130859375,"title":"The Women's Studies Alcove as Memory Place","subtitle":"Inside this space in the Library for remembering the history of Feminism at Southwestern and much more.","fullsize":"https://placingmemory.southwestern.edu/files/fullsize/25814bb267f1ee271321c7a403cd00d2.jpg","address":"","all_locations":[],"zoom":19,"creator":["Lydia Kophamel '28"],"description":"For several generations, the Smith Library Center has served as a central study spot for students. Across its three floors, the library offers a variety of spaces for collaboration, research, creation, and reflection, making it one of the most popular buildings on campus and useful spaces for academic help and success.
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\r\nAmong the many study spots are the library’s five themed alcoves: two on the first floor and three on the third. Tucked away on the edge of the third floor is the Women’s Studies Alcove. With its patterned red rug, three armchairs and a wooden desk stacked with old books and magazines, it looks similar to any of the others.
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\r\nThroughout my past two years at Southwestern, this particular alcove has become one of my favorite spots to go for a cozy night of studying. However, it took me a while to realize that the Women’s Studies Alcove is more than just a quiet place to work.
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\r\nAfter first learning about the Black feminist author and activist bell hooks and her connection to Southwestern in my Feminist Studies class with Dr. Robyn Adams, I recognized the small sign in the Alcove with bell hooks’ name next to a picture of her at a book signing here on campus in the early 2000s.
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\r\nIt quickly dawned on me that the rest of the Alcove was actually a space dedicated to honor various influential feminist thinkers as well as to tell the story of the brave women who built and shaped the Feminist Studies Program at Southwestern.
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\r\nWhen I joined the Placing Memory Project in the summer of 2026, I decided to do my first entry for the project on the Women’s Studies Alcove to learn more about how it came to be and how it works as a memory place now.
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\r\nThe Women’s Studies Alcove was founded in 1999 with support from the Susan Vaughan Foundation and was upgraded in 2005 after the retirement of Dr. Jan Dawson, a history professor at Southwestern and a key founder of the Women’s Studies Program, which by that point had been renamed the Feminist Studies Program.
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\r\nUpon entering the Women’s Studies Alcove, you find a bookcase on the left filled with works that once belonged to faculty members who worked to include feminist scholarship and teaching praxis into the culture of Southwestern. The collection spans a wide range of genres and titles, from literary works such as Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi to curriculum guides for history teachers on how to incorporate women’s experiences into history classes.
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\r\nAdditionally, two displays on top of the bookcase introduce the development of women’s history as its own interdisciplinary academic field of study and identify significant chronological events in women’s history specifically at Southwestern.
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\r\nOn the opposite wall, there is a pile of old historical materials stacked on the desk that further represent the experience of women from the university’s past, including an exhibition catalog for the library’s Jessie Daniel Ames Collection and a catalog from the Ladies’ Annex from the academic year 1896-97.
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\r\nTogether, these books, documents and artifacts transform the Alcove from simply being another study spot to a small, publicly-accessible archive devoted to remembering the experience of women at Southwestern, especially the people and ideas at the heart of the Feminist Studies Program and other related classes at Southwestern.
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\r\nDespite the care that went into creating this space a generation ago, the Alcove today may feel different than what the founders originally imagined.
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\r\nMany of the books show signs of age and are missing pages, while the informational displays about women at Southwestern are stained, faded, and in need of replacement. Moreover, during my time here, I have rarely seen students stop to look at the displays or browse the collection. Instead, the space more often serves as a quiet escape from the busier parts of the library, the perfect spot to finish a paper or cram for an important exam.
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\r\nThis is further demonstrated inside the wooden desk, where layers of student graffiti form a very different archive. References to opinions about professors, rivalries among Greek organizations, and several inside jokes represent campus life not from the perspective of the founders of the Feminist Studies Program or the designers of the Alcove itself, but by generations of students who have occupied the space in their own ways and used it to communicate to other students.
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\r\nIndeed, there is a collection of documents in the SU archives that suggest that this practice of students leaving messages to each other in the Women’s Studies Alcove started just a few years after the Alcove was established, in 2003-2004, when students wrote graffiti on scrap paper they found in the drawer.
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\r\nThe file for this in the University Archives does not provide any context for these documents, but their content suggests that long before students began writing graffiti on the desk drawer itself, they wrote graffiti on available resources in the Alcove.
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\r\nWhile these messages from 2003-2004, with their references to gender and sexuality and references to bell hooks, seem to recognize and engage the specific theme of the Alcove more than the more recent graffiti inside the desk, these communications seem very different in form and content from the more institutional voice and purpose of the displays in the Alcove.
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\r\nReflecting on the complex interplay of different memory practices evident in the Alcove today points me to a question: do these various student markings represent a challenge to the Alcove’s intended purpose, or are they evidence of how students have made the space their own in ways that might actually reinforce the Alcove's intended purpose in suprising ways?
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\r\nA similar tension appears on the walls. Three portraits of bell hooks hang on the right side of the alcove, alongside a small piece of paper attached to the wall stating her name and position as a Brown Visiting Scholar at the school.
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\r\nOn the top back wall, there are six more portraits of influential feminist thinkers. However, their identities are easy to overlook; the single label stating their names does not clearly indicate which name belongs to each portrait and is not even obviously connected to the portraits given its location on the wall far below them.
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\r\nAdditionally, the picture of Toni Morrison is missing entirely, with the rest of the images being faded from years of exposure to sun damage from the facing window. Lastly, a single portrait of Jessie Daniel Ames rests on the middle of the back wall, yet the portrait lacks any label.
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\r\nThe condition of these displays raises similar questions about how the Alcove serves as a place of memory today. How does a community remember people it has decided to honor? What responsibility do we have in relation to these memory places? Is preserving their images enough, or do we have to actively engage with and upkeep the display as we pass through the space each day?
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\r\nWhen I first began studying in the Alcove as a naive first-year, I saw it only as a comfortable corner of the library. Now, after spending hours researching the history of the Feminist Studies in Distinctive Collections in between repeated visits to the Women’s Studies Alcove, I find myself looking at the room differently.
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\r\nThe books, displays and artifacts reveal stories that some students may never notice. However, that is what makes the Alcove such an interesting site to me. It doesn’t need to be viewed as a museum frozen in time and separated from everyday life. Instead, it is a living campus space that has been continuously shaped by the students who use it for multiple purposes, creating new memories in a place dedicated to preserving older ones.
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