The Original Placing Memory Team
The team who established the Placing Memory Project in Summer 2023.
During the summer of 2023, a team of 11 Southwestern students worked intensely to build the first wave of entries for the Placing Memory project in collaboration with the Placing Memory Project Director and the University’s Special Collections & Archives staff.
You will see the names of the student researchers throughout the entries in the site: Bettina Castillo, Max Colley, Adrianna Flores-Vivas, Lainey Gutierrez, Teddy Hoffman, Hannah Jury, Shawn Maganda, Harper Randolph, Andrea Stanescu, Michelle Taing, and Ava Zumpano.
Thanks also to the generosity of the Smith Library staff, we had the Prothro Room on the second floor of the Library devoted to our work for the entire 8 weeks. This allowed us to maximize our collaborations and incidental contact with each other while also giving us a home base as we spread out into different areas of the library to focus on encountering the archives and drafting entries.
Because the new archive of entries we were building would not go live as the Placing Memory website until the end of the summer, we tracked the entries physically with map pins on a printed map mounted on foam core. Each week, we cheered on each writer who submitted an entry, and got more and more excited about the project as the pins started to spread out and fill in across the campus map.
Along the way, we did a few group field trips to learn more about the standard accounts of Southwestern’s history embedded in the campus’s current commemorative landscape as well as to do more direct site analyses of places on campus we were all interested in.
The pin for this entry is located in the Library where we did most of our work. The thumbnail picture for this entry pictures the summer 2023 Placing Memory team in the Cullen Tower, a place that is usually only accessible to graduating seniors to sign during Commencement week.
