Announcing My Summer Oral History Project
Collaborating with a colleague and student on women's history
I’ve already mentioned a few times this year that I’ve been awarded a sabbatical for Fall 2024 that will let me start researching the women’s history of Bethel University. Today, I’m happy to share a related announcement: I’ll also get to spend part of this summer conducting oral history interviews as a precursor to the larger sabbatical.
That project is made possible by a great initiative at Bethel called the Edgren Scholars program. Named for our university founder, it honors one of John Alexis Edgren’s foundational commitments: “The relation between teacher and students should not be that of superior and subordinate, but one of real friendship and helpfulness, remembering that One is our Master, and we are all brethren.” To that end, the Edgren Scholars program annually funds research projects in which faculty and students collaborate.
I’ll be working with my friend, colleague, and frequent collaborator Sam Mulberry and our student Ellie Heebsh, a junior majoring in History and Digital Humanities. It’d be hard to imagine two better partners for an oral history project about our university. Sam spent his last sabbatical interviewing Bethel faculty for a project on teaching. He’ll help us draft questions, and lend us expertise in recording and editing interviews.
Then I first got to know Ellie two years ago, when she dedicated her Intro to History project to the oral history of women in her grandmother’s home town. Since then she’s been working as the student assistant in Bethel’s archives. (One role: curating the archives’ always interesting Instagram account!) This summer Ellie will help to draft questions and conduct interviews, as well as take the lead in writing biographies for interview subjects and editing their transcripts.
So what is our project? We’ve started to compile lists of women who filled different roles in the last half-century of Bethel history, with an eye to conducting two phases of interviews: the first more in depth, as we preserve the memories of pioneering leaders and others who were in the forefront of key transitions (e.g., in the growth of women’s sports, or the expansion of seminary programs to women); the second to give a wider cross-section of women on campus the chance to share some of their perspectives on how gender shaped employment, curriculum, enrollment, spiritual life, etc. at Bethel. To prepare, we’ll be reading sources together and meeting with key partners, like archivist Rebekah Bain and our department colleague, Amy Poppinga, much of whose own scholarship in Islamic studies takes the form of oral history.
That’s not been a field of mine so far, so I’m looking forward to learning new skills and perspectives. And our interviews will not only shape the direction of my fall sabbatical — and provide new evidence for it — but perhaps generate material for Sam’s next sabbatical. Most importantly, collaborating with Ellie not only offers one of our history students an especially high-impact educational opportunity, but lets her build on previous archival work as she continues to prepare for a possible career in public history.
We’ll present some of our work more formally next fall or spring, but I’m sure I’ll also share some reports from the field here at Substack.