IN-PERSON TICKETS | Members Free and Visitors Free with admission
LOCATION | Henry Long Room, Boston Athenæum
In-Person Field Report with Sarah Pawlicki and Rebekah Bryer
Please join us to hear 2020-2021 The American Congregational Association-Boston Athenæum Fellowship Sarah Pawlicki and 2020-2021 Caleb Loring, Jr., Fellowship Rebekah Bryer discuss their research and current projects.
Sarah Pawlicki will discuss her developing dissertation, entitled “‘I Hear That God Saith Work’: Mortality and Labor in Massachusetts, 1619-1680." Sarah's dissertation poses the following question: How were labor practices structured, challenged, and transformed by religious beliefs about death in seventeenth-century Massachusetts? Diverging from past historiography that too often treats religious history and labor history as discrete fields, this dissertation uses methodologies derived from Indigenous, queer, and disability studies to argue that religious beliefs about death and afterlives organized, inflected, and recast the labor performed by Indigenous and colonizing English communities. Research at the Boston Athenæum has provided opportunities to delve deeply into the intricate theologies created by Christian wunnampuhtogig (the Wôpanâak word for "believers"), English Puritans, and Wampanoag and Massachusett practitioners of Indigenous religions.
A modified version of Sarah's third dissertation chapter will appear in the Spring, 2022 edition of Early American Studies. Sarah is also a founding member and writer at REPAIR: Disability Heritage Collective, and is currently teaching a cross-institutional course called Disability Justice and Cultural Heritage.
Rebekah Bryer will be discussing her dissertation project, "National Acts: Performance, Commemoration, and American Identity in the Aftermath of the Civil War," which examines how monuments facilitated and helped construct contested performances of American national identity in the wake of the Civil War. She is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama program at Northwestern. Her research interests are focused on the various intersections of performance and public memory, particularly in American culture from the 18th century to the contemporary moment. She is the co-convener of the Public Humanities Graduate Research Workshop at the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, and has been published in The Washington Post, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, The Portland Press Herald, and The Atlas of Boston History (2019). In addition to receiving the Loring Fellowship from the Boston Athenaeum, she has been awarded fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the George Mitchell Institute, and the Mellon Cluster in Rhetoric and Public Culture at Northwestern University. She received her B.A. in History and Theatre and Dance Studies from Wheaton College (MA) and her M.A. in Public History from Northeastern University.
