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2015 Summer Research Grant Recipients Visit the WLA
Researcher Jillian Plummer working in the WLA Reading Room.
The WLA had a busy summer with visits from our two 2015 Summer Research Grant recipients. We have enjoyed sharing our collections with these two scholars and are proud to be a part of each of their impressive research projects.
Jillian Plummer, a Ph.D. student at the University of Notre Dame, spent the first week in August immersed in the archives. Her research at the WLA was guided by the following question: How did Catholic nuns turn out to be one of the few visibly active legacies of the 1960s New Left today? Her future dissertation project aims to answer this question by tracing the growth of American sisters’ religiously-inspired peace and justice activism against U.S. foreign policy in Central America and for anti-nuclear and disarmament campaigns. At the WLA archives, she examined collections on female activism in the late twentieth century, including the collections of Mary Agnes Curran, Marjorie Tuite, O.P, the 8th Day Center for Justice, Chicago Catholic Women, Mundelein College, and Ann Ida Gannon.
Our other wonderful grant recipient, Suzanne Bost, visited the archives many times throughout the summer. Suzanne is a Professor in the Department of English and the Graduate Program Director for Women’s Studies and Gender Studies at Loyola University Chicago. The collections at the WLA aided her in analyzing the ways in which women religious write about their social justice work with Latina/o communities. Her readings of collections like the 8th Day Center for Social Justice, the Instituto Hispano, Carol Frances Jegen, Mary Agnes Curran, and the Nuevo Mundo School focused on the reciprocity, identification, and affection established between the primarily white social justice workers and the Latinas they worked to serve.
