American Studies Major Mills Gray (’28)
Mills Gray (’28) shares her reflections on summer research assistant work in American deaf history with Prof. Susan Burch:
This summer I compiled biographical files of various deaf folks throughout history, most of which are not particularly famous or well-known—just everyday deaf folks from all over the United States. I started my research with databases and digital archives: newspapers.com, Hathitrust, Ancestry.com, etc. Then I researched anything that local libraries had digitalized. It feels great to know my research is going to support a scholar’s project and enhance a university archive [copies of the research is donated to Gallaudet University’s Archives]. I think that’s honestly the part that I appreciate the most and that I feel the most grateful for—to be able to create this for people, everybody, who wouldn’t be able to find these sources elsewhere.
Being an American Studies major and doing this work in American Studies has given me a lot more of an eye towards the methodology behind the history we read in class. I feel like in American studies you’re getting into the nitty gritty; you’re looking more at “the ordinary American life” rather than “the exemplary American life.”
Screening of the new Rolling Stone Films documentary with the protagonist and film team. Q&A session to follow.
Dana Auditorium (Sunderland Language Center)
Open to the Public
Congratulations to Dr. Ellery Foutch, whose new book, A Perfectionist Impulse: The Art of Stopping Time in the Nineteenth Century has been published by University of Minnesota Press.
Holly Allen’s latest article, “Unseen, Ungrieved: Idiocy and the Architecture of Exclusion in Eugenic Institutions,” was published in the Journal of Medical Humanities: You can read it at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-026-10043-4 .
The American Studies Program congratulates Prof. Ellery Foutch on her new article that was published in Panorama - the Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art. The article is called “Iconoclasm on Paper: Resistance in the Pages of Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, 1849.” The work links to her Spring 2015 course at Middlebury: The American Civil War in Art and Visual Culture, Present.
Nathaly Martinez ‘24, American Studies major, will participate in the inaugural Immigration Advocacy Internship Cohort program. She will be interning at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.
This funded internship program was designed by recent alumni Olivia O’Brien ’21.5 and Alex Burns ’21.5 and will be funded this summer through Provost’s Council funding. She will join five other Summer 2022 interns who will be doing work related to immigration in the U.S.
