Book Artist Maureen Cummins
Maureen Cummins has cranked presses from California to the Eastern Arctic and has produced over forty limited edition artist’s books, many based on historical research. She has created projects based on slave narratives, the Salem witch trials, the gendered history of lobotomies, and interviews with Syrian and Iraqi refugees. Cummins currently lives and works in Mt. Tremper, NY. The Bowdoin College Library houses over ten of Cummins’ works and they are available to view in the SC&A reading room.
Learning from the Past?: An Archival Exploration of Bowdoin’s Racial History
Sociologist Pamela Zabala, Bowdoin Class of 2017
Pamela Zabala is a PhD student in Sociology at Duke University. Her areas of concentration are organizational sociology and race and inequality. Her current research addresses the experiences of Latinx students at PWIs; race, education, and occupational outcomes; and the intersections of religion, migration, and politics via the New Sanctuary Movement. At Bowdoin, Pamela earned a major in Sociology (with Honors) and a minor in Africana Studies. Pamela’s honors project “Cooperate with Others for Common Ends?”: Students as “Cooperate with Others for Common Ends?”: Students as Gatekeepers of Culture and Tradition on College Campuses Gatekeepers of Culture and Tradition on College Campuses is an incredibly important piece of scholarship on the history of Bowdoin College.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr’s Island, and Maine Summer Tourism
Literary Scholar Susan F. Beegel
Susan F. Beegel holds a PhD in English from Yale University. She served for many years as Editor of The Hemingway Review, and taught in the Maritime Studies program of Williams College at Mystic Seaport. A Maine native, Susan is the author or editor of four books and more than fifty articles on various aspects of American literature and history. Her most recent work on Harriet Beecher Stowe, researched with the help of Bowdoin’s Special Collections, has appeared in American Literary Realism and New England Quarterly. Beegel is a great friend and supporter of the Bowdoin College Library. Her help growing our collections of visual Stoweiana materials has been invaluable in understanding Stowe’s life and the impact of her writing.
Bowdoin College’s Land Acquisitions and Sales: 1794-1843
Researcher Don Westfall, Bowdoin Class of 1972
Don Westfall ’72 arrived at Bowdoin in September 1968 never having seen the College before. He majored in History, was an indifferent editor of the Quill, and Contributing editor of the Orient. After attending the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, he worked in Washington DC as an economic analyst specializing in food and agricultural policy, served for a time as Director of Marketing at the Maine Department of Agriculture, returned to Washington and worked for an association of manufacturing companies. Westfall is now retired and lives in Harpswell. His interest in college history began 50 years ago with the purchase of Louis O. Hatch’s “History of Bowdoin” in the old Moulton Union bookstore.
Visual Artist Crystal Cawley
Crystal Cawley is an artist who works with paper, textiles, collected objects, and re-purposed materials. Her work explores ideas of identity, time, and loss, and draws on various traditional skills like embroidery and letterpress printing. She prints and teaches in Portland, Maine at Wolfe Editions, and is also an artist member of Pickwick Independent Press. She has shown her work around the US and in England, Greece, and Japan. Her work is in the collections of the Boston Public Library, Columbia University Library, The Library of Congress, Maine Women Writers Collection, MOMA/Franklin Furnace Artists’ Book Collection, and the Smithsonian Institution Graphic Arts Collection at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., among others. In January 2021, Cawley donated 45+ of her artist’s books to the Bowdoin College Library, they can be viewed in the SC&A reading room.
Visual Artist Angela Lorenz
Visual artist Angela Lorenz resides in New England with annual stays in Bologna, Italy. Her watercolors, prints, multiples and artist’s books live in over 100 public collections in the US and abroad, and have been widely exhibited. She received a B.A. in fine arts and semiotics from Brown University, which included classes at RISD in graphics and glass and a year at the University of Bologna (DAMS). Lorenz’s work is both in the permanent collections of and has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Clark Art Institute, the Portland Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, National Museum of Women in the Arts and The British Library. Teaching and critiquing engagements include Resident Faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Adjunct Faculty, NYU. In 2019 Lorenz received the award for Outstanding Contribution to the Art of the Book by Center for Book Arts, New York. The Bowdoin College Library holds over a dozen of Lorenz’s books, which are available to view in the SC&A reading room.
‘Nothing Like Having a Good Repository’: The Archive as Teacher, Counsellor, and Diversifier of the Past
Historian Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, Bowdoin Class of 2003
Kanisorn “Kid” Wongsrichanalai graduated from Bowdoin in 2003. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. Trained as a Civil War historian, he is the co-editor of So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era-North and author of Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era, both from Fordham University Press. He is currently co-editing a volume titled Wars Civil & Great: An Exploratory and Comparative Analysis of the American Civil War and World War I. Wongsrichanalai is Director of Research at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Prior to working at the MHS, he was Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University where he co-directed the National Endowment for the Humanities project, “War Stories: West Texans and the Experience of War, World War I to the Present.”