University of Pittsburgh Library System

Adolescent literature to explore how the average age of marriage shifted since the 1800’s impacting the length of childhood.

Originally driven from a simple understanding that this photographic collection viewed through an art historical lens could provide deeper insight into the early 20th century Black experience in Pittsburgh, in time my research project has developed into a more focused examination of how the relationship between people and space in Urban League photographs can help modern viewers understand the active development of Black community. Since its founding at the height of the Great Migration, the Urban League of Pittsburgh has been one of the biggest local civic engagement powers for African Americans, eventually playing a role in literally transforming the city’s landscape to make room for Black life. Throughout its history, the Urban League has focused on issues such as housing, employment, education, and healthcare to advance the social conditions of Black Americans in a rapidly changing but nonetheless still racially oppressive nation. Looking at media from the first World War through the mainstream Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Urban League photographs tell complex stories about Black Pittsburghers’ desires for equal opportunity, dignity, and belonging mapped onto a region that can be both unrecognizable and familiar. The main outcome of this project is an online exhibit that contextualizes a selection of the collection’s hundreds of photos in localized history, but also provides visitors the opportunity to explore for themselves the narratives that emerge visually in both spontaneous snapshots and purposeful documentation. In curating this website, I hope to provide people with a glimpse into the collection’s photographs beyond what is currently publicly available and spark curiosity for future inquiries into the Urban League collection. Furthermore, I will create a list of additional resources for anyone interested in this line of research themselves and write a blog post about my experiences this semester.

Pittsburgh’s China town compared to other ethnic neighborhoods

This project seeks to analyze popular portrayals of Black women and their bodies in cover art, songbooks, and songsterswithin19th century black face minstrelsy and what that reveals to us about early conceptualizations of Black women during that time. Their portrayals as unappealing, hypersexual, and mannish strikingly contradict traditional feminine ideals of beauty, frailty, and sexual restraint. Despite this characterization of woman existing as a form of oppression and social control for many, acknowledging it as a privilege denied to Black women and other categories of women is crucial for an intersectional appreciation of American women’s historical struggles

Establish the relationship between feminist voices in independent publications and changes to public health through education, policy, and community engagement in response to HIV/AIDA pandemic.