Reflection: Arthur Kamya’s PhD Internship in the Humanities at the Boston Athenæum
It’s not surprising to find in the archives of the Boston Athenæum a scholar of seventeenth-century Massachusetts, such as Arthur Kamya, PhD candidate in BU’s American & New England Studies program; however, the opportunity for him to undertake a specialized secondary school curriculum development project on U.S. women’s political history under the auspices of a PhD internship in the Humanities at the Athenæum is exceptional.
Working as a PhD intern in the Humanities at the Boston Athenæum, Arthur took a deep dive into the dynamic history of women’s political struggle in the United States to collate materials for a workshop designed to help secondary educators integrate primary sources into the high school classroom.
“The primary sources I chose narrate American history between 1776 and 1920 as a series of contingent individual and collective actions by diverse women to carve out roles for themselves in American public life,” Arthur said. “At the same time, I made sure that the primary sources I chose to use in the workshop did not misrepresent the period between the American Revolution and the First World War as the inevitable progress of women’s political status culminating in the 1920 adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
In order to give a sense of the range of experiences, political alignments, and rhetorical and political strategies that constitute the history of women’s political mobilization in the U.S., Arthur designed the workshop around both representative and unexpected materials. For instance, he drew upon first editions of Phillis Wheatley’s poems, handwritten letters by Lydia Maria Child, Booker T. Washington, and Louisa May Alcott, as well as constitutions produced by working-class women as they promoted the cause of self-education.
Arthur also foregrounded the interdisciplinary nature of this archive, noting of the materials related to the struggle for women’s political franchise, “Suffragists’ intensity in waging a multi-media campaign—in the form of tracts, broadsides, playing cards, almanacs, and portraiture—speaks to their sophistication and ingenuity.”
Yet Arthur’s days were not always spent in the archives. “I was able to attend talks given by resident research fellows at the Athenæum on a variety of interesting subjects,” Arthur said, “And I usually joined some of the staff for a brown-bag lunch in the common room. As part of these informal conversations, I got to know what it is that makes the archivists and librarians tick—and what they consider important—which is helpful as I embark on a career characterized by life in archives.”
Having been invited back by the Athenæum to be the lead instructor and facilitator of the workshop he designed, which will be implemented next summer, Arthur’s days working at the Athenæum might not yet have come to an end, even if his PhD internship has formally and successfully concluded.
“In the course of my academic work,” Arthur reflected, “I have become convinced that women’s history is American history and American history is women’s history.” Arthur was grateful for the chance to design a project around this conviction through the PhD internships in the Humanities offered by the Associate Provost for Graduate Affairs and the Center for the Humanities.