Annual Roundtable Meeting Program, August 3, 6-7:30

Documenting Diverse Women

There are numerous collections in Georgia that highlight the experiences of women across race, class, sexual orientation, and neighborhood. A panel of four dynamic speakers will discuss archival collections across different repositories as well as various outreach and advocacy efforts aimed at increasing awareness of these resources.

Speakers:

Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies. She is also adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she teaches graduate courses. At the age of 16, she entered Spelman College where she majored in English and minored in secondary education. After graduation with honors, she attended Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English. In 1968, she entered Atlanta University to pursue a master’s degree in English; her thesis was titled, “Faulkner’s Treatment of Women in His Major Novels.” A year later she began her first teaching job in the department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Ala. In 1971, she returned to her alma mater Spelman College and joined the English department.She has published a number of texts within African-American and women’s studies, which have been noted as seminal works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Doubleday, 1980), which she co-edited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920(Carlson, 1991); Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995); and an anthology she co-edited with Rudolph Byrd titled Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Indiana University Press, 2001).Her most recent publication is a book coauthored with Johnnetta Betsch Cole, "Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities" (Random House, 2003). In 1983, she became founding co-editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women that was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent.

Jill Anderson

Jill Anderson is the History, African-American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Librarian at Georgia State University. She holds a PhD in US History from Rutgers University with a minor in Women’s and Gender History, and an MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, where she also held a two-year Public Services internship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. She has published on girls’ intellectual history and has also co-authored an article (with Jason Puckett) on collaborative instruction, “Crossing Disciplines, Creating Space: Using Drop-In Research Labs to Support an Interdisciplinary Research-Intensive Capstone Course” (in Practical Academic Librarianship). She is currently teaching an Honors College freshman seminar at GSU titled “’Going Steady?’: Documenting the History of Dating, 1940-1990,” which emphasizes primary-source searching and interpretive skills.

Morna Gerrard

Morna was educated at Edinburgh University, Western Washington University, and Clark Atlanta University, and she has worked as an archivist at the National Archives of Scotland and Georgia State University. She has written two articles that were published in Archival Issues: “Putting the Georgia Women’s Movement Oral History Project on the Web: A Case Study in Collaboration and Innovation,” and “Engaging Communities: Public Programming in State Universities’ Special Collections and Archives,” (co-written with Kevin Fleming).  She has also written a chapter, “No Fame Required: Collaboration, Community, and the Georgia LGBTQ Archives Project, which was included in Kate Theimer’s recent “Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections” book about acquisitions and appraisal. Morna serves as vice president of the Georgia LGBTQ Archives Project, and is a board member for the LGBT Institute, housed at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. She is also a past president of the Society of Georgia Archivists, and has served on the board of the Georgia Archives Institute since 2006.

Alex McGee

Alex McGee is the Assistant Archivist for the Portman Archives in Atlanta, GA. In her position, Alex assists in the cataloguing, processing, and digitization of Portman’s archival image collections. In 2016, Alex initiated an oral history project, where she and the Portman Archives are collecting the stories of those who have known and worked with the world renowned architect, John Portman, over his 60 year career.

An Atlanta native, Alex attended the University of Georgia earning her BA in History and Women’s Studies. In 2015, she completed her MA in History with a certificate in Public History at Georgia State University. While a graduate student, Alex served as the Our Mother’s Fund endowed graduate research assistant in Special Collections and Archives at Georgia State University under the direction of Morna Gerrard. In her positon, she curated exhibits on topics ranging from the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade to the history of women-led organizations in Atlanta that utilized the materials from Georgia State’s Archives for Research on Women and Gender. In addition, she was named the 2015 Ethel Woodruff Draper Research Fellow for her master’s thesis, “The Politics of Protection: The Forgotten History of Georgia Feminists and Doe v. Bolton,” supervised by Dr. Wendy Venet.