Oliver Wendell Holmes Award: Mary Grace Golfo

Mary Grace Golfo, a student in the Master’s Program in Archival Studies at the University of Manitoba, is the 2015 recipient of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Travel Award. The award enables international archivists who are training or studying in the United States or Canada to augment their experience by traveling to the SAA Annual Meeting.

Golfo is a Filipino citizen and is on leave from her position as assistant professor in the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies. Upon graduating from the Archival Studies program, Golfo plans to return to her home country to lead and develop the first formal graduate degree program in archival studies.

Golfo’s nominator wrote that her “exceptional dedication to the academic development of this field of study not only led her to make a major commitment to come here to study, but is reflected in her performance overall. . . . She is well underway on a well-conceived thesis topic on the shape that graduate-level archival studies education could take in the Philippines.”

Established in 1979, this award honors SAA Fellow and former President Oliver Wendell Holmes.