F. Gerald Ham and Elsie Ham Scholarship Award: Ashley Rockenbach

Ashley Rockenbach, who is enrolled in the MSLS program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a specialization in archives and records management, is the 2024 recipient of the F. Gerald Ham and Elsie Ham Scholarship given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The $10,000 scholarship supports the graduate archival education of a student who is studying at a United States university program. Scholarship selection criteria include the applicant’s past performance in their graduate program in archival studies as well as faculty members’ assessments of the student’s prospects for contributing to the archives profession.

Prior to her archival graduate work, Rockenbach earned graduate degrees in African History at the University of Michigan. Starting in 2011 and continuing for three subsequent assignments, she joined teams of American and Ugandan graduate students working with the Ugandan National Archives to improve access to national and regional government records in the country. Rockenbach focused on oral histories in particular, believing in their power to change dominant historical narratives. From 2013 to 2015, she conducted eighty interviews with elderly members of the Rwandan diaspora in Uganda, providing pre- and post-interview consultations and delivering written transcripts and audio recordings to every participant. Of her archival and academic experience, she writes that it provides her with “a unique vantage point for thinking critically about the promises and pitfalls of the archives profession in the twenty-first century…and being part of challenging conversations about what reparative archival work might look like, both at home in the US and abroad.”

Rockenbach’s faculty nominator shared their belief that she “will make big contributions to our field, knows how to publish and circulate new knowledge, and will have a global perspective on archives.”