F. Gerald Ham and Elsie Ham Scholarship: Cecilia Ringo

Cecilia Ringo, an MLIS student at Dominican University with a focus on archives and cultural heritage, is the 2026 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 graduate work in archives, Ringo received an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in history and women, gender, and sexuality from Kalamazoo College. She has completed internships at a wide variety of cultural institutions, including the Chicago History Museum, the Frank Lloyd Wright Trust, the Obama Foundation, and the Glessner House Museum. In 2021, she conducted oral history interviews with frontline pandemic workers; the interviews are now housed in the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library. Since June 2025 she has interned on a Mellon Foundation-funded archival program at the West Town Museum of Cultural History, which documents Chicago’s predominantly African American West suburban community. 

Ringo serves as co-president of the SAA student chapter at Dominican University, where she coordinates meetings and off-campus programming; plans information and networking events; and engages the Dominican University community in archiving, preservation, and local history. 

Ringo’s nominator stated that she “has shown time and time again that archival work is her true vocation. She has demonstrated this in the quality of academic work that she submits to her professors, her well-developed papers, her analyses of archival case studies, and her current internship at the West Town Museum.”

This scholarship was created in 1998 by SAA Fellow, past president, and longtime member F. Gerald Ham and his wife Elsie.