MY MISSION
Delivering the final lines of my convocation address "Steal a Brick", Boston University, May 2024
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT IN
The Presence of the Past
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
"The Fate of Paradise: “Re-membering”
Sherwood-Jayne Farm’s LGBTQ+ History"
​PreservationLongIsland.org, Fall 2024
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This article is the culmination of archival research I conducted at Preservation Long Island as a Robert David Lion Gardiner Young Scholar. Studying the the never-before read diaries of Preservation Long Island's founder Howard C. Sherwood (1870-1958), I positioned Howard as an individual operating in a larger trend of preservation-minded, queer Americans who restored colonial homes in the 20th century and, from inside these renovation projects, built communities for queer people seeking refuge—all under the cover of artiness.​​​ Read here.
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​"Detachment from Divinity: The Origins of Evil
and Milton's Fallibility in Paradise Lost"
The Journal of the Core Curriculum, Spring 2022
As Europe entered the Age of Enlightenment, many prominent writers engaged in an intellectual movement to understand the morality through reason. However, memories of the bloody Wars of Religion and violence in the New World posed a paradoxical question, nipping at the heels of progress: where does evil come from if the universe is commanded by a benevolent, omnipotent God? Scholars like Alexander Pope expressed an optimistic view of divine judgment while Voltaire, in his “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne”, disparaged theodicies as inherently fatalistic. In Paradise Lost, John Milton attempts to “justify the ways of God to men”, yet his explanation of how evil originates from man’s imperfection reveals his own literary shortcomings. The poet successfully proves why God permits the existence of evil, as his subjects must be independent to create true goodness, but Milton ultimately fails to explain how the Lord knows but does not control fate, as the writer is removed from divine knowledge, forced by language to describe God in human terms. ​Read here.
INTO THE ARCHIVES
This March, I was hired as a special exhibit Educator at
Preservation Long Island as we welcomed a Smithsonian traveling exhibit Voices and Votes: Democracy in America, into our gallery space. As the Educator, I conducted private tours of the artifacts, facilitated small-group activities on the history of disenfranchisement in America, and presented at Museum Association of New York workshop on best museum practices for outreach to underrepresented communities.
Voices and Votes: Democracy in America exhibit at PLI Gallery (2024)
In June, I pitched and received a grant to conduct archival research on Preservation Long Island's founder Howard C. Sherwood (1870-1958). On his death, Sherwood not only donated a collection of his diaries, correspondences, and photographs but an eighteenth century farmhouse he purchase in 1908 and spent the rest of his life restoring and furnishing with antiques.
As a Robert David Lion Gardiner Young Scholar, I transcribed all of his handwritten diaries into type and compiled a comprehensive timeline of his life. I was even able to identity men we once thought were Sherwood’s brothers as actually his close male friends pictured with him in the kinds of portrait photography usually taken with family members.
Me next to a Portrait of Howard Sherwood at his Setauket home (2024)
But, most importantly, I started to see a man, flesh and blood and complicated, emerging from the documents he left behind. With a better understanding of the intimate relationships he kept with other men, Howard emerges as a queer man living in early twentieth-century America.
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In my recent publication "The Fate of Paradise: “Re-membering” Sherwood-Jayne Farm’s LGBTQ+ History," I combine the story of Sherwood's queer life I learned from his papers and his farmhouse, Sherwood-Jayne, to "re-member" a more complete narrative of his life and built-environment. I position Howard Sherwood within a larger trend of queer preservationists who restored historic properties in the 19th and 20th centuries, transforming them from eerie manors on hill to colorful refuges where they live alternative lifestyles away from the watchful eyes of the early 20th century.
Portrait of Howard and Unidentified Man in Costume. Courtesy of Preservation Long Island
A NEW APPROACH TO ACADEMIA
As soon as I joined the history department at BU, I started writing research papers and short films on stories with an impact beyond my immediate locale, stories based on the issue of identity for historically marginalized Americans. I completed a course in which we discussed American transcendentalists like queer poet Walt Whitman and writer W.E.B. DuBois, exploring the conception of selfhood for underrepresented social groups. ​​
Based on historical concepts in class, I wrote an acclaimed research paper on Emily Dickinson, a queer American poet who criticized misogyny in New England during the nineteenth century. I went on to research Michelle Alexander and Judith Butler, discussing the issue of the non-heteronormative or nonwhite “other” throughout our nation’s history.
I channeled this research into a short film I wrote called Taking Back August (2023) which outlines the legacy of misogyny and de facto demands of female actresses baked into the history of the American Hollywood system. My script was produced as one of five films chosen for BU’s Production 3 Honors Thesis course in 2023 and awarded in its festival run over the following summer.
Still from Taking Back August (2023)
Regarding my involvement in BU’s academic and creative communities, my film Exodus (2021) was published Boston University's collegiate The Journal of the Core Curriculum. This film focuses on Americans’ disillusionment with and objection to the exclusivity of the Catholic church from the twentieth century on. This same year, my research paper on theodicy in John Milton’s Paradise Lost was published in the Core Journal, exploring the development of religious identity in post-civil war English literature. I later joined the editing team for the Core Journal to evaluate critical essays and review photography and film submissions expressing interest in the humanities.
Still from Exodus (2021)
SPREADING THE MESSAGE
In Spring 2023, I served as the Creative Director of the Social Impact Film Festival, a brand-new film festival sponsored by Paramount and non-profit Entertainment2AffectChange and hosted at the WBUR CitySpace in Boston, MA. Among a select few Boston University students, I led the creative team, establishing the brand identity and theming for the entire festival, designing and producing the logo, festival website, brochure, and in-person branding materials for the event. During the event, I also acted as an event producer, producing the run-of-show and ensuring the timeliness by cueing the graphic changes and talkbacks from the tech booth.
Brochure I designed for the Social Impact Film Festival (2023)
As a lead on the founding team, it was incredibly rewarding to concentrate my skills in graphic design and event production towards showcasing emerging filmmakers with crucial social messages I was learned about in my history classes. This topics spanned from the Green Wave Movement in Argentina for Women's reproductive rights to addressing indigenous rights to bison in the American West. Through this digital storytelling event, I helped amplifying their voices online and in-person through thoughtful art direction.
On stage hosting a talkback with filmmakers (2023)
In the long term, I will implement my education at Boston University to pursue my doctorate and enter the world of academia. I also plan on employing this experience in higher education to share history in new and engaging mediums.
One example of my approach to revolutionizing the way history is shared with the greater public is manifest in my recent interactive art exhibit memorializing the AIDS crisis. Starting as a final project for a history class on Catastrophe & Memory I transformed this multi-media art project into an exhibit at my local art gallery The Huntington Arts Council.
ART EXHIBIT
Quilt Panel for Paul and Rog
Description
In 1985, Cleve Jones started the AIDS Memorial Quilt inviting loved ones to submit homemade quilt panels celebrating those lost to the disease. Each casket-sized panel elicits the human toll of the epidemic. Through this panel, I honor the lives of poet Paul Monette and his lover Roger Horowitz by referencing Monette’s poem “Brother of the Mount of Olives.”
After discovering undeveloped film from his and Roger’s trip to Tuscany, Monette recalls being led by an Italian priest through a cloister and sensing the clergyman too was queer. Then, he wonders about the priests dying of AIDS alone in their cells, highlighting the shame surrounding queerness in the church.In this panel, Catholic objects and gay culture collide, linking two artificially separated communities- queer and ecclesiastical. I combat the stigma put on those who died in silence with a joyful explosion of vintage rosary and sequins.