Kera Lovell earned a MLIS from IUPUI in 2024 with research interests in digital archival work, AI, community archiving, and archival activism. Her major research projects currently focus on increasing public accessibility to and engagement with digital archives, particularly oral history interviews.
Publications specific to LIS:
Lovell, K. “The People’s Archive: Remembering Gender and Sexuality in South Korea,” Reviews in Digital Humanities (expected 2024).
Lovell, K. “From People’s Parks to the People’s Archive: Power, Identity, and the Right to Representation in the Media, from the late Vietnam War era to the World Wide Web,” chapter in Archiving Activism in the Digital Age, eds. Daniele Salerno and Ann Rigney (Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures: 2024): https://bit.ly/3xgZyXL.
Lovell, K. “Review of ‘CDC at 75’ at the David J. Sencer CDC Museum,” The Public Historian, vol. 45, no. 3 (August 2023): https://bit.ly/3X9yAMf.
Positions specific to LIS/Public History:
Remote Archival Assistant, Rainbow History Project, Washington D.C. Since 2024
Various tasks: Metadata creator for newly scanned documents, special project outreach, finding aid editor
Remote Archival Volunteer, Ohio University Libraries, Athens, Ohio Since 2024
Metadata creator for the Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance Collection
Organizer and Interviewer, The People’s Archive Ongoing since 2021
Founder and Host of an oral history interview project called The People’s Archive: An Oral History Project. The multi-series project features recording conversations on a variety of topics, from gender and sexuality to mandatory military service in Korea, and making those recordings accessible to the public; manager of a rotating team of 2-5 research assistants who work on this oral history project
Upcoming Course Fall 2024: GNDR 4365 – Oral History: Capturing and Presenting Individual and Community Stories – This course will teach the history, theory, and best practices associated with interviewing. It is organized into three units: 1) an introduction to the history and key debates related to interviewing individuals for oral history, 2) the best practices associated with oral history and as a class we will launch an oral history project, and 3) independent oral history projects, spending considerable time considering how to analyze and present oral histories. The course includes a study abroad/field trip component to Taiwan to explore community histories of queerness during Taiwan Pride (Asia’s largest pride parade).
Professor, Course: “Experiencing Public History: The Senses and Public History in a Digital World” – an undergraduate and MA-level course taught online at the University of Utah’s Salt Lake Campus 2019 and 2020
Course Description: This online course approached public history through the bodily senses as part of an exploration of how experiential modes of learning can make history more accessible—even emotionally impactful—for diverse audiences in a digital world. We examined various public history venues, including museums, memorials, collaborative educational workshops, digital archives, online publications, and living history sites, encouraging students to center themselves and their own communities within our online classroom. My goal was to compare how the senses—smell, sight, taste, smell, touch, and feel (empathically)—offer different ways to teach the public about history. Our driving question: As historians, how can we inform diverse publics while creating empathic connections to different historical subjects relevant to our digital world?
Summer 2020 version of the Syllabus
Organizer, Teaching With Podcasts Ongoing since 2018
Creator and editor of TeachingWithPodcasts.com dedicated to providing faculty with pedagogical tools for assigning podcasts that pair with digitized archival collections; manager of a rotating team of research assistants who work on this ongoing project
Local Organizer, Public History Exhibition, Seoul, Korea 2019-2020
Organizer for the University of Utah, Asia Campus as a host for an 8-panel exhibition on Asian American history titled “I Want the Wide American Earth: An Asian Pacific American Story,” created by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), supported by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Digital Archival Intern, Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA 2008
Assisting the Lead Digital Archivist in scanning photographs of local history as part of their larger digitization process; required knowledge in properly handling archival materials and scanning software
Curatorial Intern, Marietta Museum of History, Marietta, GA 2008
Assisting the Curator in cataloging backlog of donated items; required knowledge of properly handling archival materials and data entry via archival software
Library Assistant, McCain Library, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA 2006
Scanning and shelving books, assisting patrons, space monitoring, event assistance, Research Librarian assistance
Kera Lovell, Ph.D. 