Co-Directors

Racine Amos is currently the Community Engagement Archivist & Librarian at Penn State University Libraries. Racine is dedicated to promoting research and community engagement creating awareness and fostering literacy with a focus on issues related to social justice, equity, and recognition of individual and local histories. A sample of her work: CELEBRATING THE ADA: The Legacy of Disability Rights & Lived Experience at Penn State

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is a poet, essayist, and editor whose work is often based in Pennsylvania. Recent projects include the 2020 exhibition and catalogue, Field Language: The Paintings and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer, and the book Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, created in collaboration with Steven Rubin. She is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State.

 

Research Team

Philip Ruth (Coordinator) has served as Senior Historian and Director of Research for Cultural Heritage Research Services, Inc. of Lansdale, Pennsylvania, for most of his 35-year career as a regional and public historian. He is a member of Bellefonte’s Historical Architectural Review Board, and the boards of the Bellefonte Historical and Cultural Association and the Roland Curtin Foundation for the Preservation of Eagle Furnace.

William Blair is the Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Emeritus Professor of Middle American History, Emeritus Director of the Richards Civil War Era Center, and founding editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. He launched and edited The Brose Lecture Series with the University of North Carolina Press until his retirement in 2019. He also served as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. His books include The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth in the Dawn of Reconstruction (2021); With Malice Toward Some: Treason in the Civil War Era (2014), which was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize; Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (2004); and Virginia’s Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 (1998). He serves on the Board of Governors of the Centre County Historical Society.

Renea Nichols teaches public relations writing, public relations campaigns, and diversity in communication courses offered by the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. An active member in her community, Nichols volunteers with the Bellefonte Cemetery Association and Children Youth Services, and she teaches on Underground Railroad activities in Centre County. She is a member of the University Faculty Senate and serves on the University’s Policing and Communities of Color Advisory Council as well as the Bellisario College DEI committee. She is the 2022 recipient of the University-wide Barash Award for Human Service. She is a mother, grandmother, and author of books about interracial dating and biracial populations..

Nathan Piekielek is the Geospatial Services Librarian and an Associate Professor of Geography at Penn State University. His research interests and experiences span the fields of geographic information science and remote sensing, historical cartography, landscape ecology and conservation, human geography and migration, and academic librarianship.

Carmin Wong was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and raised in Jamaica, Queens, New York. Her poetry, plays, and research engage with transnational Black identities through written and oral literatures. She is pursuing a dual-title PhD in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Penn State. A graduate of Howard University, she holds an MFA in poetry writing from the University of New Orleans and brings rich experience in crafting narratives of communal history.

Spring 2022:

Jada Yolich is a Penn State senior originally from Chicago’s westside. As an International Relations major with minors in Spanish and history, she has worked with census data and public document analysis on several other projects before joining our team. Much of her prior experience is rooted in 19th and 20th century African-American history, as well as the African diaspora more broadly. She is a founding member of the Latinx Leadership Council at Penn State and was awarded the Bunton-Waller Fellowship to support and fund her academic career.

Fall 2022:

Jenna Lugo is a Penn State third-year student originally from New York. Her work as a History and Political Science major with a minor in Global and International Studies has inspired her research at the Museum of African American History and Culture and the Transcription Center at the Smithsonian. Here she researched census records and Freedmen’s Bureau documents in the Reconstruction era. More recently, she has started research with the National Park Service focusing on documents from the U.S.-Mexican War.

Summer 2023:

Colby Kloehr is a Penn State sophomore English and Psychology double-major with a minor in Creative Writing. Having never worked with census data and historical records, as well as being from Texas, Colby was excited to jump in and learn more about the history of Pennsylvania and to obtain useful skills during a summer internship. He pushed the project’s census research into a new direction, laying the foundation for our efforts to track out-migration of members of the local community of color during the early twentieth century,

Spring 2024:

Victoria Miller will graduate with a double-major in history and English at Penn State this spring. Originally from northeast Pennsylvania, she is excited to learn more about the rich history of the central part of the state. Miller has previous experience working with Racine Amos in the Eberly Special Collections Library. She also researched Black history in Pittsburgh through an internship with the Pennsylvania Center for the Book last semester. Her work for that project explored integral athletic spaces and identified community members from the twentieth century to help construct a digital learning tool for use in secondary classrooms.