Enfilade

With the new year upon us, it seems like a fine time to introduce and publicly thank Julia Bouwkamp, who has done an amazing job as an intern here at Enfilade for the last few months! Julia is another one of my former students (like Rebecca Woodruff, she was part of the May-term course I taught in Sweden and Denmark in 2016).

Since then, Julia has been busy with lots of things. She was a historic interpreter at Colonial Michilimackinac, a reconstructed 18th-century fort in Michigan where the lower and upper peninsulas touch. She worked as an AmeriCorps VISTA member in Wayland, Michigan marketing the economic development and historic preservation potential of the town’s Main Street program. She’s presently interning with the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council, where she also serves on the board. In particular, Julia is preparing entries for Her Hat Was in the Ring, a national crowd sourcing effort mapping women who ran for elected office before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920 (in Grand Rapids, over fifty women stood for election in the late 19th and early 20th in various school board and local government positions). In addition, Julia is doing supporting research for an upcoming documentary on the history of kindergarten in the U.S.

Clearly Julia’s interests are diverse, but there are typically a series of reliable, coherent threads: gender, the history of fashion, material culture, the mediation of the past, and history as lived experience with real world consequences (then and now).

Many thanks, Julia!

–Craig Hanson