The Fondren Fellows program at Rice University hosted its annual Fondren Fellows Showcase event April 15, where Rice students showcased their inquiry-based projects through lightning talks at the Kyle Morrow Room.
The Fondren Fellows program enables Rice undergraduate and graduate students to work on experiential learning projects focused on library and archival collections, services, spaces and skills. The students work with mentors on the projects, which have a tie to Fondren Library.
This year’s cohort developed a range of projects from creating workshops on artificial intelligence to studying the history of Rice to raising awareness of library services.
One of the many projects displayed at the showcase was the work of fellows under mentor Molly Morgan, a senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Rice.
The goal of the project, “Finding and Mapping Archival Images from Historical Plantations of Brazoria County,” is to contribute to an ongoing endeavor to identify, map and store digitized archival images from historical plantations in Texas’ Brazoria County. This work supports the research of several academic historians, archaeologists, cultural heritage managers and public history professionals who are part of a continued movement to shift the narrative on the history of Texas.
“The team was able to accomplish a really impressive amount of work through this project,” Morgan said. “They not only found, geo-referenced and made publically available archival images from historical plantations of Brazoria County, but they also offered a critical look at processes of remembering and forgetting that are part of social dialogue and heritage around the history of captive labor.
“The digital humanities exhibits they created for heritage organizations in Brazoria will be incredibly useful toward filling gaps in local histories and serving as talking points on the legacy of slavery and racial injustice.”
Click here to learn more about Fondren Fellows.
