Hello! My name is Emily Galik, and I am currently a senior at Tulane. This spring I’m working as a Reproductive Rights intern at Tulane’s History Department, under the supervision of Professor Karissa Haugeberg. You may recognize me from previous posts on my experiences at NCCWSL, PLEN Women in Public Policy, and interning at the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
As Prof. Haugeberg’s Research Assistant this semester, I’m helping her as she edits a new volume of Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, and develops a new photo essay on US women in STEM fields.
I am in my element in this position–conducting primary source research for a project concerning women’s history. However, this project focuses my search not on text sources, but images. A particular quirk of curating photos for this essay is that I must consider the rights and licensing restrictions for the photographs. My past research experiences primarily focused on text sources, or selecting photos from an archive to display in-house. Such restrictions are stricter concerning use in a published, edited volume such as Women’s America, versus undergraduate academic research or exhibition in an adjoining gallery. Thus, I anticipate that prohibitive costs could lead a photo or two to be dropped from the photo essay in favor of free or cheaper options.
This photo of Grace Hopper meeting President Ronald Reagan at her 1983 promotion to commodore has no access/use restrictions, while many photos of women working on ENIAC do, despite their concurrent contributions to programming–perhaps because of their different hosting sites, or the belief this later image of Hopper is less ‘desirable’ due to its later date.
If we complete the necessary work on this project, I will likely assist her research on women nurses and/or some other reproductive health-related field. I also look forward to bi-weekly meetings with interns working at other sites in the program, and learning more about their work.