Biographies
Hosts:
Claire Lavarreda is a World History PhD student (previously a Public History MA student) at Northeastern University. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2021 with her Bachelor of Arts in History & Social Sciences. Claire has worked in several archive-based internships, most recently interning for the Law Library of the Library of Congress in the summer of 2022. During the fall of 2021, she interned for the “Journal of The Plague Year,” a digital archive dedicated to rapid-response entries related to COVID-19, where she created an exhibit dedicated to the experiences of Northeastern’s Indigenous students during the pandemic. Overall, Claire’s research focuses on the nature of Indigenous record-keeping, and she aims to study how non-traditional archival material (such as wampum) can serve the same purpose as Eurocentric forms of archival material, such as written documents.
Catarina Tchakerian graduated with honors from Texas A&M University in December of 2020 with a Bachelor of Arts in History and minors in French and Museum Studies. As an undergraduate, Catarina interned with the National Museum of American History’s Archives Center, Gettysburg National Military Park, and Fort Necessity National Battlefield, completing projects in research, archives, and public interpretation. She did her graduate fieldwork at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and plans to return to continue her work. Catarina’s diverse experiences and studies have fostered her passion for public history across a variety of historical topics.
Guests
Dr. K.J. Rawson works at the intersections of the Digital Humanities and Rhetoric, LGBTQ+, and Feminist Studies. Focusing on archives as key sites of cultural power, he studies the rhetorical work of queer and transgender archival collections in brick-and-mortar and digital spaces. Rawson is founder and director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an award-winning collection of trans-related historical materials, and he chairs the editorial board of the Homosaurus, an LGBTQ+ linked data vocabulary site.
Dr. Ángel David Nieves is Professor of Africana Studies, History, and Digital Humanities in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University and is an Affiliate Professor in the Department of English and in the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. He is currently Director of the Graduate Program in Public History and Director of Public Humanities in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Dr. Nieves’s scholarship focuses on the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, social justice, and technology in the U.S. and South Africa, and is at the vanguard of digital history publications and experimental online publishing platforms. Nieves received his PhD from Cornell University in the history of urban development and Africana Studies. He holds an MA in socio-cultural anthropology and Women’s Studies from Binghamton University (SUNY) and a professional Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch.) degree from Syracuse University.
Dr. Jessica Linker is a historian of early America and digital scholar. She is working on a book project that examines how women practiced science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the various social and cultural trends that contemporaneously or retroactively obscured their labor. She is also interested in the ways virtual and augmented reality can be used in historical teaching and research. Her research has been supported by the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the New York Public Library. She additionally co-directs Northeastern’s Huskiana Press, an experiential letterpress studio.
