What started as a straightforward reference question at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provoked an unmistakable volley in the culture wars – and as I fled from the battlefield via the Archives shuttle, the first woman appointed as Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) saved the day. The first full week of summer… Read more →
Category: Clio Gets Personal
It’s Not Like the Movies or Social Media: Let’s Reimagine High School Reunions
My twentieth high school reunion is this summer, and I can’t decide if I want to go or not. Enmeshed in ambivalence, I’m weighing my more-bitter-than-sweet high school memories alongside how those years undeniably influenced me. What’s more, our society performs a collective myth-making around high school culture that’s immortalized in the films and TV… Read more →
A Burnout Confession: I’m a Foodie Academic Who Lost the Joy of Cooking
For most of last year, I worried that I’d broken my brain. As an academic whose job entails creating knowledge, this was utterly terrifying. I could still write, but getting words on the page was difficult and painfully slow. As I tried to rehab my writing muscles, I realized I’d missed a key warning sign…. Read more →
I am a survivor: Childhood Sexual Abuses Collections & the Archives
“I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse,” are words that lend themselves to whispers in the night, a disclosure between friends over a glass of wine. But these are not words that are meant to be spoken by a professional woman working in academia, for they break a social contract – the life of… Read more →
Disability (and) Politics: The Fetterman Fiasco of Fall 2022
In Fall 2022, conservative pundits condemned Senator-elect John Fetterman (D-PA), who had survived a stroke the previous spring, using discriminatory rhetoric. They claimed that because he was communicating using closed-caption technology, he was unfit for office. In addition, they suggested that his disability would render him unfit to perform the duties of his office. Evidently,… Read more →
Dental Work and Colonoscopies, for Someone Who Used to Always Say OK
Content warning: This piece discusses parent-child sexual abuse, coercion, and addiction. Nobody likes getting a colonoscopy. It’s not just the procedure, but the “prep” of taking a laxative and knowing your bathroom needs to be within easy reach for the next thirty-six hours or so. But what I call “Dad’s Playbook” — his instructions for… Read more →
How My Postpartum Guilt Was Healed by a 17th-Century Poet
Both of my children were born too soon. My son was twelve weeks premature, and my daughter arrived ten weeks early. Twice, I tried to will my body not to go into labor. Twice, I delivered a baby unable to breathe. Twice, I sat beside an impossibly tiny body hooked up to machines. The early… Read more →
Breastfeeding During War
The fireworks began at 7 pm, and my anxiety, already made worse by sleep deprivation, was heightened. I had just returned home with my newborn from a traumatic birth experience, and we were struggling to learn to breastfeed and find a sleeping pattern. That evening, after a lot of fuss, I had finally put her… Read more →
Pandemic Academic: Mothering from the Home Office
Twelve years ago, Baby #2 fell asleep in her carseat on the way to the hospital for the weekly mother’s support group. Insomniac Baby #1 had taught us a crucial sanity lesson: let sleeping people sleep. So I picked up Mama, PhD from the passenger seat and settled in for some unexpected reading. Since the… Read more →
Ordinary Death in a Pandemic
On Tuesday, March 17, 2020, shortly after noon, my mother, Carol Lenoir Price Swedberg, died in home hospice at the age of 90. I had arrived to be by her side three days earlier despite the fact that COVID-19 had already started to disrupt travel and other aspects of our daily lives. Mom died an… Read more →