Editor’s note: This is the sixteenth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. It is also the first entry to profile the people behind Contingent Magazine (there will be more). If you know of someone we should interview for a future profile, or would like to be interviewed yourself, please send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Erin Bartram (@erin_bartram on Twitter) is a historian of women, gender, religion, and ideas in the 19th century U.S., and a founder and editor of Contingent. Here’s how she does history.
When you are not doing work for Contingent, where else are you working? How long have you worked there and is this your first connection with the organization?
I am the School Programs Coordinator at The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. I have worked there since May 2019. I started part-time and then went full-time in July 2020. My first time visiting the house was for my first on-site interview for the position. I’d never been on a field trip there like many other Connecticut and western Massachusetts students who grew up a bit closer to Hartford. In my previous position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford, I coordinated the internship program for history majors, so I’d interacted with one member of Twain staff who was coordinating interns on the museum side (a job that’s now mine!)
[Also, I’m going to be weird and call it The Mark Twain House & Museum throughout because our style guide dictates the capitalization of the “The” and I’m too used to it at this point.]
Tell Contingent readers what a typical day/week of work at the Mark Twain House & Museum is like for you.
There’s no such thing, really. I know that’s a cop-out, but it’s true. Pre-pandemic, at least part of my day would be spent giving educational programs on-site to visiting students, but even that can mean a lot of things. It might mean doing a program on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with high schoolers or helping co-teach a college course with a local professor or a hands-on house tour with second graders–maybe even with folks at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center which is on the other side of our lawn.
In the summer, a typical day means coordinating two weeks-long grant-funded programs with local students, one on creative writing, the other on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the history of white supremacy in the US, particularly Connecticut.
Creative writing on the porch of the house with the language of flowers–specifically the ones grown on site in the museums gardens.
I’ll also be prepping for the start of school in the fall, revising our program offerings, training staff, and coordinating the advertisement and booking of programs through community partners. Lately, Connecticut Summer at the Museum has me giving a lot of our special summer tour for young children, Growing Up in the Gilded Age. When we found out we were one of the museums that had received financial support to allow children in the state to visit for free, I adapted an existing school program into a family tour and (re)trained our guides so that we’d have more offerings for families with young children.
Definitely more glitter than in academia.
Along with all of that, I might be supervising high school, undergrad, or grad interns, on-site or virtually, who are working on assessment/evaluation projects, creating podcasts, or curating exhibit cases (with the help of our Director of Collections). I also help deliver our adult outreach programs, so I might be driving to a library to deliver one of those or setting up for a virtual program live from the house.
There are also a lot of meetings (I don’t hate those as much as some people) and raucous staff lunches. One thing we think about is what modern inventions or experiences we’d like to introduce Sam to. Getting him a Baja Blast at the Taco Bell drive-in is currently my #1.
You have our attention: tell us, once it’s safe to travel again, why we should visit the Mark Twain House & Museum. What should we check out and what do you find to be the most rewarding part of working there?
Aside from the house itself, which is beautiful in all seasons and endlessly intriguing to me (thanks to the great work of our curatorial and maintenance folks), the house is so much more than the public persona of “Mark Twain.” It’s really about the family, the people who worked for them, their neighbors and friends, and their lives and connections. While you might picture him as the white-haired, white-suited Voice of American Literature, the Sam Clemens that moved to Hartford was recently married to a much wealthier woman from an abolitionist family, a young father, and an up-and-coming writer.
I think what I find most rewarding about working here is the way Sam’s own interests–in literally everything–allow us to explore so much of 19th and early 20th century history. In my academic career, I’d been fortunate enough to work in the Sedgwick family’s papers, and someone in the 19th century joked that no Sedgwick could sit down at a table without writing a letter–and they talked about everything in those letters. Clemens was much the same way, and loved to play with language even more. This means it’s really easy for me to find ways to design programs rooted in the K-12 curriculum using the family’s experiences here.
There’s also something about place-based education that’s magical, whether you’re 9 or 99. There’s a passage from a letter Sam wrote to his best friend Joe Twichell, who was the minister at Asylum Hill Congregational Church down the street, that guides often quote on tours. I think about it a lot.
To us our house was not unsentient matter–it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome–& we could not enter it unmoved.
For me, that rings true, not just because I am sometimes hit with the fact that I work in Mark Twain’s house (in his staff’s bedrooms, actually), but also because of the relationships I have with my coworkers, even those that have moved on to other positions. They’re still in the house too, because of the memories I have of them there. I won’t say I struggled with loneliness in academia. It was more that I enjoyed collaboration in a way that there wasn’t a place for in that world. I didn’t realize it until I started working at Twain, but Contingent is an obvious example of that. This doesn’t mean that everything I do at work is explicitly collaborative, but we’re all working towards a common goal in a way that’s just not the case in academic work.
What is something people don’t know or understand about working at a historic house museum like the Mark Twain House & Museum?
There’s no single “job” in a place like this. I see academic historians talking about sending “leftover” graduate students to work in historic house museums (HHMs), and public historians pushing back and saying they’re not qualified, but the reality is that there are lots of HHM jobs that neither an advanced degree in public history or “academic” history alone qualifies you for. Without our development department (especially our grants manager), our CFO/COO, our collections department, and our security and maintenance people, we don’t have a house to interpret.
Also, like all jobs, part of the job is to make it look easy. Our historic interpreters aren’t giving you a canned script, though–every general tour you go on at the house will be different because each guide crafts their own tour, drawing on the research and expertise of their colleagues, and tweaks it as we learn new things.
Sam Clemens has the perfect line for every situation–including the sign on Erin’s desk.
Can you tell us about some of the projects and programs that you have worked on at the Mark Twain House & Museum?
I have revised and expanded the educational programs we offer on- and off-site, adding a hands-on tour for K-3 students, a revised program on Twain, racism, and white supremacy that’s a good companion to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a new English language arts and visual arts program about how artists illustrate stories. With Katie Burton, my former counterpart at the Stowe Center, I created two new programs that the museums deliver collaboratively: Making an Impact, about race, social justice, and creative writing, and Nook Farm Neighbors, a hands-on material culture program.1
When the pandemic hit, I worked to convert some of our existing programs so we could deliver them virtually, but I also created some new programs to take advantage of our incredible virtual tour.
Photography isn’t allowed inside the house, but the virtual tour gets pretty close.
I worked with Leslie Imse, a music teacher from a nearby high school, to pilot a new music education program called “Make Music With Mark Twain.”
Planning out Make Music With Mark Twain! on the stick-on whiteboard.
I have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of Clemens’ writing since joining the museum–we don’t even have a definitive complete bibliography–so I have been looking for ways to bring some of his less-familiar works into the visitor experience. One way I’ve done that is through Sam’s Shorts, a program where I periodically post a short selection from a letter, essay, speech, novel, or poem in the museum center as well as online and ask visitors to read it and share their thoughts. Then I summarize the responses, answer some visitor questions, and share some context to help folks understand the place of the piece in Clemens’ personal and professional life and in the history of the period. It has been really fascinating to see what pieces people respond to, and each wrap-up post is a little research project for me–on the history of vaccines, political campaigns, incel culture, or fantasies of space travel.
Putting up the first Sam’s Shorts in the museum center.
Have you always been interested in history? If so, what’s your earliest memory about a historical topic or event?
Ahahahahahahah NO.
I was not really a history kid. I did love reading my dad’s Readers Digest books about historical disasters and topics like that, but I wasn’t into history in the way lots of other eventual historians seem to have been. I never asked to be taken to Old Sturbridge Village; I much preferred the Peabody. I dressed up as Susan B. Anthony for a school project when I was nine (I DIDN’T KNOW!!) but that was a requirement. My earliest clear memory of a historical event was when some guy named Ollie North preempted all of my favorite PBS shows every afternoon and I was pissed.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate school experiences. Was history always your main area of study and what were your research interests in graduate school?
If I’d gone with the subject I was strongest in, and that I liked the most, I would have been a math major. But I have dyslexia, and it still causes me much more trouble with numbers, so I didn’t go in that direction.2 Honestly, I had gotten a little more interested in history in high school so I went with that, though I have absolutely no memory of making that choice. Within a week of starting at the College of the Holy Cross, where I did my undergrad, I’d added a music major and that was my primary focus through college. The AAS seminar helped me figure out I wanted to do history in some capacity, and that I wanted to do US history (I’d previously been interested in early medieval), but that came too late for me to apply to any graduate programs.
Instead, I graduated and went back to the job I’d had in college, working at a rare bookstore one town over from where I grew up. It was one of the best jobs I’ve ever had, and it introduced me to so many fascinating people and topics.
Through a series of coincidences and connections, I secured a seasonal position at Governors Island National Monument, which was a brand new park at the time, and for six months I got to help research, write, and deliver the first tours of the island. When that position ended, I was unable to secure a full-time position, which led me back to grad school (I’ll explain later). My boss from the bookstore had met an author who was looking for someone to catalog their research papers for donation to an archive before they started their next book, and that’s how I ended up working as an assistant to Nancy Milford. Readers may know her from her biography of Zelda Fitzgerald, but I was sorting through the research she’d done in writing her biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The conversations I had with Nancy over tea in her living room–about researching and writing, and more importantly about the value of researching and writing women’s lives–impacted me more than I knew at the time.
When I applied to grad school, it was initially to get an MA in history so I’d have a better chance of getting back into the National Park Service. I applied to PhD programs which rightly rejected me because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but a good part of that was that I had sailed off the edge of the map in terms of what my family and friends knew about. But I knew I wanted to do microhistorical work in early America, and so the place I ended up getting accepted to do a funded MA was actually the best possible place for me: the University of Connecticut.
After my acceptance, my adviser asked me to call for a chat, and somehow didn’t rescind my acceptance after that conversation. When I started grad school, I was about the only member of my cohort who wasn’t there with the intention of going on for a PhD, and that basically flip-flopped in the first month of the semester. I applied for admission into the PhD program at UConn and that’s where I completed my degree in U.S. History with Richard D. Brown as my adviser.
The best thing to have at your defense is a team of cheerleaders in matching shirts with a hashtag they created from one of your primary sources. #AndBecauseUsefulHappy
Not only was UConn really the best place for me, I was fortunate enough to have an adviser who was endlessly curious and didn’t mind me roaming far afield. In a department with Dick Brown, Bob Gross, Chris Clark, Nina Dayton, Nancy Shoemaker, and Altina Waller–plus some Early America stars in other departments at the university–I could have only taken 18th and 19th century courses if I’d really wanted to. But I took all kinds of courses, and got really into histories and theories of colonialism. Oddly it was that stuff that led me into the topic I ended up researching.
Tell us about your dissertation, “Jane Minot Sedgwick II and the World of American Catholic Converts, 1820-1890.” For starters, who was Jane Minot Sedgwick II?
Jane was the relative of more famous people you may have heard of–the granddaughter of Theodore Sedgwick, the niece of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the great-great-great-great-great aunt of Kyra Sedgwick–and so was just connected and moneyed enough to have some of her papers preserved but not important enough for anyone to have ever noticed her before. For the purposes of my work, she was the daughter of a prominent New England Unitarian family and she converted to Catholicism in the 1850s.
In some of my coursework on colonialism and borderlands, I developed an interest in theories of identity, and in others, I’d noticed that 19th century US historiography argued that men and women had distinctly different social experiences. Why, then, were all of the major studies of converts to Catholicism in 19th century America–a period of significant anti-Catholicism–about men? I went into the project trying to answer the questions a) was the experience of conversion different? and b) how was it different? To answer those questions, I had to find someone to study. But I wasn’t just interested in finding out why someone converted, in part because I believed that focus on the conversion had caused many scholars to narrow their analysis too much, lending an air of inevitability to the pre-conversion life and then seeing little of interest in the post-conversion life. I wanted to study a whole life to understand the place conversion had in it, but I didn’t want to read meanings into that conversion that weren’t there. That meant, for me, finding someone with a rich set of papers, someone I could know as a person, not just a convert.
How did I do that? I went to the database of some big archives in New England and put in “Catholicism.” Unsurprisingly, there weren’t many hits for the period in question. But Jane came up in the Massachusetts Historical Society’s database, and within one visit, I had not only found the convert I was going to study, I had discovered a network of convert friends and a huge collection of papers from the broader Sedgwick family that would end up being vital to the work I was doing.
One common response to my research project was “Were there any converts to Catholicism?” That alone was reason to tackle it, because finding Jane was like pulling at a loose thread; the more I pulled, the more I found, in every prominent family and plenty of obscure ones. Some of these women had been examined before by scholars, but most scholars had stopped their analysis with the moment of conversion, suggesting the conversion was just a puzzle to be solved, and some had barely bothered to research these women before pronouncing that they’d undoubtedly been lured in by a priest or won over by “smells and bells.” Instead, I centered the role of women in the conversion process, drawing on histories of friendship in the antebellum period. I was able to trace relationships that led to conversion and fostered deeper religious and social connections over years and across continents.
Ultimately, the project was as much about unpacking the way latent anti-Catholicism and misogyny continued to shape historiography on women and religion in 19th century America as it was about the religious lives of the women I studied. Essentially, both the existing literature and the reactions of many historians to my project suggests Catholic conversion in the US (and to an extent the UK) is intriguing only inasmuch as it is seen as an irrational choice, which helps explain why the literature and many scholars in real life conversations with me have been less interested in probing why women became Catholic–women are also seen as irrational, and so it’s been more fascinating to puzzle over why rational men–voters, even!–would make such an irrational and dangerous choice. In my own dissertation defense, a colleague asked whether I’d considered the possibility that Jane–who made a difficult choice after ten years of consideration and lived a rich life after her conversion–had just converted because she was unmarried and lonely.
You’re a historian of 19th century America, women, and religion. For those interested in those fields and wanting to learn more about them, what are some helpful works or resources? Who are some scholars that have inspired you?
I’m going to treat this like an awards speech and pack a bunch of names in. Scholars who’ve inspired me: Ann Laura Stoler, Jenny Franchot, Catherine O’Donnell, Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Sharon Block, David O’Brien, Mary Kelley, Dallett Hemphill. Contemporaries who’ve inspired me: Monica Mercado, Bill Cossen, Pete Cajka, Catherine Osbourne, Megan Goodwin. And some good books to read:
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- Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion by Ann Braude
- The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction by Linda Gordon
- The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler by Richard D. and Irene Q. Brown
The view from the servants’ stairs.
While you were teaching and completing your dissertation, you also helped establish UConn’s Graduate Employee Union (GEU-UAW Local 6950). Tell us about the process of organizing a union and why graduate students need a union.
Participating in the formation of GEU-UAW was the best thing I did in grad school, and I include my dissertation in that.
UConn grad students had attempted to unionize in years prior, but some significant structural changes in 2013-14 really allowed it to “take” that time. The most important one, and the one that galvanized grad students across the university, was changes to our health insurance. When I started at UConn, we were on the same health insurance as the faculty. But apparently the university had set a deadline to move us to another plan and whether they intended to make this choice or they just put it off and screwed it up, grad students ended up on the plan for undergraduates. This meant the only place you could receive affordable care was at student health services on campus, and it was limited to the care they provided there at the times they provided it. This was, as should be obvious, absolutely unworkable for an adult population with children.
Health care is what lit the fire, and the early organizing committee’s choice to align with the UAW came at another fortuitous moment—just after they’d managed to force NYU to recognize the grad student union there after a multi-year struggle. But as we started doing the work to organize in preparation for a card drive, what emerged was a panoply of everyday slights and outright abuses. It was nice, in a weird way, to realize that yours wasn’t the only department where someone just “forgot” to put grad payroll information in and no one was getting paid till October or November. But we also found real disparities between departments and fields, and specific issues that needed to be addressed as well—whistleblower protection in a department where a professor had a long history of inappropriate behavior, and the lack of women’s bathrooms in another department’s building.
History grad students organizing together! With Casey Green–later a contributor to Contingent’s Forrest Gump forum.
Cards dropped on Valentine’s Day 2014, and our union was certified by the state in April. That’s really fast for something like this. We spent the next year bargaining a contract, and ratified it in April/May 2015—just as my funding ended and I left UConn. I never got to sign my union card there, but I am incredibly proud that I got to spend my last two years at that school with such an amazing group of people doing important work.
The day GEU-UAW was certified by the state.
One of the things our UAW folks reminded us of all the time was that the university could say it didn’t have the money, but a union was a way to make them open up the books and prove it. Getting the contract was a huge victory, but enforcing it was ongoing work. Turns out, though, they could get grad pay out on time! How about that?
This all being said, the non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty organized when I was in my position at the University of Hartford, and I saw the difference in organizing at a public institution vs. a private institution. Just as with UConn, I never actually got to sign my union card there either. But that was because UHart was able to drag the process out from the beginning, and was much more heavy-handed than UConn. When we as grad students got all of the state’s (Democratic) leadership and much of the assembly on our side, it made it much harder for the university to dig in. At UHart, we didn’t have any of that support. I was a VAP at the time, and at first the university tried to say people in my position weren’t in the bargaining unit, and then they “accidentally” sent my ballot to my parents’ address.3 As a result, I spent the afternoon of December 23 running down Main St. in Hartford in the snow to the Ribicoff building to get my replacement ballot in on time.
Grad students and adjuncts and faculty need unions because there is power in a union. Without collective bargaining, or in places where that’s not legal, collective action, you will get trampled over. And given that trampling over grads and adjuncts is basically the business model of the modern university, I’d argue there’s no substitute for this work. It’s not only scary to try to fight these battles on your own, it’s ultimately useless. It’s disheartening how few faculty who claim to be activists seem to have processed and deployed the fundamental mechanisms of building power in their own work lives.
Getting ready for graduation on her last day in academia.
Before Contingent was even Contingent, when it was a Google Doc called “Untitled Project Brainstorm,” what were your hopes for it? What do you want or would like its future to look like?
It was a hard time, honestly. I was recently out of academia, unemployed but for one adjunct class in the fall of 2018, and feeling pretty bleak about my own future. I don’t know that I remember what I hoped for it. I do know that while I knew how much money we were looking to raise to get the magazine off the ground, I never really allowed myself to think about how much money it would take to run it. There was a moment where we had to take a leap and say “we’re doing this, and if it doesn’t take off, the three of us are going to have to come up with several thousand dollars each to pay the people whose work we’ve already contracted.” And then there was the equally-terrifying moment when we realized people had donated and we were going to have to actually do this.
Honestly, I don’t really want the magazine to put out more pieces than it does. That’s not the growth I’m looking for. I think there’s already too much to absorb. What I’d like to do is a) raise pay and b) provide space for increasingly innovative and creative ways of doing history. These were in our “blue sky” document from the first year of publication, and we’ve done both of them already, but I want to do more.
Now three years into its existence, what are the best but also the hardest parts about editing Contingent?
Balancing keeping the mission going as originally constituted and expanding. My co-editors are infinitely patient with my many whims and what-ifs, because we all have them. It’s also challenging that we all have very different work lives than we did when we started.
One thing that has been more challenging than I expected is getting adjuncts–proper adjuncts–to pitch us. We get a lot from grad students, and full-time NTT scholars, and even those who’ve left academia. But active adjuncts? Those scholars who are teaching at three different schools to stitch together a life? We get fewer pitches from them than I’d prefer. If you’re a secure scholar whose department employs adjuncts, let them know there’s a place that will pay them for their writing.
In 2018 your essay “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind” went viral and initiated countless discussions about the academic job market. Now, three years since it debuted, what do you think the legacy of the piece is?
At the time, it was giving people permission to feel the complex feelings they had about academia. I had people tell me it helped them grapple with a loss they’d ignored for a decade. But it also meant that I’ve struggled to get out from under the weight of being known for a piece of highly emotional writing. In the immediate aftermath, there was the suggestion that my piece had done harm because I didn’t understand the labor politics of academia. A lot of false consciousness stuff, often very gendered, based on the assumption that I had never thought critically, let alone done any work, in this area.
As for the legacy, one thing I’ve noticed is the way that subsequent pieces of quit lit have been more highly praised by tenure-track scholars if they were less emotional–particularly when the author identified as a woman and when the emotions minimized were grief and anger. I see stuff like “It’s so nice to read something calm and rational, not full of anger and blame.” That really chaps my hide.
The other legacy is that I’ve gotten more citations in peer-reviewed pieces out of this piece of writing than anything else I’ve ever done. In many cases, that’s tenured or tenure-track folks using my writing–my experiences–to further their careers. It’s very odd to see yourself become a primary source, especially when you’re treated as functionally dead in the process. [Sometimes I can still hear his voice meme] But that happened very quickly, with lots of people assuming lots of things about me, my social location, and my emotional state. It was kind of funny to experience it as a historian, and made me think about how badly I might have read the sources I used. That being said, I did far more research before making any argument about Jane than people on the internet–and even scholars writing books–have done before making arguments about me.
If you were speaking to undergraduate history majors who were thinking of going to graduate school or an introduction to historical thinking and methods seminar of first-year history grad students, and they asked for your advice on how to be a historian, what would you tell them?
My go-to advice was always that you need to find a way to go from being a fan of the team to a fan of the game. When I started following baseball as a kid, I only watched or listened to games where my team was playing. And that’s a perfectly fine thing to do–to cultivate deep knowledge of a set of players so that you can watch 162+ games and really understand what you’re seeing. But eventually I became a fan of the game, someone who could watch any pair of teams playing and find it interesting and enjoyable. I think to really be a historian, you have to become a fan of the game. That means being able to find something interesting to think about in any part of the past you encounter. It doesn’t matter how much deep knowledge you accumulate about 12th century German monasticism or battles of the US Civil War, if that’s the only kind of history you can find interesting, I think you’re missing a lot of what it means to be a historian.
Erin’s current office bookshelf: a blend of Twain materials and monographs collected in her time in academia, with a broken clock thrown in to remind her of college teaching,.
You’re known for your advocacy of adjunct and non-tenure track faculty. For those wanting to help or do more for contingent scholars, what do you recommend?
I don’t blame you for asking this question, but it does feel a bit like when someone in higher ed asks me how I think we should fix academia–I don’t know that I have great ideas and I know that many of the people I’m addressing will disagree with (or at least slither away from) my suggestions. But I’ll give it a try.
Be honest about the ways that your job security often depends on the precarious employment and poor pay of adjuncts (and grad students). Think about how that shapes how you engage with this issue. Does it make you defensive? Do you find yourself making excuses for their working conditions because changing them would mean more work, fewer resources, or just general discomfort for you?
Stop saying you’ve tried helping if you’ve never done something that made you uncomfortable, if you’ve never used the privilege of your security to do something–even collectively–that would make the provost upset.
Organize. For some of you this means being active in an existing union, for some it means unionizing, and for others it means finding ways to organize that aren’t unions.
You can always just give money to them. That works too.
When you are not editing pieces for Contingent or working at the Mark Twain House & Museum, you also sing. Tell us about performing in a choral music ensemble.
Until grad school, music was always a much bigger part of my life than history. Other than maybe one total calendar year, I’ve always been singing or playing music (I was an instrumentalist first). It was a lifesaver in grad school because it was something I got to do with others–that collaboration towards a single goal thing–and it was something I could finish. When you’re doing your dissertation, you’re never finished, but I could work on music for a period of time, perform it, and be done with it.
Voices of Concinnity, the group I perform with now, is one of four ensembles that make up Consonare Choral Community.4 It’s a small professional chamber ensemble, meaning it’s about 12 voices max and we sing stuff designed for a group of that size. Everything we sing is unaccompanied as well. In combination, those characteristics mean we’re not performing the Verdi Requiem or Bach Mass in B Minor.
But lots of what we sing is by living composers. What makes Concinnity different from every other group I’ve sung with, though, is that our artistic director Sarah Kaufold consistently programs composers who aren’t white men. It’s almost impossible to describe to someone outside of choral music in the US just how relentlessly male and white that space is, but the best way I’ve come up with to describe it is that in the decade before I started singing with VoC, I’d sung more music by living composers named Eric than I had by women composers living or dead.
Sometimes just the women record and perform things too!
That recording of “TaReKiTa” came from February 2020, our last live indoor performance before the pandemic. So many aspects of our world have been gutted by COVID-19, but as a singer I really felt a line from Marta Olmos’ piece in our History Now series: “Now my body is a weapon. Do I have it? Am I spreading it? I walk lightly through public spaces, covering my face to protect others from my presence. My work is too risky. My stories are non-essential.” And I’m just someone who sings on the side. My friends who are professional musicians lost their livelihoods in the blink of an eye–especially the singers.
But we didn’t give up. During the pandemic, we commissioned a piece about the experience of the initial lockdown and recorded it virtually. This summer we had the chance to sing that piece together live in a series of outdoor concerts throughout the state.
Rehearsing for this concert inside, once we were all vaccinated, was an absolute joy.
For the first time in 15 months, we sang together inside, in a beautiful acoustic, to prepare pieces for our upcoming live(!!) performances, "From Silence Into Song."https://t.co/GIZTQO0scc
— Voices of Concinnity (@ConcinnityCT) May 6, 2021
It takes some getting used to, but it feels so good to be back. 🎶🎶#choirlife pic.twitter.com/e44U7ave8Z
A year of singing virtually, then singing outside masked and distanced, then just singing outside strengthened us as singers and really showed us what we could do. Listen to the same song recorded inside a very resonant church and then outside in Sarah’s backyard, masked and distanced. I am not lying when I tell you I could only really hear one other singer when we recorded the second version.
I was also able to combine two parts of my life when Concinnity recorded at the Twain House, performing a setting of the poem Sam Clemens chose for his daughter Susy’s headstone.
A piece I think of as one of our signature tunes (because we’ve performed it so many times!) gets at some of why we do this.
In our lifetime, we will undoubtedly have so many questions left unanswered.
So many stories will be left untold.
Perhaps we may live an answer or illuminate a story.
Perhaps we may not.
So we turn to the security of constancy as dependable as the sea,
nature full of beauty and peace,
music that can teach and inspire.
Perhaps all we can do is seek comfort
in such things as flowers, and song, and you.
People think they know a lot about Erin Bartram. What’s something people don’t know or would be surprised to know about you?
I know how to score a baseball game by hand and used to do it a lot. I also review books for Publishers Weekly, a gig I got with the help of a wonderful person who works in the archives where I did a lot of my research. My reviews are anonymous, and I can’t reveal the books I’ve reviewed, but let’s just say I’m lucky to get a sneak preview of a lot of the great scholarship on religion that’s being produced these days.
Exploring the Richard Scarry exhibit at New-York Historical Society on a staff trip in the winter of 2020.
If you weren’t a historian, what kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I suppose from one perspective, we know what kind of work I’d be doing because I’m doing it. I’m not a historian in the way many use that term. As an editor and someone who develops and delivers educational programming for children and adults, I do lots of the work of history every day. I couldn’t do either job without the skills and knowledge I gained in academic history. And I produce historical knowledge as well, especially in my work at the museum. But I don’t do it in the way academic historians recognize–as an individual, under my own name, after being reviewed by my peers–in either of my positions.
That being said, I’m also not considered a historian in my position at the museum by those in the museum world, at least so far as knowledge production is concerned. As a general rule, there are people within museums that are expected to write articles, and those people are curators, not school programs coordinators. Even if I wanted to write a conference paper or article or a book about anything Twain, there’s really no space or support in my position to do that. That’s not the fault of my museum, it’s just not what my job is. In that sense, I really am finding another use for the history PhD—I need it to do my job, but I am not doing the primary thing it purportedly trains you to do.
If I weren’t doing what I’m doing now, though, I’m not sure what else I’d do. Having worked in academia doesn’t make you “qualified” for lots of things, but it doesn’t make you as unqualified as lots of people think. The PhD is a bit of a millstone because of what it represents to people who want to hire you, but I know I’m perfectly capable of doing lots of things well and finding fulfillment in them. I had other jobs before grad school and I’ve managed to make my way out of academia okay, though it was rough at times. I think it’s important for people following that path to know the difference between what they’re capable of doing and what the hiring world thinks they’re capable of doing, because your inability to persuade people to hire you can pretty quickly erode your general sense of usefulness.
- Katie is now at Keeler Tavern, another HHM in Connecticut.
- The only part of grad school applications I enjoyed was getting to do GRE math.
- How did they have this address? On-campus summer band camp two decades earlier.
- Liz Bologna, the magazine’s communications person, also sings in VoC