Bingham Center Technical Services graduate intern Colette Harley wrote a reflection on processing the collection of abortion rights and LGBTQ+ rights activist, Ann Baker. Baker was the founder and director of the National Center for the Pro Choice Majority, a clearinghouse for information related to abortion clinic violence, attacks against providers and perpetrator information. The bulk of the material in the collection pertains to Baker's work assembling, documenting, and disseminating information relating to the anti-abortion movement in the 1980s-1990s. Read the full piece.
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| Welcoming Ren Bickel, Technical Services Archivist
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My name is Ren Bickel and I'm the new technical services archivist for the Center. In this role, I process collections, which means I identify the materials, put them in order, house and label them, and create collection guides and metadata description so that the archival materials can be used by researchers.
I've specialized in processing work for a few years now. Prior to joining Duke, I worked for the College of Charleston as on several grant-funded projects that allowed me process and describe a wide variety of collections. Before that, I was at the University of Louisville, where I started my career in archives after working for several years in public libraries. I obtained my MLIS at Aberystwyth University in Wales in the United Kingdom.
I started at Duke in February, and I have loved my time in Durham and with the Sallie Bingham Center so far. I have already gotten to process two collections: the papers of teen magazine publisher Alison Amoroso and those of playwright and missionary Edna Aikin Baldwin. I've also updated a few other collections, processing additions and editing their collection guides. Currently, I'm working on the papers of Aishah Shahidah Simmons, a Black feminist lesbian filmmaker, educator, and writer whose materials will be a rich resource for writers, activists, and others. I've also attended the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick symposium (session recordings now online!) and our celebration of the life of Dorothy Allison. I've loved meeting some of you at those events, and I hope I get to meet many more friends of the Center in the future.
The Center's mission fits perfectly with my passions and interests in women's history and culture, life in the southern U.S., and queer studies. I am delighted to be able to explore and make accessible the amazing collections that Laura Micham and Kelly Wooten have curated and to benefit from the relationships they've formed over the years. Thanks to those of y'all who have given me a warm welcome!
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| 2025-2026 Research Travel Grant Recipients
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Lucy Kelly's project will examine the impact on the AIDS epidemic on the creation of queer community spaces, using three regions in the American South, including Durham, NC.
Image from The Front Page newspaper,
Nov. 24, 1995 via Digital NC
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Congratulations to this year's recipients of our research travel awards. We are looking forward to seeing everyone in our reading room and learning more about what they find in our collections.
Mary Lily Research Travel Grants
Daniel Belasco, Al Held Foundation, “Total Revolution: The Origins of the Feminist Art Movement, 1963-1969”
Ayumi Ishii and Kate Copeland, Pacific Northwest College of Art, “Compleat and Infallible Recipes”
Chloe Kauffman, Ph.D. candidate, University of Maryland, College Park, “’If women are curious, women also like to speak’: Unmarried Women, Sexual Knowledge, and Female Mentorship in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Atlantic”
Lucy Kelly, Ph.D. candidate, University of Sussex, Sussex Center for American Studies, “’I want to fight the fight. I want my rightful place’: Queer Worldmaking in the American South, 1970-2000”
Lina-Marie Murillo, Faculty, University of Iowa, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and History, “The Army of the Three and the Untold History of America’s Abortion Underground”
Melissa Thompson, Ph.D. candidate, West Virginia University, “Redefining and Recreating the Meaning of Family, 1929–2010s”
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Research Travel Grants
Stephanie Clare, Faculty, University of Washington, Seattle, “Eve’s Pandas: Queer Futurity and the More-Than-Human”
Julien Fischer, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Stanford University, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, “Writing the Incurable: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on Love and the Impossible”
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Pop-up panda card from Richard Fung to Eve Sedgwick. Image courtesy of David Seitz.
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One of our greatest joys is hearing from our researchers and sharing publications related to Bingham Center collections. If you have an article, book, or work of art based on research at the Sallie Bingham Center, we would love to hear about it!
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Nannie H. Burroughs
Image from the Library of Congress.
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This spring Bingham Center staff acquired a number of works about women working. Here’s a small selection:
Brown, Wilmette. Black Women and the Peace Movement. Foreword by Janice Owens, introduction by Juliet Yelverton. Clevedon, U.K.: Falling Wall Press, 1983. Wilmette Brown was active in the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers before teaching in Zambia and moving settling in England.
Burroughs, Nannie H. Think On These Things. Washington D.C.: Nannie H. Burroughs Publications, 1963. A scarce work by Nannie H. Burroughs, a prominent African American businesswoman, educator, religious leader, civil rights activist, and suffragist who founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington D.C., the first school in the United States to provide vocational training for African American woman. (Pictured at left.)
Davis, Tish, et al. Our Jobs, Our Health. A Woman's Guide to Occupational Health and Safety. Boston: Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health and the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, 1983.
Somerville, Mary. Physical Geography. Fifth edition, thoroughly revised. With Portrait. London, John Murray, Albermarle Street. 1862. This work was originally published in 1848 and now considered to be the first textbook on the subject in English. The Bingham Center also holds an 1848 edition.
Women in the Work Force News. High Point, N.C.: American Friends Service Committee, 1981-1984. Ten issues of this ephemeral local newsletter.
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This "Do Something Rad-ish!" bumper sticker is from the Helaine Victoria Press collection. This nonprofit educational organization was founded in California in 1973 by Jocelyn Helaine Cohen and Nancy Victoria Taylor Poore. Their mission was to publish and distribute women's history postcards in an affordable, attractive, and popular format. In 1976, the operation moved to Indiana and began producing letterpress materials. We often find Helaine Victoria Press postcards sent between feminists in other manuscript collections. We hope this inspires you to tend your garden and do something "rad-ish" this summer!
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