P. Newman Lecture Series

Hosted by Heritage Frederick

The Williams Observatory at Hood College is a historical structure listed on the National Register and a local landmark for early STEM education for women in Frederick.  The college is looking to rehabilitate the structure to make it a working astronomical observatory once more while also converting it to house the college’s museum, which will house permanent and rotating exhibits on Hood College history and local Frederick County history.  How this happens and what local folks can do to help is the topic of this talk by Dr. Jay Harrison, associate professor of history and history department chair, and Mary Atwell, college archivist, both of Hood College.

Bios:

Mary Atwell is the archivist and collections development librarian at Hood College, in the position since 2015. She earned her MLIS with a concentration in archival studies from Drexel University and she is an active member of the Society of American Archivists and the Mid-Atlantic Archives Regional Archives Conference. She is also an active member of the Frederick Historic Sites Consortium. Previously, she earned a B.A. in History from Ithaca College, and minored in anthropology and art history. 

Jay T. Harrison is an associate professor of Latin American and public history at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where he chairs the department of history and coordinates the college’s program in public history.  His research addresses the study of missionary endeavors and indigenous responses in later colonial New Spain, and the praxis and pedagogy of public history in museums and archives.  His most recent books are The Franciscans in Colonial Mexico (2021), coedited with Thomas M. Cohen and David Rex Galindo, and At the Heart of the Borderlands: Africans and Afro-Descendants on the Edges of the Spanish American Empire (2023), coedited with Cameron D. Jones.