About The James Farmer Project
The goal of this website is to highlight James Farmer’s educational legacy at Mary Washington through the gathering of various materials relating to his years at Mary Washington. As a group we have conducted oral histories with some of his former students, transcribed and captioned recordings of Dr. Farmer lecturing and gathered some of his classroom-related materials. An additional goal of this website is to collect James Farmer artifacts that Mary Washington students and faculty have made over the years. This allows visitors to our website to navigate old and new resources relating to Farmer. We created this project to educate former, current, and future Mary Washington students about the importance of Farmer to our campus and school legacy. This project was made in collaboration with HIST 428: Adventures in Digital History and our group's project outline can be found on the class website.
(Farmer speaking at MWC Phi Beta Kappa Induction, 1993)
Meet The Team
Kimberly Eastridge is a History and American Studies double major with a minor in Museum Studies. After graduating from UMW, she plans to work in exhibition design. Kimberly's role in this project includes conducting oral history interviews, inputting metadata, exhibition creation, and minor website development.
John Forest is a History and American Studies major in the College of Education at UMW. After graduating from the university, John would like to teach Civics at the secondary level. He would also like to eventually continue his studies in Education and obtain his M.Ed. John's contributions to the website include: website development, video editing, transcription, exhibit creation and data entry on certain items in multiple collections.
Eilise Mahoney is a History and Communications and Digital Studies double major at UMW. After graduating from the university, Eilise would like to work in the communications field. Eilise's contributions to the website include editing and compiling oral histories, creation of the highlights video and its portion of the Farmer Legacy Exhibit, data entry on certain items, and ensuring the accessibility of the website.
Katia Savelyeva is an English major and Digital Studies minor. After graduating from UMW, she hopes to work in editing or publications and is interested in pursuing graduate work. Katia's role in the project involved transcribing and subtitling the three Farmer lectures, data entry, and transcription, and building the Years at UMW timeline.
Megan Williams is a History and Historic Preservation double major with a minor in Museum Studies. After graduating from UMW Megan would like to become a museum curator. Megan's roles in the project included digitizing classroom materials and selecting preexisting materials from UMW's Special Collections and University Archives website.
Special Thanks
Angie Kemp and Carolyn Parsons at UMW's Special Collections and University Archives gave invaluable guidance through the sources we used from Special Collections. In addition, Angie offered vital help in mastering Omeka.
UMW Historic Preservation major and Special Collections lab aide Francesca Maisano gave important guidance in getting started on subtitling the three lectures.
Dr. Erin Devlin helped guide the oral history interviews by giving advice and resources.
We are so thankful to Pam Davis, Christopher Williams, Mary Helen Dellinger, and Jeffrey McClurken for allowing us to interview them about their relationships with Dr. Farmer. We are also thankful that all interviewees were so flexible as the university switched to distance learning halfway through the semester.
Dr. Jeffrey McClurken served as both an oral history interviewee and our advising professor. We are very grateful for his flexibility and advice as we navigated the project.