Staff Transitions
There have been a number of comings and goings in the Museum over the last year. We are sad to announce the departures of three Mellon Collections Assistants. Lauren Banquer has taken a position as collections registrar for the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation in Portland, Oregon. Patricia Duany has accepted the position of collections manager at the San José Museum of Art. Janice Nosal has taken a position with Crozier Fine Arts. Annalisa Heppner, Manager of the Circumpolar Laboratory Inventory Project, has taken a new position as Director of the North Burial Ground for the City of Providence. We thank them for their work and wish them well in their new endeavors.
Several members of our permanent staff have also moved on to new opportunities. Mae Jackson, Museum Operations and Communications Coordinator, accepted a position as Communications Specialist at the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown. Kevin Smith has stepped down as Deputy Director/Chief Curator. Dawn Kimbrel, Registrar, has left the museum for a position in the private sector. Leah Burgin, Manager of Education and Programs, has taken a position with the Choices at Brown program. We greatly appreciate their dedication and commitment to the Museum.
The Haffenreffer Museum is pleased to welcome two new permanent staff members and five grant funded staff members. Christina Hodge has just been hired as our new Associate Director. She served as Academic Curator and Manager of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections. Ariel Bordeaux has been hired as our Administrative / Communications Coordinator. She joins us from the RISD Library Special Collections.
Four staff members joined us last year on grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Rika Smith, Project Conservator, and Juan Arce, Project Photographer, were hired under our “Transforming the Haffenreffer Museum” grant. Jessica Nelson, Curatorial Assistant, and Matthew Longchamps, Project Photographer, were hired under our “Engaging the Americas” grant. Our newest hire is James Whitney, Manager of the Circumpolar Laboratory inventory Project, is funded by a collaborative agreement with the National Park Service.
Finally, we are pleased to announce that two staff members have been promoted due their outstanding service. Leah Hopkins, Mellon Outreach Engagement Specialist, has assumed the position of Manager of Education and Programs. Thierry Gentis has been promoted to Head Curator. Congratulations to both!
Staff Activities
Michèle Hayeur Smith and Kevin Smith co-organized a session entitled “Social Archaeology in the North and North Atlantic: Investigating the Social Lives of Northern Things” for Society for American Archaeology meetings on April 17, 2022. Michèle gave a paper entitled “Invisible Women in a World of Men: Trade in the North Atlantic, AD 1000-1600. Kevin and Gudmundur Ólafsson presented a paper entitled “Of Monsters and Men: Material Culture, Movement, and Symbolism at Surtshellir, a Western Icelandic Viking Age Ritual Site.”
Michèle Hayeur Smith assisted with the installation of Viking Exhibit at the Musée Pointe-à-Callière in Old Montreal and gave a talk entitled “The Role of Women in Viking Societies.” She did a podcast on her book for the Journal of Women’s History at the University of Oklahoma. She was invited to serve on the editorial board of Brepole’s North Atlantic World Series. She has been invited to give a paper at the Viking Congress in Liverpool in July and has been asked by the University Press of Florida to do an edited book on the Vikings tentatively titled The Hidden Lives of Viking Women.
Kevin Smith and his coauthors, Gudmundur Ólafsson and Albína Hulda Pálsdóttir, published an article titled “Ritual Responses to Catastrophic Volcanism in Viking Age Iceland: Reconsidering Surtshellir Cave through Bayesian Analyses of AMS Dates, Tephrochronology, and Texts” in the Journal of Archaeology Science (Vol. 126, 2021). They argue the site was linked to the Vikings’ beliefs about Ragnarök, the end of the world. This article was picked up by Live Science, Archaeology Magazine, and Smithsonian Magazine.
Leah Hopkins has been appointed to the Rhode Island Historic Preservation and Heritage Commission. She has also been invited to serve as a co-facilitator with Mack Scott for the Summer Youth Internship Program in Mystic, Connecticut from July 10-22. This project is part of a multi-year collaboration between the Center for Slavery and Social Justice, the Mystic Seaport Museum, and Williams College funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation called “Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom.”
Bob Preucel and Woody Aguilar gave a virtual presentation on the Pueblo Revolt to the Keres Childrens Learning Center at Cochiti Pueblo in November, 2020. More recently, Bob gave a paper in the Affective Artifacts Seminar hosted by the University of Manchester, England on February 15, 2022 and a paper in the IDENTIS Symposium, sponsored by Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy, on May 25, 2022.
Rika Smith has been invited by the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles to give a summer workshop on inpainting. The Getty is an international leader in conservation practice in the world’s visual arts and cultural heritage.
Grants and Awards
Kimberly Clark’s Greenovation Award, 2020. The Museum was awarded the Greenovation Award for recycling seven pounds of nitrile gloves. Kimberly Clark’s RightCycle Program coordinates the recycling of personal protection equipment (PPE), including protective clothing, safety glasses, and nitrile gloves. These materials are collected, processed into plastic pellets, and recycled into new consumer products.
GRoW@Annenberg grant, 2020. GRoW@Annenberg awarded the Museum a grant to conserve fragile and at-risk objects in preparation for the museum’s anticipated move from Bristol to Providence. It covers the cost of acquiring necessary conservation equipment, tools, and resources to help outfit a state-of-the-art conservation lab in the new museum. You can learn more about this project linked here.
New Cooperative Agreement with the National Park Service, 2021. The Museum has established a new Cooperative Agreement with the National Park Service. Overseen by Kelsey Lutz (Senior Curator, Alaska Region, NPS) and Justin Junge (NPS Project Liaison), it will evaluate the Giddings/Anderson federal collections in preparation for their potential transfer from the Bureau of Land Management to the NPS. It will fund the hires of an Arctic archaeologist and a consulting osteologist. The goal is to obtain a deeper understanding of how the collections relate to present-day tribal partners. It will also help support the Museums work with Robert King (BLM) in implementing ongoing NAGPRA activities.
Other News
The Museum is pleased to announce a new education module titled This Land is Home: A Seasonal Round in Native New England. Developed by Leah Hopkins and Leah Burgin, it is a self-paced, virtual learning module that explores how the seasons shape traditional and contemporary Indigenous lifeways in New England. This is a free resource and although it is designed primarily for 3rd-5th grade students, it is an engaging learning experience for students of all ages. Visit the new module linked here.
The Museum has launched its redesigned website. Created by Mae Jackson with the help of Brown University’s Office of Communications, the site is designed to be more user friendly, easier to navigate, and visually engaging. With an updated organizational structure, users can better utilize and enjoy all of the resources that the Museum has to offer. New high-quality photos and interactive elements bring the pages to life. Visit our new website linked here.
The Laboratory of Circumpolar Studies has been officially transferred from the Department of Anthropology to the Haffenreffer Museum. This transfer, effective as of May 1, 2022, clarifies the university’s legal and practical responsibilities with regard to the Arctic collections made by J. Louis Giddings and Douglas Anderson. This transfer is particularly important given the museum’s ongoing NAGPRA work with Native Alaskan tribes and corporations and the forthcoming move of the collections from Bristol to Providence.
Cover photography by Juan Arce