Hello, and welcome to Perseverantia: A Fitchburg State Podcast.
This series is a project of The Empty Campus, a Digital History endeavor undertaken by students in the Honors Seminar in History in spring 2022.
Students began the semester with a broad introduction to the practices, methodology, and goals of digital humanities, public history, and oral history. Through their reading and exploration of these fields, they constructed an oral history project to begin to capture the Fitchburg State community’s experiences with the Covid 19 pandemic. They organized into four teams, each focusing on a different segment of campus life, and together they collected 36 oral history interviews. They partnered with another digital history project by the Economics, History, and political science department to collect digital images and documents that also capture this history. Together, these projects are now housed in a digital archive at emptycampus.omeka.net
Yet the class also undertook the work of interpreting the research they collected, which they have organized into five introductory podcast episodes, which move chronologically and thematically through the pandemic over two years.
It is our hope that this podcast initiates a process of reflection and community building and rebuilding that comes in the wake of disruptive and traumatic events. Life did not stop with the pandemic, but the ways the Fitchburg State community taught, learned, recreated, and connected transformed, and they continue to transform.
Public History works to generate collective attention around a past event. It is meant to be shared broadly. It can take many tones, and it can focus on short term, immediate needs or long term transformations. But above all, as one historian explains, public history has the power to call publics into being, by directing collective attention on events, texts, and voices to “act like compass for navigating the past,” — even the recent past. Digital history adds a new dimension to this work, in which digital space - whether storing information, presenting exhibits on line, or preserving new artifacts that are born in digital space, such as our oral history interviews or this podcast, generate further examination and contemplation.
This work is liked to the study of history in general, but the publicness and connection generated by the screen and networked, or streaming audio constitute an extension of our public sphere and public life, enabling new ways to navigate the historically constructed world in which we live.
This goal of engagement, within the Fitchburg State community, and between the institution and its region and people, is the goal of Perseverantia. Perseverantia is the motto for Fitchburg State, meaning perseverance. Like the university’s seal depicting the saxifrage, a delicate white flower that nonetheless is able to break through rock, these symbols embody the determination and spirit with which the Fitchburg State community weathered the pandemic. We feel it is an appropriate topic to launch the university podcast, Persevernatia, which we hope will continue to expand to cover the academics, events, athletics, and many activities of Fitchburg State.
I’m Professor Katherine Jewell, a historian at Fitchburg State.
Executive producers for this podcast were Steve Olson and Maddie Waterson. Joe Cautela III was the project manager.
The editorial team, led by Ronan Cords, in clued Nicholas Green, Emily Klein, Francesco Campione, Dillon Granberg, and Nathaniel Felix.
Geena Duval and Mary Kate Moreau are the content managers for this project.
Benjamin Hill is the library liaison.
Dana Cisowski is responsible for all licensing and ethical guidelines.
The web team, who produced the Empty Campus website at https://sites.google.com/fitchburgstate.edu/fsucovid19, are Jessica Patel, Leah Williams, and Chris Morales.
Thank you to Michael Kramer, Gill Frank, Kisha Tracy, Asher Jackson, and the Honors Program and Department of Economics, History, and Political Science.
You can subscribe to Persevernatia at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.