Thank you for listening to this pilot series of Perseverantia.
I’m Professor Katherine Jewell, a historian at Fitchburg State University. Students produced these episodes from oral histories they conducted during the spring of 2022. These thirty-six interviews are housed at empty campus.omeka.net. The process of documenting Fitchburg State’s experience with Covid 19 continues, and the Empty Campus site is still taking documents, photographs, and testimony regarding these experiences.
Producing a podcast is time-intensive, technical, and requires significant work behind the scenes in organizing metadata, clipping soundbites, constructing guiding questions and themes, and organizing labor. Each episode represents many hours of these students' collaboration and effort, sometimes reflecting skills and methodologies only recently learned. As their professor, I am incredibly impressed with what they produced in one semester.
Their effort also represents the beginnings of a broader process of reflection on the changes the Covid-19 pandemic wrought. At this recording, the United States nears one million deaths due to this virus. What changes in daily life, work, learning, and community it engendered also remains to be fully understood. Certainly, researchers for years to come from many disciplines will grapple with these questions.
But for the Fitchburg State community, this podcast offers a starting point, I hope, to begin these conversations. The students who produced it experienced these events, themselves, and thus this is their attempt to represent this history from their perspective. Many more perspectives are needed to expand, complicate, and construct a full history of Covid 19 for purposes of community reflection, memory, and consideration as well as reinterpretation. This is, after all, what historians, do, and I am grateful to these newly minted historians for their insights.
I hope to see Perseverantia continue and focus on other Fitchburg State stories. To lend support to this effort, please contact me by email at kjewell1@fitchburgstate.edu.
Thank you again to all who supported this podcast, lent their voices to the oral history, and whose scholarship inspired students in this work of digital public history.