Strategies for Survival

Abstract This History Unclassified article details its author’s experience putting together an archival exhibit with 12 undergraduate students at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. The exhibit was about premodernist women who taught on the Brooklyn College faculty between 1930 and 1980, and the article (like the exhibit) tells their stories (innovations performed, triumphs achieved, misogyny faced). This essay also interweaves the tales of these historical archival subjects with other, more contemporary stories: those of the medievalist-historian-author leading the project, of the first-generation college student researchers striving to make sense of their futures, and of the fate of the humanities in US public universities of 2023.