Mark L. Email & Phone Number

St. Louis, Mo, Us

St. Louis

• Working with the MHS African American Objects Collection I have worked to assemble a complete inventory for the curator including compiling a conservation and deaccession list for the burgeoning collection, which continues to grow.• Cataloged 600+ legacy incomplete object records, requiring extensive research of important figures and events in the St. Louis African American community.• Composed original blog entries for the MHS website showing the background behind important history makers whose objects and stories are found in the African American Collection.- Working with curator Gwen Moore, I have helped research and assist with the development of upcoming Mill Creek Valley exhibit at Missouri History Museum, with an emphasis on research around jazz and entertainment as well as housing and city development policy.

St. Louis

• Worked with Prof. Walter Johnson providing key archival resources and data pertaining to topics from community organizing to civil rights, labor history and St. Louis politics for Johnson’s book, “The Broken Heart of America.”

St. Louis

(Internship: January 2017-Summer 2017) (Volunteer/Freelance Work: Summer 2017-Present)As an intern, work focused on preliminary manuscript collection processing, as well as compiling an inventory of the museum artifacts and photographs. Work also included the use of Evergreen ILS to organize the museum's library.Work post internship was on a freelance or volunteer basis. This notably included work on the Fall 2017 exhibit, "Eminent/Displaced" as well as the Fall 2018 exhibit "Civil Unrest in Review." Worked as project lead for research and exhibit design for Eminent, which looked at Mill Creek Valley a displaced black community in St. Louis City--connecting it to the 2016-2017 displacement of the St. Louis Place neighborhood for the National GeoSpatial Agency in north St. Louis city. Work here also included providing social media and print marketing for the exhibit.For the Fall 2018 exhibit, "Civil Unrest in Review," collaborated with museum volunteers and staff to bring to life the photography of photographer Erik Tan. Working with photographer Marissa Southards, I worked to compliment Tan's work with that of documentarian and activist Richard Reilly. In addition to still photographs, scrapbooks and art, a 20 minute oral history/slideshow was produced recounting Richard's foray into protest photography. Additional work included the organization and production of a live speakers panel featuring photographers Derrick Phillips, Bassem Masri, Richard Reilly and Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Cohen (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).

St. Louis

• Working under Andrew Hurley and in collaboration with the St. Louis Community Development Agency through the EPSCOR Grant, completed two years of graduate assistant work studying the impact of climate on the social and physical changes in St. Louis City neighborhoods. • Conducted on-site interviews with neighbors in Wells Goodfellow, Baden, Shaw and Botanical Heights, cataloging interviews into an online database and organizing large quantities of metadata.• Creating a 3d model using Prof. Hurley’s “Virtual City” simulator to demonstrate physical neighborhood change in areas like Wells Goodfellow where disruption in sewer systems had caused long-term structural decay necessitating the intervention of MSD with Project Clear.

St. Louis

Second formal internship at the State Historical Society of Missouri, St. Louis. This period I was working more in digitization and social media. I began an independent project Open Archive STL: History Through the Lens of Public Policy--where I blogged about historical resources available at the archive which would be of interest to those seeking answers for topical questions relating to policing, housing inequities, urban renewal and civil rights. This evolved to the website (openarchivestl.net) created after the internship. This work was leveraged through an experimental social media campaign using Twitter/Facebook to promote blogs, as well as engage followers with polls and trivia activities. This data was then analyzed for the internship wrap-up, overseen by UMSL History Chair Andrew Hurley. More successfully, my work during this period built upon a project I began as an undergraduate intern, digitizing from microfilm the African American owned, St. Louis Argus Newspaper. Under the mentoring of the office supervisor, Zelli Fischetti, this work was then uploaded to the Internet Archive where it continues to rank highly among black owned newspapers on the platform.

St. Louis

Work here consisted primarily of manuscript collection processing and training in the best practices/ethics of archival work, artifact and photograph handling and document repair. Some of the collections processed include:http://shsmo.org/manuscripts/stlouis/s1114.pdfhttp://shsmo.org/manuscripts/stlouis/s1113.pdf

Master'S Degree, History

Bachelor'S Degree, History