The Peabody Ballroom Experience Wins The 2023 NCPH Outstanding Public History Award
Joseph Plaster, director of the Tabb Center, has been named 2023's Small Institution Award Winner by the National Council on Public History for the Peabody Ballroom Experience, an arts and humanities collaboration between JHU and Baltimore's ballroom community.
Read more on the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute website
Spring 2023 Curating Archives Event Series Announced
The Curating Archives event series explores the politics of historical memory and creative approaches to archival collections. Speakers include Jules Gill-Peterson, Chase Joynt, SHAN Wallace, Sandra Eder, and Jeanne Vaccaro.
Read more about the event series
Tabb Center Hosts Trans Oral History Workshop and Public Talk
On December 3, 2022, the Tabb Center hosted Andrea Jenkins and Myrl Beam from the Minneapolis-based Tretter Transgender Oral History Project. Jenkins and Beam held a public workshop, "Doing Trans Oral History," and a public talk, “Building Power Through Documenting Trans Oral Histories.”
Read more at the Johns Hopkins News-Letter
Tabb Center 2022/23 Public Humanities Fellows Announced
The Tabb Center is pleased to announce its inaugural 2022/23 Public Humanities Fellows: Hoesy Corona and Nicoletta Darita de la Brown. Fellows are non-institutionally affiliated organizers, artists, cultural workers, and knowledge-creators who mobilize and creatively interpret materials from the Sheridan Libraries’ rare book, manuscript, and archival collections over the course of a yearlong residency.
Read about the fellows on the Sheridan Libraries Blog
Planning Underway for Third Annual Peabody Ball: April 15, 2023
Four ballroom leaders – Icon Hall of Famer Enrique St. Laurent, Legendary Marco West, Icon Sebastian Escada, and Legendary Rhonda Carr – are in the process of planning the third annual Peabody ball competition, scheduled for April 15, 2023 at the historic George Peabody Library. Each performance category is inspired by rare books and manuscripts from Special Collections.
The Peabody Ballroom Experience is an arts & humanities collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and ballroom, a nearly century-old performance-based culture composed primarily of gay, lesbian, transgender, and gender non-conforming people of color. The project cultivates an exchange of knowledge and creativity between the university and the ballroom scene.
Visit the Peabody Ballroom Experience website
Tabb Center Librarian Heidi Herr Curates Rare Comic Books
Johns Hopkins Magazine profiled Heidi Herr’s curatorial work with mid-century romance comic books in its Fall 2022 edition. Herr, Tabb Center Librarian for Student Engagement, began acquiring comic books during the summer of 2021, amassing a collection that contains over 300 issues. Herr and her students drew on the collection in spring 2022 to curate an online exhibition and an exhibition at the Brody Learning Commons. Herr will teach “Romancing the Comic Book” in January 2023 through the Program in Museums and Society.
Read the profile
Tabb Center Fellow Researches Baltimore Trans Histories
In the summer of 2022, Tabb Center fellow Sophia Lola (JHU 2022) researched the impact of the 2015 Baltimore Uprising on the city’s trans organizing. Lola’s recordings and transcripts are part of a growing Baltimore LGBTQ oral history collection archived by the Sheridan Libraries.
Read Lola’s blog post about her findings, based on oral histories with four local trans organizers.
Tabb Center Postdoctoral Fellows Announced
The Johns Hopkins Society of Fellows in the Humanities named its first cohort of nine fellows in May 2022. Two fellows are affiliated with the Tabb Center: Jo Giardini, who will complete a public-facing fellowship at the Tabb Center and the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality; and Spencer Hupp, who will complete a fellowship with a focus on the collections for Writing Seminars.
Read about the Society of Fellows program on the Hub