Hello! My current professional, creative and recent academic life:
“Maybe my passion is nothing special, but at least it’s mine.”― Tove Jansson, Travelling Light
“PhDs are information specialists.” — Leonard Cassuto
- I earned my PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in American Studies in late 2021. My digital dissertation project, “Changing Lanes: A Reanimation Of Shell Oil’s Carol Lane,” explores a public relations campaign led by mid-20th century women’s travel director for Shell Oil, Carol Lane. It involves prosopography (group biography), as well as distant and close textual analysis of data and media. I also earned a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from UNC.
- “Changing Lanes” was added to two lists of innovative dissertations! https://www.humanitiescareers.pitt.edu/innovative-dissertations and https://nextgendiss.hcommons.org/examples/ and have presented widely on the ins/outs of pursuing an alternate form of scholarship.
- “I have held positions as an audiovisual archivist, consultant, fellow, volunteer, adjunct faculty, exhibit developer, and researcher for a variety of commercial and public institutions such as the Pacific Film Archive, Women In Film Foundation, UCLA, Academy Film Archive, Discovery Communications, Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, UNC, the Southern Oral History Program, State Archives of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, and the NEH-funded Tribesourcing Southwest Film project. Last year I was also project manager of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ (National Film Preservation Board funded) “Capturing Changing Technologies In Oral Interviews”.
- Current activities:
- as co-founder of and archivist for the nonprofit Deserted Films with Devin Orgeron.
- screenings around Palm Springs
- coordinating Home Movie Day events
- giving talks and mentoring
- working on a future iteration of my dissertation,
- taking Polaroids, digital photographs, 360-degree VR images, make videos and more, weekly, if not daily.
- as co-founder of and archivist for the nonprofit Deserted Films with Devin Orgeron.
- I am of Yankton descent.
- I am a little obsessed with footnotes and annotations,
- and this quotation by Cliff Kuhn from “A Historian’s Perspective on Archives and the Documentary Process,” The American Archivist 59, no. 3 (Society of American Archivists, Summer 1996), 312-320:
CONTACT: msdollman [at] gmail.com