Please join the Conference of Quaker Historians and Archivists (CQHA) on three days in June, for a set of virtual sessions foregrounding expanded approaches to the study of Quaker history and culture. Registration for the June sessions is now open. Sessions are free to attend but you must be registered via Eventbrite to access the Zoom details.
CQHA’s June sessions have been chosen with a methodological focus in mind. The sessions are scheduled for June 14, 22, and 28, each at 12:30-2:00 pm EDT. They are:
Researching Quaker History Online: A WorkshopTuesday, June 14, 2022 | 12:30-2:00 pm EDT
Presenters: Mary Crauderueff, Susan Garfinkel, Emily Higgs Kopin
Research in the digital age increasingly requires new tools, methods, and sources. Presenters in this hands-on session will demonstrate some of the most useful tools for conducting Quaker history research online. Speakers will cover scanned Quaker meeting records available through Ancestry.com; architectural survey of Quaker meeting houses in the Historic American Buildings Survey; contemporary born-digital online resource; and, archived websites in the Internet Archive.
History from Things: Quaker Material and Visual CultureWednesday, June 22, 2022 | 12:30-2:00 pm EDT
Presenters: Laura Keim, Isabella Rosner, Anne Verplanck
Attention to material and visual culture extends our ability to understand the past as lived experience. Presenters in this session share case studies from their research that profile material and visual culture artifacts and methods to shed new light on Quaker history: Quaker material life at Philadelphia’s Stenton, home to six generations of the Logan family; a seventeenth-century needlework suite from London’s Shacklewell School; and, applying methodological tools for interpreting Quaker portraiture.
Quakers in the Field: Ethnographic and Oral HistoriesTuesday, June 28, 2022 | 12:30-2:00 pm EDT
Presenters: Alex Primm, Rebecca Hamilton-Levi, Oscar Lagusa Malande
Oral histories, interviews, and ethnographic research present rich opportunities to work closely with living informants to collect and preserve first-hand accounts of recent and current events. Presenters in this session share background and methods used in contemporary contexts: oral history projects including early work with elder Friends and current research in the Ozarks; the QuakerSpeak bi-weekly video series featuring first-person narratives by and for contemporary Friends; and, ethnographic fieldwork among Kenyan Quakers in the post-missionary/colonial era.
Please see CQHA’s website for full information, or contact the organizers by email at [email protected].
The Middlesex Centre Archives (MCA) is pleased to announce receipt of a $28,500 grant through the Library and Archives Canada’s Documentary Communities Heritage Program (DHCP). This grant will support the professional repair, cleaning and digitisation of early records and photographs from the businesses, industry and personal records of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and the Marsh Store (1862-1955). The original fragile records will be preserved meeting archival standards, and the digitised records will become accessible to the public. MCA is one of 11 recipients in Ontario under this year’s DCHP grants.
Join us Saturday, May 28th, for the final lecture in CFHA’s Quakerism in the Atlantic World series. The series has provided a wonderful opportunity to gather over the past five months to hear speakers present on their research and engage in the broader Quaker scholarly community. CFHA is pleased to welcome Dr. Robynne Rogers Healey and Erica Canela who will present on their chapter, “‘Our Dear Friend Has Departed This Life”: Memorial Testimony Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century.”
Robynne Rogers Healey is a professor of history and the co-director of the Gender Studies Institute at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada. She is associate editor (history) of the Brill series Research Perspectives in Quaker Studies, convenes the Conference of Quaker Historians and Archivists, and serves as publications chair for the Canadian Friends Historical Association. Her publications include From Quaker to Upper Canadian: Faith and Community Among Yonge Street Friends, 1801–1850 (2006); Quaker Studies: An Overview, The Current State of the Field (2018, with C. Wess Daniels and Jon Kershner); Quakerism in the Atlantic World, 1690–1830 (2021), and many articles and chapters in the field of Quaker history, especially related to eighteenth-century topics and the evolution of the peace testimony. She is currently working on two projects: a small monograph on Quaker quietism and a collaborative project on nineteenth-century Quaker women.
Erica Canela is a final-year part-time PhD candidate in religion and theology at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her thesis is titled “Quakers and Religious Identity in Herefordshire and Worcestershire: From Civil Wars to the Eve of Toleration, c. 1640–1688.” She is the recipient of several awards for her work in Quaker history, including the David Adshead Award and the Gerald Hodgett Award. Her article “The Commendable Life and Noble Death of Humphrey Smith” was recently published in Quaker Studies, and she is writing two volumes for the Brill Research Perspectives in Quaker Studies series on early Quakerism.
Rosalind Johnson is visiting fellow at the University of Winchester, UK. She works as a researcher for a county history project in Wiltshire and previously taught at the universities of Winchester and Chichester. Her principal research interests lie in the field of religious history in the long eighteenth century, particularly the history of Quakers. She is currently working on the history of Quakers and marriage, and on the history of Quakers in the city of Salisbury, UK, and is particularly interested in the position of women in religious groups, in expressions of popular piety, and in examining how nonconformists interacted with their conformist neighbours. Her publications include “The Case of the Distracted Maid: Healing and Cursing in Early Quaker history,” Quaker Studies (June 2016) and “The Lives of Ejected Hampshire Ministers After 1662,” Southern History (2014). She is currently researching the extent of Quaker faithfulness to the tithe testimony.
Erin Bell is a senior lecturer in the Department of History, College of Arts, at the University of Lincoln, UK. She has a particular interest in the different experiences of male and female Friends, and in considering how mainstream attitudes towards other religious communities related to and informed attitudes toward and depictions of Quakers. She also works on the representation of the past in factual television programming and is a member of the Lincolnshire Area Meeting. In addition to her book History on Television, co-authored with Ann Gray (2013), she has published widely on representations of Quakers in popular culture and the law in the early modern period. She is currently working, with Richard Allen, on Quaker Networks and Moral Reform in the North East of England.
Jon Mitchell was awarded a PhD in 2018 in Theology and Religious Studies from the School of Philosophy, Religion and the History of Science, University of Leeds, UK. His dissertation was titled 
Geoffrey Plank is a professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia, UK. His research examines early modern debates over conquest, settlement, warfare, and slavery in the context of transatlantic imperialism. He is interested in the ways in which the European colonization of the Americas affected ordinary lives, and has studied a variety of groups, including French- and English-speaking colonists, Scottish Highlanders, Quakers, and Native Americans. His books include John Woolman’s Path to the Peaceable Kingdom: A Quaker in the British Empire (2012); Quakers and Abolition (2014, with Brycchan Carey); and Quakers and Native Americans (2019, with Ignacio Gallup-Diaz). He is also the author of many chapters and articles on eighteenth-century Quakerism. 
Dr. Richard C. Allen is a Hon. Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University, Canberra, and a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University. He is also a former Reader in Early Modern Cultural History at the University of South Wales and currently supervises doctoral students at the University of Birmingham. A former Fulbright Professor, he has published extensively on Quakerism, migration, and identity.