The Project Team - ReConnect/ReCollect

A group of people standing in a picnic shelter laughing.

Project co-directors Ricky Punzalan and Deirdre de la Cruz in the stacks of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Michigan, 2022.

Ricky Punzalan (School of Information) brings years of experience working with Native American archival collections and community consultancy to the project; his special relationship with Michigan’s Philippine collections goes back to his dissertation research on the Worcester photographic collection. Deirdre de la Cruz (History and Asian Languages and Cultures) is a historian and anthropologist of the Philippines; she has made extensive use of U-M’s Philippine collections in her undergraduate teaching, most recently through Michigan in the World, an undergraduate internship program that developed an online exhibit about the historical relationship between the Philippines and the U-M.

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“The composition of our team is unique in the way it crosses disciplinary and professional boundaries: it includes leading archivists, collections managers, LSA and SI research faculty, and graduate students.”

Ricky Punzalan, Co-PI

Dr. Deirdre de la Cruz

Dr. Ricardo “Ricky” Punzalan

Madeline Bacolor

Madeline Bacolor is a 2021 graduate of the University of Michigan’s Program in the Environment. She is also a Filipina American who studied Philippine history and Filipino American culture during her undergraduate career. Her interests are in community engagement, accessibility to and ethics of colonial materials, and Filipinos in urban spaces. She wrote her honors thesis about Manilatown in San Francisco and its residents’ struggle against urban renewal.

Dr. Kerstin Barndt

(she/her)

Dr. Kerstin Barndt, Associate Professor of German Studies, is a museum and literary scholar who studies the history of museums and exhibition culture in Europe and globally. She engages with exhibitions across museum genres to analyze their narratives, collection histories, memory politics, and changing place within society. Barndt is the co-editor of Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories. Narrating the Past for Present and Future and currently at work on Museums in Ruins, a book that probes the intersections between the histories of ruins, museums, deindustrialization, and decolonization. From 2020-2023, Barndt directed the Museum Studies Program, where she brought ReConnect/ReCollect’s decolonial and reparative framework to bear on the program’s curriculum and programing. Barndt has also co-curated a number of exhibition projects in Berlin, Dresden, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor, where Object Lessons: Reconstructing Museum Histories at Michigan showed at the U-M Museum of Natural History in 2017.

At ReCollect/ReConnect, Barndt worked with the team on community outreach, programing, and the artist residencies.

Nancy Bartlett

Nancy Bartlett is Associate Director of the Bentley Historical Library. A Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, she has written and edited extensively on archives and architecture, the cultural conditions of archives, and the history of archival principles including archival provenance. She was a member of the Bentley Historical Library research team investigating “Engaging the Archives: New Partnerships and Understandings of Teaching and Learning with Primary Sources.” This five-year project, begun in 2015, was made possible by the University of Michigan Third Century Initiative. A resulting publication, titled “Teaching Undergraduates with Archives,” is co-edited by Nancy Bartlett, Elizabeth Gadelha, and Cinda Nofziger. The volume is available from Michigan Publishing. Bartlett has curated exhibitions including “Constructing Gender: The Origins of Michigan’s Union and League,” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and lectured on Michigan modernism in architecture. She was the Bentley Historical Library administrator of a joint seminar held annually, from 1999 to 2015, with the State Archives Administration of China.

Isabella Buzynski

Isabella Buzynski is a second year Master of Information student at the University of Michigan with a focus in archival studies. She has contributed to a number of digital humanities projects related to American social and political history, urbanism, migration, and religion. Her most recent work is featured in “Hold Me Up”: Narrative Histories of Black Community Building in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, 1910s-1970s. Drawing on this interdisciplinary experience, she is interested in building connections among memory institutions and communities to support ethical, culturally sensitive archival practice and public engagement.

Alyssa Caldito

Alyssa Caldito is a third-year undergraduate student at the U-M School of Public Health. She is studying Community and Global Public Health with minors in Asian/Pacific Islander American (A/PIA) Studies and Community Action and Social Change. As a first-generation Filipino American, she has always sought to involve herself in the AAPI community organizations. She is the Co-President of the Filipino American Student Association at U-M, a former intern for The American Citizens for Justice, and was a Tayo Fellow for the Filipino Young Leaders Program in Summer 2023. Through her work within the AAPI community, including with ReConnect/ReCollect, Alyssa strives empower her community in the fight for social justice and health equity.

Martha O’Hara Conway

(she/her)

Martha O’Hara Conway is Director of the Special Collections Research Center in the University of Michigan Library. Martha has curated several exhibitions, including Storied Acquisitions: Highlights from the University of Michigan Library Collections, and authored or contributed to a number of publications, including The Practice, Power, and Promise of Archival Collections Assessment and Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections, which consists of a framework and a suite of tools that support the operationalization of an ethical, informed, and resource-sensitive approach to acquiring, managing, and caring for collections.

Dr. Deirdre de la Cruz

Dr. Deirdre de la Cruz, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Associate Professor of History, is an historian and cultural anthropologist of the Philippines, with an interest in the transformation of religious sensibilities, beliefs, and phenomena in the 19th and 20th centuries. Specifically, her work examines different varieties of Filipino Christianity through their material, textual, and technological mediations. Her approach to these subjects departs from the premise that the Philippines is a highly productive site for comparative and interdisciplinary inquiry, and thus her work situates the Philippines and Filipinos in relationship to other worlds and communities—be they defined by empire, Christian mission, or diaspora—in ways that unsettle claims often made about Filipino culture and history.

In the last few years, Deirdre has turned her attention to the vast collections of Philippine materials at the University of Michigan. In 2019, she directed a group of undergraduate students in an immersive, eight-week research fellowship at the Bentley Historical Library which produced a website of student-authored essays on the colonial relationship between the Philippines and the University of Michigan. This experience led her to an on-going exploration of related questions and concerns, including affect as archival object and archival method, translingualism in the imperial archives, and how to decenter the US in US empire studies.

Robert Diaz

(he/him)

Robert Diaz is a doctoral candidate whose research focuses on the confluence of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific World, scientific expertise, and lived imperialism of youths in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His current work explores how youths in the Philippines, Hawai'i, and Guam interpreted and played active roles in the American colonial project, along with the ways that discourses of childhood shaped American colonial policy between between 1890 and 1946. His primary contribution to ReConnect/ReCollect's work on reparative description was the Glossary of Harmful Terms.

Project Contributions

Glossary of Harmful Terms 5

Bibliography 5

Paulina Fraser

(she/her)

Dr. Paulina Fraser is currently a visiting research scholar with the community-focused research center known as CREATE (Community-Based Research on Equity, Activism, and Transformative Education), where she contributes to innovative work to advance and reimagine more equitable educational opportunities. Paulina has a diverse experience of working in different educational and community-based settings providing pedagogical support and assessment, facilitation, and curriculum development. She has taught in both K-12 and postsecondary settings, teaching courses such as multicultural education, women and gender studies, oral history, and critical writing.

Paulina received her Ph.D. from the School of Education at U-M in Educational Studies. Originally from California, Paulina received her M.A.Ed with a concentration in Equity and Social Justice at San Francisco State University. As a first-generation Filipina American, Paulina’s interests include critical representation, (counter)storytelling, and de/anti-colonial approaches to education. Her dissertation centered around Filipino efforts of knowledge preservation and their collaborative partnerships between academic and community organizations, with the goal of exposing and educating broader audiences to the contributions of Filipinx/a/o Americans. Paulina’s primary contribution to ReConnect/ReCollect’s work on reparative description was the Educational Toolkit.

Chad Kamen

Chad Kamen is a first year Master of Information student at the University of Michigan. Through pursuing the School of Information’s digital curation track, he hopes to focus his studies on how community-centered archives develop reparative classification and metadata practices. Before coming to Michigan, Chad worked on a variety of different archival projects at the University of Virginia, including a year-long collaborative effort to build an exhibition of the University’s multitude of queer histories. He is excited to carry this experience forward as a research assistant for the ReConnect/ReCollect team.

Project Contributions

Glossary of Harmful Terms 5

Ella Li

Ella Li is a second-year Master of Information student at the University of Michigan. By pursuing the School of Information’s data track and research track, she aims to concentrate her studies on social justice, with a particular emphasis on health justice and data justice for marginalized populations. Currently, she is working on her thesis, which explores how the LGBTQ+ community presents themselves in online and offline spaces. Ella is passionate about participating in activities and projects related to social change and social justice. With a strong foundation in mathematics from her undergraduate studies and computing skills, she has had the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Ricky Punzalan on the Reparative Description in Data Curation project. Now, she is honored to join the ReConnect/ReCollect team as a research assistant, where she will work on developing and improving an automation tool to detect harmful terms in finding aids.

Jim Moss

(he/him)

Jim Moss is a collections manager at the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA). Jim engages students and faculty through object-based learning. He connects community members and researchers with the Museums’s cultural collections. His work in the digital humanities seeks to expand awareness and access to museum collections and documentation through respectful and ethical curation, while attempting to address colonial and institutional harm caused by past and present curation practices.

Emily Na

Emily Na is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the contemporary memory of slavery through literature, visual culture, and museums. Her dissertation, currently titled “Beyond the Plantation Fixation: Public Sites of Slavery and Their Rival Geographies,” is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the relationship between fictional narratives of slavery and public plantation sites. She is excited to bring her background in the history of slavery and issues of redress to this project on the collective recognition of the university’s harm toward Filipino collections. Emily’s work has been featured in the James Baldwin Review and online with Public Books.

Project Contributions

Glossary of Harmful Terms 5

Sony Prosper

Sony Prosper is a Ph.D. in Information student at the University of Michigan. He is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Museum Studies. His interests are broadly the social, cultural, and historical contexts of intangible cultural heritage, archival practices, recordkeeping practices, museum practices, and technology use, particularly in the U.S. and the Caribbean. He is currently interested in examining two research threads. The first is how members and volunteers of nontraditional, community-based, and grassroots archives conceptualize records and how these conceptualizations inform archival programs and practices in the U.S. The second is the repatriation of cultural heritage material, particularly to Haiti.

Before being a Ph.D. student, Sony worked at the University of Virginia Library, where his work included collection development, exhibition curation, instruction, and outreach. He holds a Master of Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University (formerly known as Simmons College).

Dr. Ricardo Punzalan

Ricky Punzalan (he/him) is an associate professor at the School of Information and director of the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan. A scholar of archives and digital curation, he recently has been inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. He studies community access and use of anthropological data in archives, as well as the digitization of ethnographic records held in libraries, archives, and museums. His research has established and shaped practices of virtual reunification and digital repatriation of cultural heritage collections. To do this work, he designs and carries out community-based, participatory research projects, which incorporate the perspectives of cultural heritage stakeholders beyond academic researchers. His scholarship has brought to the fore the critical challenges faced by underserved and Indigenous communities and has created dialogs between communities and cultural institutions. He co-directs “ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan,” a project that develops the framework for, and the practice of, reparative work for Philippine collections acquired by the university during the US colonial period. He is currently co-chair of the Archival Repatriation Committee of the Society of American Archivists and on the Board of Trustees of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.

Sara Reed

Sara Reed is a fourth year undergraduate studying anthropological archaeology. Reed is an honors student with a primary interest in early civilization and state formation. Currently, her research focus centers on the development of the Imerina Kingdom of Madagascar, with the aim of reevaluating traditional models of state formation against the kingdom’s 18th century expansion. As an archaeologist, Reed is interested in the ethics of collection and curation, and is excited to apply her archaeological a

Kristi Rhead

(she/her)

Kristi Rhead is a Ph.D. Student in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on media, identity, and public history/anthropology on the island of Réunion, located in the Southern Indian Ocean and fully administratively integrated into France and the European Union. As the Project Coordinator for ReCollect/ ReConnect, Kristi has been especially excited to make connections between French and US island empires and to work to build resources that communicate research to audiences beyond academia. Before becoming a Ph.D. student, Kristi received her M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and her B.A. in International Studies and French from Johns Hopkins University.

Project Contributions

Exploring Ethical Stewardship of Human Remains5

Nick Trudeau

Nick Trudeau is a PhD candidate in the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. His research focuses on social change and the exchange of culture between Indigenous populations and Europeans in the Great Lakes Region during the 14th-17th centuries. He has also used his work to teach communities about their connections to and responsibilities toward Indigenous archaeological sites as a means to repair relationships between descendant Native American communities and the people living on their ancestral homelands. As a collections assistant for the ReConnect/ReCollect project he is excited to help build and repair relationships between the University of Michigan and the Filipino community.

Project Contributions

Exploring Ethical Stewardship of Human Remains5

Sophie Wolf

Sophie Wolf is a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Michigan majoring in Anthropology, Spanish, and Political Science. She is interested in how cultural variation can influence human perception of truth, logic, and time, and plans to write an LSA Honors thesis on the topic next year. She is thrilled to be a part of ReConnect/ReCollect as a research assistant working out of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, and is particularly interested in creating solutions to increase accessibility to the museum collections for use as an active resource.