Collins Library is pleased to welcome new librarian Angela Weaver who will join us September 9, 2019. Angela Weaver served as the Head of the Drama and Art Libraries and the Arts & Humanities Liaison Team leader at the University of Washington. She has worked at UW since 2004 in positions of increasing responsibility and prior to joining the UW Libraries, served as a Fine and Performing Arts Librarian at George Mason University as well as worked as the Coordinator of Library Instruction at the University of Mississippi. Angela not only has a Masters in Library Science but an MFA in Playwriting from UC, San Diego and a BA in Psychology from Duke University. She is an accomplished scholar and professional and some of her contributions include the development of a web page at Rutgers titled Women of Color, Women of Words: African American Female Playwrights, she serves as the moderator for the list serve of African-American Female Playwrights and the African American Theatre and has participated in many diversity initiatives at the University of Washington. She was a panelist at our last Race & Pedagogy Conference contributing to the session: “Public Art and Expression on our Campuses: Context, Content, and Controversy.” In addition, Angela coordinates digital humanities for her team and has recently completed an extensive project associated with Marie Antoinette, looking at different aspects of historical context using the platform of Pressbooks. Angela is a seasoned teacher with an extensive history of working with primary source documents, connecting with students and faculty, with a passion for the subject areas for which she will be responsible for including theatre, art and art history, music, and African American Studies.
Learn more about Angela and her interests:
- What excites you about joining Puget Sound?
Everything! The opportunity to work closely with students in some of my favorite subject areas; to work collaboratively with colleagues to connect users to unique collections in enriching ways; and to integrate my interest in art, crafting, and digital humanities into my daily work. I’m also very excited by the super short commute–I only live about twenty minutes away from campus.
- Tell us a little about your background and interest in the fine and performing arts?
I received a MFA in playwriting before I entered a MLS program, so I always knew I would be a librarian who focused on the performing arts, primarily drama. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with art and art history, design, dance, and music as well.
- Can you tell us about your work with digital humanities?
I was interested in a digital humanities project where I could use my personal research into the world of Marie Antoinette as part of my professional work. I decided on a dramaturgical casebook because students have to do historical/contextual research in order to contribute to the director’s vision on a production and that process lent itself to the platform I was using, Pressbooks. So I enlisted the help of Marie Andrews, an iSchool student, as part of her directed fieldwork assignment. Together we created a dramaturgical casebook for La France Sauvée, an unfinished play by Olympe de Gouges, an eighteenth century French playwright who was sent to the guillotine for treason. I was fortunate enough to find an English language version of the play online, translated by Clarissa Palmer, a scholar who has been translating the works of Olympe de Gouges. She gave me permission to use her text and Marie and I began working to create the casebook for the play. Later, I enlisted the help of a colleague, Deb Raftus, to record the names of the characters, so that users would have an idea of how the names sounded in French. Our goal was to create a model that faculty could use for engaging students with a dramatic text using a digital platform either in a classroom setting or as part of a production.
- Anything else you would like to share?
I am a huge Godzilla fan and own a number of action figures and nearly all of the films (can’t wait to purchase the new film, I’ve seen it twice already). I also love the character Wolverine from the X-Men movies and animated series; in addition to owning the films and a few Funko Pop figurines, I have a Wolverine tattoo on my upper arm based on one of the sumi-e ink drawing promotional posters created for the film The Wolverine (2013), which was set in Japan. If you’ve got an hour to kill, ask me about Logan (2017). Okay, maybe two hours.