The Perry Project
Preserving the heart of the Perry House community.
The Preserving the Histories of Perry House Oral History Project, affectionately called the Perry Project, memorializes the oftenoverlooked contributions of Black and Latinx students, faculty, and staff by officially archiving their lived experiences in Bryn Mawr’s institutional memory. The initiative is funded by the College through a Libraries and Information Technology Services (LITS) grant.
The team was formed in pre-COVID times as a response to a call to action from alum Rachel Awkward ’09, who, in June 2019, realized the College had no way for her and her peers to have their specific stories and history with the College preserved. First two, now four specially trained student researchers have led the charge, guiding and grounding the research and interviews behind the project and helping to document and preserve the heart of the Perry community.
Something we discussed a lot, particularly in the planning stages, was the difference between engaging with stories and merely collecting them. It quickly became clear that just as past students’ experiences did not occur in a vacuum, this research must not be done without proper attention to historical contexts, individual experience, equity, inclusion, healing justice, and radical imagination. We, the researchers, are thus doubly qualified to do this work, both through the deep examinations we have conducted into the official BMC archives and through our identities as students, experiencing, to quote interviewer Aaliyah Joseph ’22, “the apparatus of Bryn Mawr.”
Working on this project is fulfilling and, at times, challenging due to the tensions created by archival work as a means of preservation—the tensions between honoring what was considered valueless, rewriting institutional memory by adding these stories to the College Archives, and contributing to the idea that they and the people they represent must be contained and controlled by the institution for them to be deemed meaningful. One way we disrupt this is through utilizing oral histories, a method often overlooked or scorned due to a purposefully damaging reputation of being less “true” and less “real” than written history. Oral histories allow interviewees to have their stories told in their own voices; they allow people to speak for themselves.
In the moment of conducting the interviews, we have felt inspired, angry, disappointed, connected, appreciative, in tune, and mobilized. On the one hand, it has been inspiring and comforting to hear about the different communities that Black and Latinx folks have formed and sustained. These communities have existed between staff and students, Bryn Mawr and Haverford College Black and Latinx student leagues, faculty and students, and queer students of color. Thus, interviews have occasionally been spent laughing at inside jokes and in awe of the heartwarming traditions of said communities.
On the other hand, it has been disheartening to hear the recurring brunt of institutional racism on the lives of students before, during, and after they arrive on campus. And, so, interviewing has often felt like looking in the mirror, transcending any years passed. Yet, we have heard a complex and unique story from each interviewee, all of whom have left an inescapable impact on the College. With the publication of the project in 2021, this impact will be felt by everyone who listens to the stories of the Perry community and its descendants.
This issue of the Alumnae Bulletin presents reflections from Black alumnae/i and students spanning 65 years in the life of the College.
