Hannah Peckham is a research administrator at the University of Notre Dame. She lives in Stamford, Connecticut, and has been a member since 2019.
University of Notre Dame
Social Media: hpeckham.com
Alma maters: AB (history and religion), Duke University, 2012; MAR (history), 2017, Yale Divinity School; PhD (history), University of Notre Dame, 2024
Fields of interest: US and the world, higher education, politics, religion
Describe your career path. What led you to where you are today?
I’ve worked in education my entire career, and I’m very interested in helping institutions thrive. I taught history and literature for several years at a prep school in my home state of Arizona. I then studied for my master’s at Yale, and, after taking a gap year during which I worked at Yale Medical School in research administration, I started my doctorate at Notre Dame. I’ve always balanced pursuing my own academic projects with working on the administrative side of the university, including several years where I was a grants consultant within ND’s graduate school. When the opportunity came after graduation last year to start a full-time job in research administration, I took it.
What projects are you currently working on?
I’m currently focused on revising my dissertation for publication with an academic press, and I have a couple articles that have been languishing that I’d like to finally send out. Longer term, I have several book ideas that I’m pursuing, including one on the idea of expertise, from Chautauqua to the present, and another on colonialism, higher education, and interdenominational Christian organizations in the early 20th century.
How have your historical interests evolved across your career?
I’ve been focused on the 20th century, and on religion and politics, since I was in college. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on the Jesus Movement, an eclectic band of evangelicals in the late 1960s–70s that really galvanized the Religious Right later in the decade, and I wrote my master’s thesis on conservative women activists in the 1980s. My dissertation focused on a different group of actors, specifically mainline Protestant missionary-educators and the associations they founded to support American-sponsored universities abroad in the long 20th century, as I found myself becoming fascinated by the transformation of higher education from 1900 to the early 1970s.
What’s the most fascinating thing you’ve ever found at the archives or while doing research?
The Boston Athenaeum, one of the most beautiful places to conduct research in the United States, holds the records of the Attic Club, a group of women in the late 19th century that would sign up to give lectures to others within the group on topics of interest, including travel, politics, and literature. They had a wonderful sense of humor, and I loved discovering a set of cards they made that superimposed their own faces on magazine advertisements.
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