By Bailey Meyerhoff
In the Spring/Summer semester of 2023 I took an internship practicum course at Wayne State University that connected me with the Lady’s Museum Project. While I had originally been primarily interested in taking the practicum to build professionalization skills that would make me a more experienced and valuable candidate for future work, I felt genuine excitement after reading the project description for the Lady’s Museum Project. It aims to make the periodical work of Charlotte Lennox, an understudied eighteenth-century woman writer, more accessible to undergraduates, academics, and the general public. The digital humanities project is feminist in its aims and its practice: uninterested in confining Lennox’s work to the academic realm, it calls for volunteers of all backgrounds to help them reach their goal of expanding access to Lennox and her magazine, the Lady’s Museum (1760–61). In this way, even as I did, of course, gain the professionalization skills and CV credit that I sought, my work with the Lady’s Museum Project transcended the practical realm—during my two and a half months with them, I felt myself a contributor to a project doing essential feminist work.
My goal with this reflective piece is to detail my experience working with the Lady’s Museum Project, focusing particularly on the production process for each critical introduction that I crafted as well as the advantageous skills that I’ve gained from this work.
My professionalization skills have developed as one of the most practical takeaways from interning. I came to the project with previous experience writing a critical introduction for a digital humanities project as an undergraduate student, but that had been a one-off experience; the bulk of my time working with the Lady’s Museum Project, on the other hand, was spent preparing for or writing critical introductions, an activity that has already impacted my ability to concisely synthesize texts in a manner suitable for a general audience.
Our process for crafting these essays was well-organized: first, I would choose a topic related to Lennox or the Lady’s Museum that I was interested in (one of the critical introduction suggestions on the website, or something entirely different that I was interested in exploring). Kelly and Karenza would provide me with a reading list composed of texts that would equip me with contextual knowledge of the discourse surrounding the topic as well as sources to draw from in the introductions themselves. I was encouraged to follow my own interests in the service of producing content for the project, which was one of the best aspects of the internship from both a standpoint of enjoyment and one of practicality. For instance, as someone interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in ecocriticism, working on “Charlotte Lennox: Eco-Feminist?” provided me with the chance not only to immerse myself in eighteenth-century scholarship related to ecocriticism (undoubtedly essential for my future studies), but also to publish work relevant to my future field that I can use as a writing sample in my doctoral applications.
Other critical introductions that I wrote include “Lennox and ‘Female Education’” and “Women’s Educational Politics in Eighteenth-Century Periodicals.” I started the production process for each critical introduction by completing readings that Kelly and Karenza provided me with, noting along the way what I felt to be the most essential strands of thought throughout the various readings. Once finished, I’d work on an outline for the critical introduction that would detail what I felt to be the most pertinent details from the readings, and Kelly and Karenza would give me feedback and help me work out the contours of my ideas for each piece through discussion. Feedback was, of course, an essential component of the critical introduction writing process, and I received it in relation to my outlines and drafts; I’m no stranger to receiving feedback on my work and tailoring it accordingly, but I think that editorial meetings with Kelly and Karenza to discuss what ideas each piece would include was essential in helping me shape my thoughts on each topic as well as how they were manifest within the introductions themselves. Additionally, my experience with receiving their feedback has helped prepare me for future work with editors of various genres, since I am now more capable of fitting my work to the goals of the publication that I am working with.
The critical introductions are meant to introduce and contextualize their topics for a general/undergraduate audience and are, as a result, only about 1,000 words long. It was crucial for me to be selective about the information that I would include within each critical introduction. As a graduate student, my writing assignments tend to require much greater length than that of critical introductions, and I struggled at the beginning of my internship with narrowing my work down to fit that constraint. Not only this, but the work of synthesizing an array of scholarly secondary sources to introduce a topic to a general audience was a feat in itself, requiring (again) much considered selection.
By the end of my semester working with the Lady’s Museum Project, I became accustomed to the structure of writing a critical introduction, and I believe this to be my greatest takeaway. The repeated experience of writing critical introductions—working within restrictive length constraints and writing specifically to introduce topics to a general audience—has enhanced my flexibility as a writer. As I move forward in my professional and scholarly pursuits, my invaluable experiences with this project will continue to increase my adaptability as a writer and provide me with examples of my own published writing.