The Eaddo and Peter Kiernan Lecture

Mya Rose Bailey

Preservation Society Curatorial Research Fellow Mya Rose Bailey (they/she) holds a Master’s degree in Decorative Arts, Design History and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Their research highlights the intersections of multisensory anthropology, enslavement, temporality and memory in Black communities.

Before joining the Preservation Society as a Fellow, Bailey received the 2025 William L. Thompson Collections Fellowship with the Jenrette Foundation to expand analyses of plantation landscapes. Additionally, Bailey has broadened interpretations of Black material culture and design within the Museum of Arts and Design at Columbus Circle, Historic Huguenot Street, and most recently the Central Park Conservancy’s digital project: Envisioning Seneca Village.

Megan O’Connell

Megan O’Connell graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in American Studies and Psychology from Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, and earned an MS in Library and Information Science with an archives management concentration from Simmons University, Boston. She served as a manuscript assistant at the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. O’Connell was the digital cataloging intern for the Federal Highway Administration Research Library through the Summer Transportation Internships for Diverse Groups partnership between the Washington Center and the Department of Transportation. She presented research on pedestrian accessibility data availability in the STIPDG summer symposium. She also served as volunteer librarian at the Torit Montessori and as an archives intern at the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation Plans Library.

Grace Acton

Grace Acton, Preservation Society Archival Research Fellow, graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Interdisciplinary Studies from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and earned an MA with Distinction in Digital Humanities from Lancaster University, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal and Iredell Prize. In addition to her coursework, Grace has excelled in roles which require critical thinking and data analysis to address complex collections management problems as a Synergy Collections Management Intern for Bates College Museum of Art, Collections Steward and Digitization Intern for the Maine Maritime Museum, and Dorothy W. Sanborn Summer Intern at the Rufus Porter Museum of Art and Ingenuity.

Acton has also presented at numerous conferences, offering papers which demonstrate her facility with archives management and digital humanities, such as “Into the Zooniverse: Crowdsourcing Data for the Bates Museum of Art Collection” at the 2023 Bates College Mount David Summit; and “Rufus’s Adventures in Cyberspace: Bringing Rufus Porter School Art into the World of Digital History” as a webinar for the Rufus Porter Museum of Art and Ingenuity.

She is a member of the New England Archivists, Society of American Archivists and Digital Preservation Coalition; is conversational in Russian and biliterate in Spanish; and programs in R and HTML/XML.