Researcher Profile

Faith, Athletics, and the Archives: An Interview with Dr. Paul Putz

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This past October, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections welcomed Dr. Paul Putz for the annual Archival Research Lecture, where he presented “Sports and the Stories We Tell: Evangelical Identity and the Christian Athlete Movement in America.” This month, we feature an interview with Dr. Putz that dives into his research at the intersection of American evangelicalism and big-time sports.

When and how were you first introduced to Wheaton Archives & Special Collections?

When you study American evangelicalism, the archives at Wheaton are a go-to destination. During my dissertation research, I looked to see what holdings Wheaton had related to sports and Christianity, and I found that it had several significant collections. I applied for a travel grant that allowed me to make the trip up from Texas. Getting to spend a week at Wheaton going through archival material was truly a joy, and it shaped my dissertation and then my book project in significant ways, too.

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Life-writing and the Archives: A Conversation with Lucy S. R. Austen

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Wheaton Archives & Special Collections is pleased to announce that writer Lucy S. R. Austen will be our speaker for the annual Fall Archival Research Lecture! In anticipation of her upcoming visit, this month we feature a conversation with Lucy about her time researching for Elisabeth Elliot: A Life, her biography of missionary, speaker, and public evangelical Elisabeth Elliot, published by Crossway last June.

When and how were you first introduced to Archives & Special Collections?

I actually discovered the Archives & Special Collections through a Google search! In 2009, I was working on a mini-biography of missionary and author Elisabeth Elliot for a high-school English textbook featuring American Christian writers, and when I went looking for critical biographies of Elliot to learn more about her life, I was startled to discover that there were no full-length biographies of her in existence. Essentially the only published information about her life dealt with a small portion of the decade she spent in Ecuador as a young woman, working to reduce unwritten languages to writing for the purposes of Bible translation. In the process of digging around for any source material I could lay my hands on, I discovered the webpage for Elliot’s papers at Wheaton. I wasn’t able to visit the Archives at that time, but I relied on the biographical information and the list of “Exceptional Items” from the page for her papers, along with other sources, as I completed my project.

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Faith, Memory, and Archives: An Interview with Devin Manuzullo-Thomas

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Last September, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections hosted Dr. Devin Manzullo-Thomas for the annual Archival Research Lecture, where he presented “Exhibiting Evangelicalism: Exploring the History of Christian Museums in the United States.” This month, we feature an interview with Dr. Manzullo-Thomas, delving into his archival exploration of how evangelical communities engage with and commemorate their histories.

When and how were you first introduced to Archives & Special Collections?

I first visited the Archives and Special Collections at Wheaton in 2013 or 2014, to conduct research related to my denomination, the Brethren in Christ Church. (Several Brethren in Christ leaders are either alumni of Wheaton College or are otherwise represented in Archives & Special Collections materials.) While there, I also visited the Billy Graham Museum on the first floor of Billy Graham Hall, and my interest was piqued. Because of my training as an archivist/public historian and my scholarly work on the history of my own denomination, I’ve long been interested in how religious communities present their history in museums and historic sites. I started wondering: “How have other evangelical groups and institutions represented the past in public spaces?”

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Unveiling the Secrets of Fan Letters: A Conversation with David Reagles

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This May, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections talks with historian David Reagles, author of Searching for God in Britain and Beyond: Reading Letters to Malcolm Muggeridge, 1966-1982, about his journey through the vast collection of fan letters held in the Malcolm Muggeridge Papers.

When and how were you first introduced to Archives & Special Collections? What kinds of research projects have led you to the Archives’ collections?

I first stepped on Wheaton’s beautiful campus as a graduate student in 2011. Two moments really stand out in my mind when I think about the archives during those life-changing years. The first took place during a seminar on the history of evangelicalism in the Atlantic world. It was a wonderful eye-opening class, which included among other things a jaunt to the archives. There Bob Shuster masterfully guided us through proper archival procedures and etiquette, as well as offered an overview of the kinds of rich materials available. As we walked into the classroom, he had placed one or more archival boxes at each seat. After a short lecture, he asked us to open our materials and to try as best as we could to tell a “story” of the box. I recall pouring through the contents and feeling a kind of weird combination of confusion, excitement, anticipation, uncertainty, and discomfort. I loved it. That short lesson really affirmed the kind of joy-filled experience archival research could be.

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Research by Proxy: In the Manuscripts Reading Room with Chelsey Geisz

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While Wheaton Archives & Special Collections continually adds new digital content to our online archival photograph database and oral history interview collections, most of the thousands of pages of records in our collections can only be accessed in the Manuscripts Reading Room. We frequently receive inquiries from researchers who are unable to travel to use the collections, and so keep a list of local researchers who provide research and scanning services to distance patrons as “proxy researchers.” This week, we sat down with Chelsey Geisz for a behind-the-scenes look at proxy research in the Archives.

Chelsey Geisz is in her final semester of Wheaton College Graduate School’s MA in Systematic Theology. For the last year and a half, she has also served as a proxy researcher and a research assistant for a major College history project. Because of her work as a research assistant, she has the dubious distinction of likely being the only person alive who has read every Wheaton student publication from 1860-2000!

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Stories from the Archives: An Interview with Dr. Aaron Griffith

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At the end of September, Wheaton Archives & Special Collections hosted historian Dr. Aaron Griffith for the 2022 Archival Research Lecture, “American Evangelicals and the Making of Modern Prison Ministry.” For those who were unable to attend the lecture, this month we feature an interview with Dr. Griffith about the many visits he made to the Archives during his research on prison ministry and evangelical attitudes to criminal justice.

When and how were you first introduced to Archives & Special Collections?

Believe it or not, when I was a Wheaton undergraduate student (and a philosophy major, not history), I had very little idea of the Archives’ existence or purpose (though I remember a friend telling me that the third floor of the Billy Graham Center was a nice, quiet place to hang out). It wasn’t until much later, as I started getting interested in American religious history during my M.Div. program, that I realized that the Archives was an absolute goldmine for the study of evangelicalism. My first research trip to the Archives was when I accompanied Grant Wacker there for a day, to assist him with some research for his book on Billy Graham. We were both in Wheaton for a conference, and he asked me to help him read through some letters to Billy Graham and categorize them. I remember feeling energized by this work, and I think it was this experience that really sealed the deal for me in terms of getting me excited about historical research and showing me how important the Archives is for understanding American evangelicalism.

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Getting Lost in the Archives: A Conversation with Dr. Amber Thomas Reynolds

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Thomas Headshot

This September, we sat down with Dr. Amber Thomas Reynolds—Wheaton College Grad School alumna and archives enthusiast—and plied her with questions about the challenges, joys, and adventures of archival research. A longtime patron of the Billy Graham Center Archives, Dr. Reynolds relied heavily on our resources for both her MA thesis at Wheaton College and PhD dissertation at the University of Edinburgh. Currently serving as a guest assistant professor at Wheaton College, Dr. Reynolds can be found in the history department, where she is teaching World History Since 1500 and US Pop Culture Since 1900 this semester.

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