The Legacy of Unwritten Histories

By Stephanie Pettigrew

When I first started my PhD in 2013, I left a very comfortable, established community of support in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, made up of friends I had known since middle school, of family. I had a general sense of knowing my community and being known by it.

When I arrived in Fredericton, I found myself not only in a strange place, but without any pre-existing community support. It was really my only complaint about those early years at UNB. My mentors, Drs Elizabeth Mancke and Greg Kennedy, were amazing and would stop at nothing to support me, but they were not the peer network I increasingly craved. The grad student network at UNB was scattered, incohesive, almost ephemeral. I knew my peers existed on campus, sometimes I’d even get the odd beer with one or two of them, but they did not exist as a supportive network. 

I had friends doing their grad studies at other universities who had the sort of peer support network I wanted, and I was downright envious. I missed having that sense of community.

As I started attending conferences and establishing a network outside of my own university, I began to grow more and more of that community I was looking for. Enter Andrea, and Unwritten Histories.

This is weird to say considering how much of an impact Unwritten Histories ended up having on my career and subsequently my life, but I actually do not remember how Andi (Andrea Eidinger) and I were first introduced. The blog was already well established by the time we met. But I don’t have a concrete memory. It would not surprise me if Andi remembers this (note: after reading a draft of this, Andi tells me we met when I participated in CHA Reads). It just seemed to happen, and once it did, the relationship seemed to always exist. There wasn’t really any effort that went into creating it, or in working together.

A lot of effort and work was extracted from both of us, however, when it came to maintaining the blog. From our creativity, to our research and editing skills, to the sheer amount of time it took to get everything from an idea to a published post – it was a lot. It was especially onerous when you consider that I was still a grad student, and Andi was precariously employed from contract to contract.

The work did pay back dividends. A community sprung up around UH, particularly of female grad students and early academics in the humanities. Suddenly, I had the community of support I had been lacking since moving to Fredericton. There was always a group of women I could reach out to for advice. Whenever I attended conferences, I would be delighted to meet up with people I had been introduced to through the blog. A few times, people approached me at conferences asking if I “was Stephanie from UH” (real star power!) 

There is even a direct line that can be drawn from my time with UH to the career I have now. 

So why did things fall apart? The same reasons why many digital initiatives in the humanities fall apart: a lack of understanding for how much time, effort, and money these projects require. 

What started as a passion project became a story of two early career academics who were completely overwhelmed and afraid to push for more resources to help maintain a valuable resource due to the potential backlash. We began to feel more and more like our labour was being exploited. It is hard for those who depend on digital resources without being involved in their creation to really understand the scope of the labour that goes into creating them. For many of our readers, I think there was a gross underestimation of the work, time, hours, and effort involved. The only supporters who really understood were those who also ran blogs, like Cory at the Acadiensis blog, the team at Borealia, NiCHE, etc. 

The work involved was simply not sustainable for two of us, considering we both had “day jobs” with heavy work loads. Eventually, something had to break, and it ended up being the blog. But I am still eternally grateful for the opportunities it afforded me, the community it provided when I really needed it. 

The confidence I gained from the creation of an academic community from afar helped give me the confidence to create a stronger community at home. Wanting to assure that grad students entering the program did not feel as isolated as I did, I spoke to Elizabeth Mancke about ways to create more community around the Atlantic Canada Studies centre, and the result was real, meaningful friendships that have carried into the present. I am eternally grateful for the support of Richard Yeomans, Rachel Bryant, Erin Morton, Erin Isaac, Zachary Tingley, Keith Grant, and so many others. 

Unwritten Histories was a lot of work. Exhausted nights after writing dissertation sections, long days of research, frantically prepping CHA Reads pieces for upload while also trying to prep my own conference papers. But in the end, UH helped me find my voice.

Stephanie Pettigrew is a collections data anaylist at Library and Archives Canada and a longtime contributor to Unwritten Histories.