Welcome to my online portfolio! Here, you will find examples of my work selected from my nearly ten years of experience as a public historian, researcher, and office manager. My career has consisted of a unique breadth of industries and practice that I hope to share below. Click on the menu to find a short bio and a link to my most up to date resume.
Thank you for visiting.
An office manager is often required to wear many hats. At LLI, I monitored two to three email addresses, researched and executed HR policies, vetted and implemented new software systems, and organized an extensive sample library, in addition to managing multiple social media platforms. Here is an example of a content piece I ushered through concept, photography, copy, and posting.
In 1953, Janell Landis traveled to Japan as part of a three-year teaching program, which turned into four decades of engagement with the Japanese community as an English teacher and resident of Sendai. In 1981, she met Hiroi Michiaki, a local artisan specializing in Edo-koma (Edo-style wooden spinning tops). In October of 2013, my project partner, Dr. Paula R. Curtis, and I traveled to Ms. Landis’s home in Tennessee and conducted interviews about her life in America, experiences in Japan, and tutelage under Hiroi as part of an effort to publicize and document her collection of Hiroi-sensei’s work. Ms. Landis was planning a trip to Japan in May of 2014 and invited us to come.
After receiving a grant from Dr. Curtis’s department at the University of Michigan and a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the travel and equipment expenses, we accompanied Janell for a week of her month long journey. While in Sendai, we interviewed Hiroi-sensei, documented his collection, and gathered archival materials pertaining to his work and to his and Janell’s relationship.
We have begun transcription of the materials collected, created a digital archive cataloging the collection, and an plan to make the full interviews in both languages available. And happily, in August of 2014 Janell’s tops were accepted into the Morikami Museum in Delray Beach, Florida where they have become a part of their extensive craft art collections.
In June of 2014, Main Street Fairmont hosted an arts and music event in Downtown Fairmont as part of a regular First Friday series that summer. In order to let our partners in the local press know what was going on, I prepared a formal press release. We had a lot going on in Fairmont that night, and we ended up having nearly 500 people in our downtown to celebrate our newest businesses.
You can read the full press release here.
In the Fall of 2011, I completed a three-month internship at Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. During this internship, I prepared and organized preliminary research for five National Register of Historic Places district nominations, including an inventory of properties, photograph collection, narrative summaries, and bibliography for the project. At the end of my tenure, I compiled a full methodological report on my practice and products.
You can read the full report here.
And the completed nomination for the Pittsburgh Renaissance Historic District here.
Update: Next Exit HistoryTM is now an app for the Android and Apple platforms. Although, the old online database has been taken down and the links below are broken, anyone who downloads the free app can search “Malina Suity” and find the pieces that I authored.
The University of West Florida was an early pioneer of mobile application technology as a platform for historic interpretation. As a student at UWF, I had many opportunities to create content for Next Exit HistoryTM. Our professor often described these 250 word essays as “historical haikus,” as we had to communicate the essence of wide-ranging subjects in a very limited space. I completed content pieces for two summer travel courses: Civil Liberties to Civil Rights, focusing on urban history and civil disobedience along the east coast, and Corps of Discovery: Exploring the West of Lewis and Clark. You can find links to my work available to view on the Next Exit HistoryTM database now.
“Pittsburgh’s Hill District”
“Old Patent Office”
“Times Square”
“Harwick Mine Disaster”
“Deadwood”
“Blackbird Hill”
“Teton Council Site”
“Saltworks”
During the summer of 2012, I worked as a graduate assistant for my Public History adviser. I both completed work and assisted with the Oral and Community History course in which students undertook research and oral history collection for the Guantanamo Public Memory Project. As a student, I studied the history and culture of Guantanamo Bay as a naval base, interviewed two former residents, transcribed recordings, and edited audio recordings into two, two-minute, interpretive pieces to be available for posting to the project blog. The travelling exhibit derived from the work of more than a dozen higher education and history institutions toured the country after its completion.
See the exhibit’s schedule of events here.
Visit the project blog here.
And view stories and videos on many of the subjects of the project at gitmomemory.org
In the Spring of 2012, I took a class entitled Ideologies and Political Movements in Europe Since 1789. As a requirement for this course, I wrote a long-form paper concerning an ideology of the covered time period. I chose the Syndicalist political movement and, finding little mentioning them, concentrated on women’s connection to it. The small amount of primary and secondary sources on the subject was challenging, however I believe the creative argument I made unveils a compelling angle on the subject. You can read Women and Syndicalism Before the First World War here.
As part of a class project for Advanced Museology in the Summer of 2011, I researched, designed, and installed a large portion of an exhibit for a local historic site called Arcadia Mill. Collaborating with three other classmates, I wrote label text, designed a seating area, two murals, and two artifact cases with the intention of communicating how the land looked before the Spanish came, along with the story of the first owner of the Mill site, Juan de la Rua.
A local television news segment on the site and the exhibit can be found here.
In the Fall of 2010, as part of my Public History Methodology course, I wrote a number of short essays no more than a page in length. Each essay was meant to summarize and expand upon the lessons of an assigned text. This particular text was After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection by James West and Mark H. Lytle. The essay details the tools a historian uses to communicate history to the public.
You can read the full essay here.
Malina Rose Suity 