Melissa Barthelemy

ABOUT

Melissa J. Barthelemy is an educator with a background in law, history, and gender & sexuality studies. She applies social justice values to all aspects of her life, including her work in student affairs and public history. She is an award winning curator, with extensive project management experience. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Public History at the University of California Santa Barbara, and was a 2019-2020 Free Speech Fellow for the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. She has over 20 years of experience in higher education.

For the past four years she has worked for the UCSB Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Dean of Students Office, and the Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) Office on special projects pertaining to free speech, campus climate, mental health services, and crisis management. She has helped lead campus and community responses to the May 23, 2014 Isla Vista Tragedy in which six UCSB students were killed and 14 individuals were injured in a violent rampage in the area adjacent the campus. As such, Melissa has served as a liaison between family and friends of the victims and the University administration, has played a lead role in organizing memorial anniversary events, and created a condolence archive collection based on the artifacts left at spontaneous memorials in the wake of the violence.

As a UC Free Speech Fellow, Melissa is interested in relationships between intolerant and offensive speech, campus safety, and hate crimes committed in college environments. She has presented widely at national conferences on the topics of proactive responses to free speech community controversies and campus responses to violence. As part of her year-long research project, Melissa created a 100-page toolkit for student affairs administrators and university leaders to help them balance demands for freedom of speech and the promises of equal educational opportunities. The toolkit entitled “Let There Be Light: Freedom of Expression on Campus,” was published by the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. UCSB Public Affairs published an interview with Melissa about her project which is available here.

Melissa is nationally recognized as an expert in condolence archives and rapid response collecting efforts, that document history as it unfolds. She regularly presents on emergency planning and crisis response for museums, libraries, archives and universities. She has helped lead the national effort to create more resources and a professional network for condolence archive managers through partnerships with professional organizations such as the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the National Council on Public History (NCPH). For the past five years Melissa has worked with communities that have decided to create condolence archive projects and one-year memorial anniversary exhibits in the wake of traumatic death, such as Orlando (Pulse Nightclub Shooting), Las Vegas (Route 91 Harvest Festival Shooting), Pittsburgh (Tree of Life Shooting), the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and others.  In 2016 the exhibit she curated “We Remember Them: Acts of Love and Compassion in Isla Vista,” won a national Award of Merit for Leadership in History from the American Association of State and Local History. She holds a J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law, an M.A. in History from San Francisco State University, and a B.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz.

Here is a more personal and detailed narrative of how how I got engaged in the work that my dissertation focuses on:

I am a Ph.D candidate in Public History (with a Designated Emphasis in Feminist Studies) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I work with Leila Rupp, Interim Dean of Social Sciences and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, and Public History professors Randy Bergstrom and Stephan Miescher. You can read more about me in the GradPost or The Bottom Line school newspaper, or visit my profile on the UCSB History Department website or my LinkedIn profile.

My dissertation is entitled “The Humanity of Loss: Memory and Politics in the Wake of Mass Shootings.” I am looking at how the concept of “mass shootings” has evolved over time, and how  communities have engaged in memorial projects in the aftermath of such violence. The response to the May 23, 2014 Isla Vista Rampage provides my primary case study and for comparative purposes I am examining the collection projects in Orlando (Pulse Nightclub Shooting) and Las Vegas (Route 91 Harvest Festival Shooting). I have also interviewed survivors and family members from the Tower Shooting at the University of Texas in Austin that took place in 1966. I am particularly interested in the ways that friends and family members of victims mobilize memory to create memorial projects, and also fight for political and social change. Through this work I hope to provide a larger context for thinking about the various ways we create meaning out of acts of violence, whether it be calls for gun reform, combating violence against women, or turning to artistic expression to help grapple with loss. My methodology employs oral history, as well as archival driven history with a cultural studies approach focused on analysis of discourse, representation, and reception.

On May 23, 2014 six UCSB students were killed and another 14 individuals were injured in a violent crime spree that occurred in Isla Vista, the residential and commercial district adjacent the UCSB Campus. In the immediate aftermath I worked with UCSB counselors to provide crisis trainings for the graduate student Teaching Assistants. Then I initiated a memorial collection and documentation project under the guidance of retired administrator Debbie Fleming, who was then Dean of Students and later the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs. For links to NBC Nightly News stories about what occurred click here and here.

Since June 2014 I have served as the Project Manager for the May 23, 2014, University of California, Santa Barbara and Isla Vista Memorial Archive. Housed in the UCSB Library’s Department of Special Research Collections, our archive documents the campus and larger community’s response to this senseless violence. It includes thousands of physical artifacts and digital images of condolence items from our immediate community and from around the world. The Archive is available to researchers and classes. Click here to access the Finding Aid and click here to read about the history of the project.

At the request of the UCSB Library I also served as Curator and Project Manager for a large one-year memorial anniversary exhibit. The exhibit entitled We Remember Them: Acts of Love and Compassion in Isla Vista served as a tribute to those who were killed and injured, and highlighted the ways our community came together to heal through loving acts of remembrance. In creating the exhibit I worked closely with the parents and friends of the victims. Though we had 22 campus and community sponsors, the 6,000 square foot exhibit was largely student-run and volunteer driven. In the ten weeks that the exhibit was open we had over 1,800 visitors. It was the largest exhibit in the University’s history both in terms of size and attendance.  Articles on the exhibit were published by Noozhawk, The Bottom Line, the Ventura County Star, and a photo was published in the LA Times.

In 2016 our project team received the Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) for our archive and exhibit. This award is shared by the UCSB Public History Program, the UCSB Library and the campus’s Divisions of Student Affairs, and Humanities and Fine Arts. To read an article about our national award click here.

For the five-year memorial anniversary we launched an online version of the exhibition that recreates the experience of visiting the physical exhibit by allowing visitors to navigate room by room, and see representative samples of what had been on display. The website can be accessed here. An article written about the history of the project and the launching of the online exhibit can be accessed here. A virtual tour of the exhibit utilizing Google Business 360 can be found here.

On this particular site you will find information about my background, my research and teaching interests, my public history projects, and my service work.  I have also included links that relate to some of the projects and organizations that are important to me.  If you have any questions, send me an email at barthelemy@ucsb.edu

When I am not working I spend most of my time outdoors-- camping, hiking, and gardening. I grew up in the mountains of Ojai, a small town just an hour's drive from Santa Barbara. My parents helped foster a love for nature in all of their children by raising us in the midst of the Los Padres National Forest, where we hiked up mountains and along creek beds, and did not even own a television. Both of my brothers, Bennett and Bob, are talented artists. Some of Bennett's nature photographs appear on this site.

Thanks for visiting my site.