About MARCH
MARCH is a regional public humanities research and resource center in Camden, and is home to a Humanities makerspace, the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia and public history projects illuminating the many lives and stories of our own neighborhood in Camden’s historic Cooper Street. MARCH has been thinking deeply and carefully about place for over twenty years, and asks us to consider “where do you find yourself?”
In fall 2023 MARCH initiated a new focus on the Environmental Humanities, exploring creative and critical approaches to thinking about our place, relationships, and responsibilities to the natural world and nonhuman community. MARCH will be creating new programs to support campus and community scholarship, creative work, and activism related to the environment.
Where to find MARCH
You can find MARCH at 325 Cooper Street in Camden, one of the historic row homes featured in our Cooper Street Project.
325 Cooper Street is a contributing structure of the Cooper Street Historic District, which is listed on the New Jersey and National Register of Historic Places. The west end of a row of three houses built in the early 1850s, it supports the district’s significance as a collection of residences representing the nineteenth-century history of Camden. Its past residents include Camden’s second female physician, Lettie Ward.
MARCH TEAM
Dr. Jillian Sayre, Director
Jillian Sayre (PhD, University of Texas) is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communication where she teaches courses on contemporary theory, ecocriticism and environmental writing, Native American literature, American literary history, and gothic and horror writing. Dr. Sayre’s research centers what she calls affective genres, stories that move their readers or audiences to feeling or action. From the bodily engagements of mourning and horror to the care cultivated for companion animals to the overwhelming experience of grandeur in the natural world, Dr. Sayre studies the ways that these narratives move their audiences in significant – and signifying – ways.
Her book Mourning the Nation to Come (LSU Press, 2019) is a study of early national literature and culture in North and South America that looks at how European-Americans grounded patriotic feelings in laments for an Indigenous past. Representing Indigenous communities as already extinct, lost, or vanished, Dr. Sayre traces how the national romance in the United States, Spanish America, and Brazil made space for emerging nations by writing over the continuing presence of Native people. She has also published essays on translation and translation theory, early national religious writings, weariness and exhaustion as environmental feelings, and companion animals in early American frontier stories. You can find more information about her research here.
Dr. Sayre describes herself as a book nerd who is interested in what stories do: how they move us to feeling, how they change the way we understand the world around us, and even how they encourage us to create new and better worlds for ourselves and our communities.
Isabel Steven, Program Coordinator
Isabel Steven (she/her) comes to MARCH with nearly ten years of experience as a museum professional in history, art and literary institutions. she was most recently at the Rosenbach Museum and Library where she developed public programs and managed the historic house tour and docent guide force. She earned her MA in Public History at Temple University, where her scholarship theorized queer possibilities of economically independent coupled women in 18th-century Philadelphia. This scholarship was featured in the debut season of the Elfreth’s Alley Museum podcast The Alley Cast, a project that she co-produced in summer 2020. Her thesis focused on the application and transformation of this type of scholarship for a public audience, the historic house museum as a site uniquely situated to interpret queer history, and the use of intuition and possibility as methodology. She is excited to join MARCH in developing programs, projects and managing the Historic Preservation continuing education program at a time when the center is turning its focus to the environmental humanities.
Sophia Westfall, Student Researcher at Proof
Sophia Westfall is a student at Rutgers University in Camden and is currently earning a degree in English Composition and Digital Studies with a minor in Writing. She is a member of the Honors College and of the International Honors English Society, Sigma Tau Delta. She is a tutor at the Writing and Design Lab, a writer for the student newspaper The Gleaner, and a volunteer at The Writers House. In addition, she is a senior editor for The Undergraduate Review, a specialist at Apple, the editorial director of Spoon University New Brunswick Chapter, and the founder of The Secret Society of Poetry, a literary magazine which publishes young and emerging voices internationally.
Sophia’s poetry has been featured by The New York Poetry Society and she is a two-time award winner for The Young Writers short story contest. In her spare time she likes to translate ancient scripture and is currently working on her debut fiction novel. She is an interdisciplinary researcher and her studies include the influence of the humanities on one another from a literary, environmental, and historical perspective.
As a student researcher at Proof, she will be conducting workshops throughout the semester that engage in this interdisciplinary research whilst also noting the importance of critical making in a materialistic world. This research is part of a larger English project she is working on with Dr. Sayre, which includes the construction of a biodegradable poetry book as well as studies the relationship between material and content.