At the beginning of July, the Center welcomed two of three interns that we’ll be hosting this summer—Linnea Hill and Emily Kovacic. Amber Johnson will join us in mid-July. Bios are below for the interns, and we are all excited to work with them on a range of projects that support AFC’s core initiatives. As Linnea and Emily can report, that work started right off the bat as they joined us down on the National Mall to help out with public programming that AFC ran in collaboration with our Smithsonian colleagues running the Folklife Festival.
Two of our summer interns come to us via our paid internship program. Launched in 2018, the Folklife Internship program honors the legacy of our late colleague, Peter Bartis. Read more about the establishment of this program in this blog post. And hearty congratulations are in order for Linnea and Amber, as they rose to the top of a competitive pool with over 130 applicants!
Linnea Hill recently graduated with her MA in Folklore and Public Culture from the University of Oregon. Her thesis, titled “Roadside Attractions: Politics, Tourism, and Folk Culture in Roadside America” details the relationship between folk art, American tourism, and museums. More broadly, Linnea’s research interests sit at the intersection of American folk art, music subcultures, and artist-built environments. In her free time, she enjoys camping, hiking, reading, and pottery. While at the AFC, she will bring her previous knowledge of collections processing and folk arts programming into a large-scale, federal institution environment.
Amber Chevaughn Johnson comes to us from just up the way at the University of Maryland (College Park). As a former middle school language arts educator for almost a decade and current Ph.D. Candidate in Education, she is passionate about how we imagine education, especially in relationship to the ways that the materiality of our everyday lives—even those fleeting experiences—is preserved, curated, and shared by everyday people . Currently, Amber’s work—including her dissertation— examines the roots of Black education by exploring the tangled relationship between formal, public education and intimate, informal cultural knowledge as stewarded by Black communities, especially Black women. Amber is excited to be joining the American Folklife Center this summer to continue making connections between folklife and education, especially in ways that amplify the power of knowledge held by people in vernacular spaces.
Our third intern comes to AFC through an ongoing relationship with our colleagues at Utah State University’s (USU) Folklore Studies program. USU works each year to select a student in their program who has interest in public sector work, then sends that student our way for several weeks. Emily Kovacic just finished her first year in the USU Master’s program and is a graduate instructor in the English Department there. Her research interests include ethnography, oral histories, space and place, environmental folklife, festivals, legend, the supernatural, and Appalachia. She is currently the President of the USU Folklore Club.
Everyone at AFC is looking forward to working with Emily, Linnea, and Amber over the coming months, and we are excited to have them alongside us as professional colleagues. To learn more about our internship program and a range of other research awards and fellowships offered through the Center, please visit this online guide.