Rachel Pierce
About Rachel Pierce
I have a PhD in gender and women's history and an MLIS in library and information science. My research interests are grounded in a background as a women's and gender historian. I am also interested in photography, digitalization, and archives. These interests have led to research on the development of feminism within political institutions, gendered political journalism during the Cold War, and how gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class can be expressed in descriptive metadata for materials from cultural heritage institutions. I am also interested in the relationship(s) between digital and physical iterations of archives, with a focus on how classification systems do or do not articulate the relations between physical and digital materials and collections.
At KvinnSam, I serve as a bridge between the research community and the KvinnSam staff and collections. Among other things, I assist in writing applications that draw on the KvinnSam competence and/or materials. Among the examples are the applications to The Swedish Research Council, in which researchers now need to position themselves and their research in relation to sex and gender perspectives. I can assist researchers in including this sort of perspective in their applications. I am also responsible for a number of research networks housed at KvinnSam, and I work daily with KvinnSam's archival collections, including the development of systems for born digital archival materials.
Outside of work, I volunteer at Hagabion, where I sometimes can sneak in a film between selling tickets. I am also very interested in photography.