Meet Mariana Brandman, New Sophia Smith Collection Archivist

In the fall of 2024, Smith College Libraries welcomed Mariana Brandman as the new Sophia Smith Collection Archivist in Special Collections. An accomplished historian, Mari has worked as a researcher and archivist at institutions throughout the country, from the New-York Historical, to University of Chicago's Special Collections Research Center, to the Library of Congress. Now, Mari comes to Special Collections with a passion for sharing the past with today’s minds through materials found in the Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History.

“Doing this work in times when you're struggling, whether it's with the outcome of a presidential election or just an issue you care about, you can go to the archive to draw inspiration and draw strength,” she says. “You find answers to the questions, ‘What are the challenges that people have faced before me?’ How can I learn from that and do something similar or something more effective?’”

Mari was drawn toward history at an early age: “I grew up a history buff. My dad had been a high school social studies teacher before I was born, so it was something we loved to do together,” she says. As an undergrad at Yale University, Mari first felt history could be more than a family connection. “I took one history class mainly to make my dad happy, and then I fell in love with it,” she notes. “I knew I had to major in it, and very soon was thinking about pursuing it as my career.”

What surprised Mari most in her studies was the sheer volume of historical knowledge that she only encountered once she was a student at an Ivy League school. “As I was studying US history, I found myself getting really angry about the things that I had only just learned in my major,” she recalls. “Not many people have access to that information, and I wanted everybody to know what I was learning.”

Access to history became a focal point of Mari’s studies and drove her to narrow in on public history as a concentration. “I knew I wanted to get stories out there for everybody to see, understand, and think about when making their decisions about issues today,” she says.

Mari continued her studies and pursued a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, where her work focused on the history of feminism and comedy in the United States. Her dissertation, “Take Back the Mic: The Rise of Feminist Stand-Up Comedy in American Culture,” is the first historical study of modern feminist comedy, uncovering how comedy has come to serve as a language for contemporary feminism.

“I've always been interested in women's history, in feminism. I was an athlete growing up, and I often wondered why the girls' basketball team was treated differently than the boys' team,” she notes. “I’m also a big comedy nerd. I come from a blended family; comedy was the basis for us to really unite and bond, so I got into comedy history while I was in college as well.”

Mari’s dissertation traces the emergence of feminist stand-up comics from the women's liberation movement through the 1990s. These performers, she argues, gave rise to a feminist comic tradition, one that both stood apart from the mainstream and one that influenced popular American comedy in the latter decades of the twentieth century. They used their acts to demand public recognition of their whole personhood and their right to participate fully in cultural life.

“I wanted to understand why there seemed to be this tension between feminism and comedy when I thought they meshed so well,” she says. “Cultures that face oppression often cope through humor and use it to make  these great pointed criticisms of society. I saw that happening with feminists in the movement and wanted to explore that.”

As part of this research, Mari had her first introduction to the Sophia Smith Collection. “As I was looking for archives, it was hard to find stand-up comedy. Oral traditions are not often thought to be important enough to be recorded,” she observes. “But the Women's Music Archive here at Smith has all these great recordings of women's music festivals and other performances that were happening from the '70s to the '90s  — it was mostly female musicians playing for the women's culture community, but comics performed as well. They were sometimes the emcees and hosts, but they also did their own sets and released their own albums.”

Mari was impressed by the depth and range of resources available at Smith. “This was the only archive out of all the ones I visited in the country that I came to twice,” she says. “I was just blown away with the Sophia Smith collection. I always kept an eye on it after I went home to write my dissertation – I just knew it was a really special place.”

After completing her Ph.D., Mari continued to gain hands-on experience in archives across the country. When she saw the opening for the Sophia Smith Collection Archivist role, she recalled her positive experience in the throes of dissertation research at Smith and knew she wanted to go for it. Now, she has the opportunity to do what she’s set out to do since that first history class at Yale — promote accessibility and knowledge of history. Showing students the wide breadth of items in the Sophia Smith Collection, she says, is the most rewarding part of her work.

“I recently taught a Hampshire College class, Labor Organizing in the Care Economy — that's a real interest of mine, care work, which is a very feminized field that’s often looked down upon despite being so integral to our economy,” she says. “I had the opportunity to go through the Sophia Smith Collection and think about what parts of the collection I wanted the students to see, from the National Congress of Neighborhood Women to the YWCA to early flight attendants’ unions, in order to show the array of social factors that are so interconnected in that line of work.”

Looking ahead, Mari is excited to use the Sophia Smith Collection as a tool for teaching and knowledge building, and as a way to offer perspective for those seeking to contextualize the past in order to understand the present.

“The thing that I think is probably most important is that we can't take progress for granted. Looking at the collection, you can see how there's often both progress and backlash in all these different areas. It’s important for people to keep fighting and to understand that you can't sit back and expect something to happen,” she says. “It's all been fought for at every point, and you can see that in people's diaries, letters, and the buttons they made 70 years ago (especially the ones you would be happy to put on your backpack today!). Feeling connected to all of that and being able to share that with everyone is such a wonderful part of this job.”

Contact

Mariana Brandman, Sophia Smith Collection Archivist: mbrandman@smith.edu