Remembering the Past, Building the Future: Our 2014 Graduate Intern

Tegan Kehoe, Summer Grad Intern, reading at "Judith Speaks" (5/15/2014)

Each summer, the Sargent House Museum invites one graduate school intern to learn more about the work behind a historic home first-hand. This summer's intern is Tegan Kehoe, a recent graduate of Tufts University, Boston.

Tegan completed her combined Master's in History and Museum Studies. At Sargent House, she will be working with our collections, doing research and adding data to our database files.

Tegan says, "My concentration in history is the social history of collective identities, such as race, class, gender, and ability/disability, in the United States. My background is in museum education and collections management, and in the future I hope to work in collections and curating with a strong educational leaning."

Along with Sargent House, Tegan currently works at Old South Meeting House in Boston. And, previously, she worked at the Old State House Museum, USS Constitution Museum, and Museum Textile Services.

Tegan feels right at home working in Gloucester on Judith Sargent Murray. She first visited Gloucester with her upstate New York family while she was attending college at Brandeis University. She fondly remembers teaching her younger brother to say “gloss-stir” instead of how it's spelled.

As for Tegan's connection to Judith, she says, "Judith Sargent Murray was actually the sometimes rival of one of the people I did my undergraduate thesis on. My thesis, titled 'Female Education, Gender and the Public Eye in the Literary Careers of Sarah Wentworth Morton and William Hill Brown,' got me very invested in the life of Morton. Morton (1959-1846) was a Boston-based writer who was not quite as explicitly forward-thinking as Murray in her writings on gender. There was a period of time when both she and Murray were using the pen name 'Constantia,' and they had a bit of a polite squabble in the literary columns of some newspapers over the name before Morton backed down and began writing as 'Philenia.' My research on Morton was my first introduction to Murray."

Tegan has also studied Rev. John Murray in her research. She is a Unitarian Universalist and therefore, along with all UU parishioners, claims Murray as a “founding father” of the church. One of the long-term projects that she's put on the back burner while she worked on her degree is a guidebook to sites related to Unitarian, Universalist, and Unitarian Universalist history.

We are so happy to have Tegan with us this summer. What a perfect fit for our little museum!

By Kimberlee Cloutier-Blazzard, Development Associate