TALK DESCRIPTION

In the late 1970s and 1980s, archivist and author Susan Tucker compiled and wrote about oral histories of domestic workers and employers of domestic workers in articles as well as a book called Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South. The book has continued to elicit a wide range of praise and criticism as well as many letters, calls, and emails from readers, authors, and scholars across the world.

Her talk to us will center around this continuing readership as well as what was left out of the book: attention, for example, to food, as well as how interviewers and writers work together. Tucker now resides in Baltimore and New Orleans—her own domesticity centered both on grandchildren and research on the material ways memories are made and conveyed.

SUSAN TUCKER BIO
Susan Tucker is an archivist whose specialty has long centered around memories of domesticity, of public space, and of bibliographic and archival research. She is currently co-editor of the letters of Josephine Louise Newcomb (1816-1908), looking especially at how these letters have been used to prove one wealthy woman’s status as a resident and citizen of New Orleans. Retired from Tulane University’s Newcomb Archives, this CHoW member has also worked recently on such projects as the digital recreation of a library of women-authored books at the 1884-1885 Cotton Exposition; the NOLA4Women linked exhibitions for the 300th anniversary of New Orleans; and the Longue Vue Garden Jewish Women Leaders exhibition.
Her publications include Telling Memories Among Southern Women: The Scrapbook in American Life (co-edited with others); City of Remembering: An American History of Genealogy from New Orleans; and especially in terms of culinary history, editorship of New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes. In 2001, she founded the New Orleans Culinary History Group (now defunct) to draw interest to various exhibitions such as the first ever work on African American Lena Richards, and on other women who ran famous restaurants in New Orleans or wrote about the city’s
food. The group also compiled the first complete bibliography on New Orleans cookbooks (through 2008). Tucker still enjoys knowing and speaking about these cookbooks: their covers, their contents, and the stories people tell about them. In 2017, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities honored her with its award for Lifetime Contributions. In 2021, she began work on a compilation of poems, stories, and personal essays about archives—their great and small reading rooms, as well as their allure as metaphors of secrecy, access, and long hours of detailed work.