Melissa Barthelemy

ABOUT

Melissa J. Barthelemy is an educator with a background in law, history, and gender & sexuality studies. She applies social justice values to all aspects of her life, including her work in student affairs and public history. She is an award winning curator, with extensive project management experience. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Public History at the University of California Santa Barbara, and was a 2019-2020 Free Speech Fellow for the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. She has over 20 years of experience in higher education.

Melissa has served as an intern and consultant for the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs assisting with special projects pertaining to free speech, campus climate, mental health services, and crisis management. In addition to teaching for academic departments she has worked for the Dean of Students Office, Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS) and Graduate Division. She has helped lead campus and community responses to the May 23, 2014 Isla Vista Tragedy in which six UCSB students were killed and 14 individuals were injured in a mass shooting rampage in Isla Vista the residential and commercial district adjacent the UCSB campus. Melissa has served as a liaison between family and friends of the victims and the University administration, has played a lead role in organizing memorial anniversary events, and created a condolence archive collection based on the artifacts left at spontaneous memorials in the wake of the violence. From 2014 to 2020 she served as the Project Manager for the collection project and curated the subsequent physical and digital exhibition. The May 23, 2014 Isla Vista Memorial Archive is housed in the Department of Special Research Collections in the UCSB Library and documents the campus and community response, including thousands of artifacts, documents, and digital images. The Archive is available to researchers and classes. The Finding Aid can be accessed HERE.

At the invitation of the UCSB Library she served as Curator and Project Manager for a large one-year memorial anniversary exhibit in 2015. The exhibit entitled “We Remember Them: Acts of Love and Compassion in Isla Vista,”served as a tribute to those who were killed and injured, and highlighted the ways the community came together to heal through loving acts of remembrance. In creating the exhibit she worked closely with the parents and friends of the victims. Though there were 22 campus and community sponsors, the 6,000 square foot exhibit was largely student-run and volunteer driven. In the ten weeks that the exhibit was open there were over 1,800 visitors. It was the largest exhibit in the University's history both in terms of size and attendance.  Articles on the exhibit were published by Noozhawk, The Bottom Line, the Ventura County Star, and the LA Times.  In 2016 the project team received a Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) for the archive and exhibit. This award is shared by the UCSB Public History Program, the UCSB Library and the campus's Divisions of Student Affairs, and Humanities and Fine Arts. To read an article about the national award click here.

For the five-year memorial anniversary her team launched an online version of the exhibition that recreates the experience of visiting the physical exhibit by allowing visitors to navigate room by room, and see representative samples of what had been on display. The website can be accessed here. An article written about the history of the project and the launching of the online exhibit can be accessed here. A virtual tour of the exhibit utilizing Google Business 360 can be found here.

Melissa's dissertation is tentatively titled "Memory, Protest, and Politics in the Wake of the Isla Mass Shooting Rampage of May 23, 2014 in Santa Barbara County, California." She is particularly interested in the ways that community members, friends and family members of victims mobilize memory to create memorial projects, and also fight for political and social change. Through this work she hopes to provide a larger context for thinking about the various ways we create meaning out of acts of violence, whether it be calls for gun reform, combating violence against women, protesting sensationalistic media coverage or turning to artistic expression to help grapple with loss. The dissertation discusses the campus and community crisis response in the immediate wake of the violence as well as long term efforts to try to heal and to honor those who were killed and injured through the public history projects she led at UCSB (collecting, archiving and exhibiting artifacts). Her methodology employs autoethnography, oral history, as well as archival driven history with a cultural studies approach focused on analysis of discourse, representation, and reception.

Melissa is nationally recognized as an expert in spontaneous memorials, condolence archives and rapid response collecting efforts that document history as it unfolds. She regularly presents on emergency planning and crisis response for museums, libraries, archives and universities. She has helped lead the national effort to create more resources and a professional network for condolence archive managers through partnerships with professional organizations such as the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the National Council on Public History (NCPH).  Melissa has worked with communities that have decided to create condolence archive projects and one-year memorial anniversary exhibits in the wake of traumatic death, such as Orlando (Pulse Nightclub Shooting), Las Vegas (Route 91 Harvest Festival Shooting), Pittsburgh (Tree of Life Shooting), the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and others.  

As a past UC Free Speech Fellow, Melissa is interested in relationships between intolerant and offensive speech, campus safety, and hate crimes committed in college environments. She has presented widely at national conferences on the topics of proactive responses to free speech community controversies and campus responses to violence. As part of her year-long research project, Melissa created a 100-page toolkit for student affairs administrators and university leaders to help them balance demands for freedom of speech and the promises of equal educational opportunities. The toolkit entitled "Let There Be Light: Freedom of Expression on Campus," was published by the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement.

She holds a J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law, an M.A. in History from San Francisco State University, and a B.A. from University of California, Santa Cruz. You can read more about Melissa by visiting her profile on the UCSB History Department website or her LinkedIn profile.