Collecting area: Visual culture

Jennifer P. Schneider, M.D., Ph.D., is a physician certified in Internal Medicine, Addiction Medicine and Pain Management. She is the author of 15 books and numerous articles in professional journals. She is a nationally recognized expert in two addiction-related fields: addictive sexual disorders and the management of chronic pain with opioids. She also has experience and interest in the area of osteoporosis and its drug treatment, and maintains an email support group for people who have experienced atypical femur fractures related to the use of bisphosphonate medications. Dr. Schneider has written several articles in medical journals about egg donation and its potential long-term risks. Now retired from direct patient care, her professional activities include writing, lecturing at conferences, serving as an expert witness in legal settings, and appearing as a media guest on television and radio. One of her main current activities is to teach a remedial 21-Continuing Medical Education course on appropriate prescribing of controlled substances for chronic pain, under the auspices of Professional Boundaries Education in multiple locations in the U.S. 

The collection contains Dr. Schneider’s published articles, books, and book reviews on sex addiction and its effects on the partner; use of opioids in the treatment of chronic pain; femur fractures caused by the usual osteoporosis treatment with bisphosphonates; and potential cancer risk from egg donor protocol. In addition to her professional work, the collection also documents the family history of Raphael Patai and Naomi Nir along with their children, Daphne Patai and Dr. Schneider, through extensive correspondence, original paintings by Naomi Nir, a journal kept by Nir and Raphael Patai from 1949-1951. SCUA holds the papers of Naomi Nir and Daphne Patai.

After retiring from a career as a nurse and a health coach, Jean Schnell immersed herself in the photography world. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibits and shows throughout the New England region including the Moakley Courthouse in Boston, the S&G Gallery in New Bedford, Mass., the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, and the Davis Orton Gallery in Hudson, N.Y. In 2017, Schnell was a Critical Mass finalist.  Her Quaker meetinghouse photographs have been featured in Lenswork and Yankee magazines. The Friends Journal published her article “Framing the Light: Quaker Meetinghouses as Space and Spirit” accompanied by her photographs. 

In 2014, Schnell embarked on a project to photograph the twenty-three Quaker meetinghouses in Massachusetts. As a lifelong Quaker, Schnell sought to document the significance of the meetinghouses both as historic buildings and as spiritual spaces. Her collection contains photographic prints of the scenes she captured along with her notes, research materials, and various publications that include images from the project.

A life-long resident of Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts, and a third-generation Spiritualist, Louise Shattuck was an artist, teacher, and noted breeder of English cocker spaniels.

Shattuck’s work as a teacher, writer, artist, and dog breeder are documented in this collection through decades of correspondence and diaries, artwork, publications, and newspaper clippings. Of particular note are the materials associated with the Spiritualist history of Lake Pleasant, including three turn of the century spirit slates, samples of Louise’s automatic writing, a ouija board and dowsing rods, and an excellent photograph album with associated realia for the Independent Order of Scalpers, a Lake Pleasant.

From a childhood spent in a tenement in Norfolk, Va., Carolyn Martin Shaw went on to enjoy a distinguished career as a pioneer in Black Feminist anthropology. Educated in segregated schools, she was an outstanding student, winning scholarship funding to Michigan State University, where she received both her BS (1966) and PhD (1975). Shaw’s dissertation on Kikuyu kinship morality marked several themes that she developed through subsequent research projects in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Based in the Department of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz throughout her career, she was a productive scholar, publishing dozens of articles and chapters, and two important monographs, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Class and Sex in Kenya (1995) and Women and Power in Zimbabwe: Promises of Feminism (2015), and she filled a variety of administrative posts, including department chair, Provost of the Kresge residential college, and Chair of the UC system-wide Committee on Privilege and Tenure. She has received numerous awards in her career, including a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Zimbabwe in 1983-1984, a Danforth Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and a McHenry Award for Service to the Academic Senate at UCSC. Shaw retired from UCSC in 2010.

Documenting her work in Black feminist anthropology, the Carolyn Martin Shaw collection includes published and unpublished writing, correspondence, and a wealth of information on her research in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Along with her fieldnotes, research data, and photographs, the collection also includes records of her faculty service at USCS, and awards received for teaching and university service.

Born on New Year’s Day 1876 to Mark and Katie Shultis, Newton Shultis became a member of the Massachusetts Agricultural College Class of 1896. A resident of Medford, Mass., at the start of his college career, Shultis was described by his classmates in the yearbook as “the only man in the class who has not an enemy in college.” An avid fan of the baseball and football teams, the former of which he was manger, Shultis was also a member of the Washington Irving Literary Society, DGK fraternity, and the YMCA, and he was known to have brought a Hawkeye camera with him to campus. After graduation, Shultis joined his father in the family grain shipping business in Boston where for many years he was a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Shultis died in Hopkinton, N.H. in 1956.

The Shultis papers include a selection of correspondence from Shultis to his parents during his college years, along with a remarkable array of ephemera, including his cadet’s uniform with hat, belt, and bayonet scabbard; his graduation robes; a three-volume herbarium; three volumes of class notes and essays; 16 dry plate glass negatives; a Class of 1896 photograph album; and miscellaneous photographs, school books, and ephemera.

Peter Simon’s life and work as a photojournalist follows the quintessential arc of the counterculture, baby boom generation. The son of Richard Simon, founder of Simon and Schuster, Peter grew up in the New York City suburb of Riverdale and attended Boston University, graduating in 1969. While a student at BU, he began documenting the political turmoil in the US when he became photo editor for the radical student newspaper, the BU News, and later as a press photographer for the Cambridge Phoenix. In 1970, Simon left Boston to form Tree Frog Farm, a back-to-the-land commune in Guilford, Vermont, and after leaving there in 1972, he immersed himself in the New Age, forming a close relationship with spiritual leader Ram Dass. Among the most constant threads connecting his work throughout these changes was music. Simon’s sisters, Carly, Lucy, and Joanna have all been involved in music, and through a partnership with longtime friend Stephen Davis and his association with Rolling Stone magazine, Simon enjoyed unique access to many of the most important musicians of his generation. He spent time on the road with the Grateful Dead; went backstage and at home with Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and many others. His early forays into the world of reggae with Bob Marley and other Jamaican recording artists resulted in one of his nine books, Reggae Bloodlines. Simon’s other photographic interests are as wide-ranging as his background. A visitor to Martha’s Vineyard since the 1950s and a resident since 1974, his work reflects the changes and cultural richness of that island; his family’s friendship with Jackie Robinson has driven his lifelong documentation of baseball, and he is in high demand for portraits, weddings, and other work for hire.

The Peter Simon Collection houses the original negatives for Simon’s complete body of work as a photo journalist and also includes many photographs taken by his father Richard, an avid amateur photographer, which documents the Simon family and life in Riverdale and Stamford, Connecticut, where the family had a summer home.

Specializing in study of the biology and evolutionary history of ciliophorans, Eugene B. Small conducted both laboratory and field studies in comparative morphology and morphogenesis, ciliate ecology, phylogeny, life history, and nutrition. He was particularly noted for his work on ciliophorans from marine habitats ranging from the psammitic shores to the pelagic zones to deep sea hydrothermal vents. After receiving his doctorate at UCLA in 1964, Small served on the Zoology faculty at the University of Illinois and, from 1972, in the Department of Biology at the University of Maryland.

The collection consists primarily of thousands of electron micrographs of ciliophorans taken over the course of Small’s career, along with a small number of laboratory and field notebooks.

An activist with an international reputation, Agnes Smedley is most often associated with women’s rights, birth control, Indian independence, and China’s Communist revolution.

These black and white mounted prints, many taken by Agnes Smedley with her captions and accompanying narratives, were reproduced from the Smedley Collection at Arizona State University. Most are of China, but the collection also include scenes of the American West and students at the Tempe Normal School. The images were assembled for exhibition, most likely by the Women’s Studies Program at UMass Amherst.

Born in Grinnell, Iowa on July 14, 1914, to Eva Craig and Lee Augustus Renfrow, Edith Renfrow Smith was the first African American woman to graduate from Grinnell College in 1937. She moved to Chicago after graduation where she worked first at the YMCA and later at the University of Chicago. In 1940, Edith married Henry T. Smith; the couple welcomed two daughters: Virginia and Alice. After earning her teaching license, she taught in the Chicago school system for twenty-one years before retiring in 1976. Smith continued to serve as a volunteer well into her nineties. She is the recipient of numerous honors highlighting her activities and contributions later in life, including admittance into the Chicago Senior Citizen Hall of Fame, selection as a “superager” in a Northwestern University study, induction into the Iowa African American Hall of Fame,  and several distinctions awarded by Grinnell College: an honorary degree, the naming of the Smith Gallery in Joe Rosenfield Campus Center, and the naming of a new residential hall building on campus.  An illustrated biography of her life, No One is Better than You: Edith Renfrow Smith and the Power of a Mother’s Words, was published in January 2024.

While the physical materials that comprise the Edith Renfrow Smith Papers are small in number, including an award, photographs, and a family tree, the collection is enhanced by nearly 150 digitized photographs scanned and posted online by Grinnell College.

Stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Born and raised in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, Keith Harmon Snow earned his Master’s in microwave engineering at UMass Amherst. He worked at General Electric Company but left the security of his job soon after receiving a promotion in order to pursue travel and a career in investigative journalism. As a photojournalist and war correspondent, Snow worked extensively in Central Africa. He served as a genocide investigator for Survivors Rights International, Genocide Watch, and the United Nations, documenting and exposing genocide and crimes against humanity in Sudan and Ethiopia. Snow won three Project Censored awards, and in 2009, he was named the Regent’s Lecturer in Law & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recognized for over a decade of work on war crimes. A champion for human rights and the rights of children around the world, Snow’s book, The Worst Interests of the Child: The Trafficking of Children and Parents Through U.S. Family Courts, was published in 2015. Snow died on December 8, 2024.

The papers of Keith Harmon Snow document his work as a photojournalist and war correspondent in Africa, featuring research materials, notebooks, published writings by and about Snow, and a vast array of his photographs, slides, and negatives. The collection includes publications, documents, and book drafts Snow accumulated during the investigative process of writing his book, The Worst Interests of the Child. Also chronicled, his multi-year struggle with the town of Williamsburg, Massachusetts to enforce zoning bylaws that regulate the use of firearms and explosives at a shooting range near his property.