Collecting area: UMass faculty

John Edward Higginson retired from the Department of History, University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2024, where he taught since 1989. Higginson received a B.A. in Journalism from Northwestern in Chicago, where he was also a student activist alongside John Bracey (UMass W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American Studies) in 1968. He went on to receive his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan, with research focusing on the history of Southern Africa and comparative labor history. His publications include The Hidden Cost of Industrialization: State Violence and the Economic Transformation of Southern Africa, 1900-1980 (forthcoming), Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900-1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), and A Working Class in the Making: The Union Miniere du Haut-Katanga and the African Mineworkers, 1907-1949 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). In 1993-94, he was the recipient of the Research and Writing Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.

The John Higginson Papers include documents collected from the South African National Archives, the Historical Papers of the University of Witwatersrand, the Sterling Library at Yale University, Archives africaine in Brussels, Belgium, and Arquivó Historico Ultramarino in Lisbon, Portugal. The papers also include published articles by Professor Higginson and the manuscript versions of his monographs A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise and the African Worker, 1900-1947 (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid, 1900-1948 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). It includes correspondence, class material, readings, lecture notes, course syllabi and materials for his teaching in the History Department, copies of research materials from South African and Congo archives, journal articles on South Africa and Katanga, WPA slave narratives, and minutes and notes from Goodwin AME Zion Church 1993-2005. It also contains William Burr’s dissertation on the Cold War and the Marshall Plan in Europe. These papers were a gift of John Higginson, 2024.

Shortly after earning his doctorate in plant pathology from Cornell in 1954, the internationally known phytopathologist, Francis W. Holmes began his career at UMass Amherst. Working in the Department of Plant Pathology (1954-1991) and later as Director of the Shade Tree Laboratories, Holmes became a leader in the study of Dutch elm disease, and he conducted important research on injury to trees from road salt and the relationship between salt injury and Verticillium wilt disease. During Holmes’s tenure, the Shade Tree Labs tested nearly 250,000 elm samples for Dutch elm disease and diagnosed a great variety of other diseases on more than 150 other types of trees. While on a Fulbright fellowship in the Netherlands, he devoted his free time to preparing a monograph on six Dutch women scientists who discovered the source of Dutch elm disease in the 1920s and 1930s. Holmes retired from the University in 1991 and remained in Amherst until his death in 2007.

The papers document Holmes’s research on shade trees and his tenure as a professor of microbiology. The collection includes some professional correspondence (1954-1977), awards, research notes and publications, and memorabilia. Holmes’s translations of phytopathological works from Dutch to English may be of interest to scholars of Dutch elm disease.

Bronislaw Honigberg was a parasitologist who, though studying the intestinal parasites of amphibians, provided research for the U.S. Department of Public Health’s infections diseases lab. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1920, Honigberg fled to the United States at the beginning of World War II, cutting short his Polish medical education to become an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. (1943), M.A (1946) and Ph.D. (1960). Honigberg joined the University faculty in 1961 and taught in the zoology department until his death in 1992.

The collection is comprised of Honigberg’s lecture notes, including exams, lab exercises, and illustrative material. There is also five folder of reprints spanning the years 1949 to 1991 and thus representing Honigberg’s research throughout his career.

A member of the Massachusetts State College Class of 1936, Leonta Gertrude Horrigan was affiliated with UMass Amherst throughout her long career in academia. After receiving he MA from Smith College in 1942 for a thesis on DeQuincy and Milton, Horrigan taught creative writing, composition, among writing classes, to UMass undergraduates, and was frequently singled out as a favorite instructor on campus. In 1964, she was appointed Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and retired to emeritus status in 1986.

The Horrigan Papers contain nearly a half century record of instruction in writing education at UMass, with a wide array of other materials relating to Horrigan’s varied interest, events on campus, and to the evolution of the university in the post-war years.

David R. Inglis enjoyed a distinguished career in nuclear physics that ranged from theoretical work on the structure of the nucleus in the 1930s to the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s and work on renewable energy in the 1960s and 1970s. A Professor of Physics at UMass from 1969-1975, Inglis was a founding member of the Federation of American Scientists and from the mid-1940s on, he dedicated himself to informing public policy on the dangers of nuclear technologies.

The Inglis Papers offer a perspective on the life and career of a theoretical physicist who grew from an early involvement in the Manhattan Project to becoming a committed critic of nuclear weaponry and nuclear power. Although the collection is relatively sparse in unpublished scientific work, it includes valuable correspondence relating to Inglis’s efforts with the Federation of American Scientists and other organizations to influence public policy on issues relating to disarmament and nuclear power.

Janice M. Irvine, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is known for her research in the areas of social knowledge production, culture, politics, and sexuality studies. She earned her Ph.D. from Brandeis University, and an MPH in biostatistics and epidemiology from Boston University. She has received two Fulbright Scholarships; a Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America Oral History Grant; a Rockefeller Fellowship at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY; and an award for Career Achievement and Distinguished Scholarship by the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association. Irvine’s books include Talk About Sex: How Sex Ed Battles Helped Ignite the Right; Marginal People in Deviant Places: Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism; and Disorders of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology. Irvine is also the author of numerous articles, and editor or coeditor of several volumes of essays.

The Janice M. Irvine Oral History Collection consists of oral histories conducted by Irvine over the course of more than a decade. Including interviews that were part of the research for her book Marginal People in Deviant Places, the collection also emphasizes experiences of people researching, using, or prescribing psychedelics for medical, psychological, spiritual, or mystical purposes, as well as individuals and groups engaged in or welcoming difference and creating or inhabiting alternative spaces. Interviews will go online as the files and metadata are prepared.

Beginning with his dissertation in theoretical astrophysics “Local irregularities in a universe satisfying the cosmological principle” (Harvard, 1961), William M. Irvine enjoyed a distinguished career as an astronomer and a role as one of the primary figures in developing astronomy at the Five Colleges. Arriving at UMass in 1966, Irvine helped build the graduate program in astronomy and beginning in 1969, he was a motive force in establishing the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory. Focused largely on the chemistry of dense interstellar clouds and the physics and chemistry of comets, and with a broad interest in bioastronomy/astrobiology, Irvine has been a prolific contributor to his field, and has served as President of the Commission on Bioastronomy at the International Astronomical Union, Chair of the Division for Planetary Sciences at the American Astronomical Society, a Councillor of the International Society for the Study of the origin of Life, and a member of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Irvine Papers offer a thorough record of the establishment of the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory from 1969 through its dedication in Oct. 1976, along with insights into the growth of astronomy at UMass and the Five College Astronomy Department. Correspondence, memoranda, grant applications, and many dozens of photographs offer insight into the financial and political challenges of building the Observatory in the Quabbin watershed. The collection also includes notes for teaching Astronomy 101 and 223 (planetary science). His history of the department, Reflections on the Growth of Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts and the Five College Astronomy Department (2006), is filed with the Physics and Astronomy Department records and a copy is included in this collection. Irvine’s published works are listed in the Libraries’ ScholarWorks author gallery.

Frederick Painter Jeffrey was born in the coal mining town of Trauger, Pennsylvania in February 1911. Jeffrey received a BA in poultry husbandry at Pennsylvania State College in 1932 and then an MS in poultry genetics at Massachusetts State College in 1934. Jeffrey became a professor of Poultry Science at Rutgers University from 1935-1944; after leaving Rutgers, Jeffrey became a professor in the Poultry Science Department at the University of Massachusetts, a department he later headed. In 1954 he became the Dean of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, a position he held until his retirement in 1971. Frederick Painter Jeffrey died in September 1997.

The Frederick Painter Jeffrey Papers include materials about his work with Bantam chickens and document his tenure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There are also limited materials related to his family and schooling.

Over the course of his esteemed dance career, Richard Jones performed with Eleo Pomare Company, the Miguel Godreau Dance Company, and the Xochipillian Dance Group. Jones was appointed to the staff of the University of Massachusetts on September 1, 1973, and remained with the department until his death in 1991. While at the University, Jones was the founding artistic director of the Amdans Theater, and was the artistic director of the University Dancers from 1979 to 1991.

The Jones Papers are a collection of photographs and reviews of Jones’s choreography during the 1970s and 1980s. A copy of Jones’s original essay, “Costuming for Three Styles of Dance,” (circa 1975) appears in the collection, as do photographs, playbills, posters, Amdans Theatre and University Dancers reviews. The Papers also contain letters to Jones from the Boston Ballet and the American College Dance Festival, as well as reviews of Jones’s choreography for professional companies outside the University.

A poet, expert on the works of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Francis, and D.H. Lawrence, and a 1953 graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Donald Junkins directed the Master of Fine Arts in English program from 1966. Junkins juggled his career as a poet with his work at the University, focusing his teaching energy on literature, not creative writing, to save his creative resources. Before turning to poetry, Junkins studied theology at Boston University School of Theology. Through meeting poet Robert Francis and taking courses with Robert Lowell, Junkins discovered his love of poetry, and his life path was forever changed. After leaving Boston University, Junkins taught creative writing at Chico State University before returning to UMass to teach.

The Donald Junkins Papers document his youth in Saugus, Mass., his experiences as a student at UMass, and his professional and creative life. The collection includes correspondence with his family throughout his life, photographs documenting his family in Eastern Mass., his records as head of the MFA in English program, and his personal and professional correspondence.