Jeffrey C. Kasch Foundation Research Trip: Samantha Silver

This summer’s funding was incredibly meaningful to my dissertation research. There is no substitute for getting to travel to visit archives in person and work directly with archivists on site. This allows us to expand the scope of our projects and directly root them in archival evidence, giving us credibility and producing reliable historical projects. This funding enabled me to visit the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY for several days to consult collections at the Carl Reiner Center for Archives and Preservation for my doctoral dissertation on gender and stand-up comedy history. This is a newer museum that has been growing its collection of materials related to comedy. I was able to work closely with the archivists at the museum to look at their collection on comedian Rusty Warren. This has made possible an entire dissertation chapter about her, which aims to recover the role of queer performers in the history of stand-up comedy and shed light on women’s comedy and comedy’s role in the struggle for women’s liberation. She was known as the “mother of the sexual revolution,” in the 1960s, but was also closeted in her own sexual orientation. I was one of the first academic researchers to visit this collection and I was able to build a strong relationship with the museum that I hope will continue to grow connections between GW American Studies and larger projects in service of public history.