We would like to congratulate our colleague, the former Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Dr. Wendy Chmielewski, for receiving the 2023 Anna K. Nelson Award for Archival Excellence from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Dr. Nelson, a historian and expert on archival preservation and open public access to presidential and government records served on the U.S. Public Documents Commission. Nelson helped write the report that led to the passage of the Presidential Records Act.
George Fujii explains in the SHAFR blog that “The 2023 Anna K. Nelson Prize for Archival Excellence honors an archivist who has demonstrated both exemplary expertise as well as outstanding and dedicated service over time to the community of scholars of the history of U.S. foreign relations and international history.” Dr. Chmielewski helped co-found the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at Swarthmore College in 1991 and served on its faculty committee until her retirement in 2021.
Fujii writes of Dr. Chmielewski, “A scholar of women’s history and peace movements, Dr. Chmielewski is honored for her leadership as the George R. Cooley Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection for over twenty years. In that role, she oversaw the expansion the collection’s records, made detailed finding aids for many of them available on the internet, highlighted many of its print and graphic materials on its website, and added a public history component to this archival repository. In these ways and others, she has been a driving force in making the Swarthmore College Peace Collection (SCPC) an indispensable resource for scholars of the American peace movement and the history of U.S. foreign relations more broadly. Beyond the peace collection at Swarthmore, Dr. Chmielewski has also been a member of the advisory committee of the American Museum for Peace, the Jane Addams Papers Project at Ramapo College, and the Centre for Peace History at the University of Sheffield. SHAFR recognizes her for this work and her multiple contributions to the study of U.S. foreign relations.”
Reflecting on the award, Dr. Chmielewski graciously offered, “As my work for the Peace Collection was always a collaborative effort with other SCPC staff members over many years, I think this award really belongs to the SCPC.”
We are thrilled for Wendy and her colleagues, and we join SHAFR in acknowledging and honoring her work.