Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, PhD
I’m Dr. Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe. I’m a history professor at Normandale Community College.
Previously, I was the Interim Director of Academic Technology/Academic Technologist for Instructional Technology at Carleton College, a Penn Predoctoral Fellow for Excellence Through Diversity at the University of Pennsylvania, and I worked at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media on a number of education and public history projects. I earned my PhD in History from George Mason University.
Teaching
Fall semesters
HIST 1101 (World Civilizations 1, premodern world history – 1300 CE)
HIST 1133 (Minnesota History)
Spring semesters
HIST 1102 (World Civilizations 2, modern world history 1300-2020)
HIST 1131 (History of the family)
Summer sessions
HIST 1101 (World Civilizations 1, premodern world history to 1300 CE)
SoTL
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning projects in process:
- Co-director with Jack Norton
- Goal: provide a common digital sandbox for students to practice a range of historical communication and research skills.
Principles of History SoTL in Digital History Classes
- Collaborators: Mills Kelly, Amanda Madden, Nate Sleeter
- Initial presentation: Banff SoTL Symposium, October 2022
Research
Current project:
A study of visual rhetorics and published materials related to addiction and treatment, centered on the Hazelden and Dia Linn facilities and programs in Minnesota after World War II.
Digital Dissertation:
They Need You! Disability, Visual Culture, and the Poster Child, 1945-1980 examines the history of the national poster child—an official representative for both a disease and an organization—in post-World War II America. This dissertation argues that the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis/March of Dimes and Muscular Dystrophy Association’s poster child campaigns increased the visibility and understanding of physical disability in new ways by depicting disabled American children within their families and communities as full, if physically limited, citizens of the nation. The campaigns’ emphasis on curing disability and illness centered on a rhetoric of disease eradication, which through repetition became a dominant logic for health charities in the United States. The focus on disease eradication in poster child imagery promoted a narrow view of disease and disability as conditions to be overcome, and precluded political avenues and policies beyond medical research into a cure. Moreover, these poster child campaigns contributed to broader shift toward viewing charitable donations as a consumable good through the establishment of annual rituals of philanthropy-as-civic participation.
This project is presented through the digital publishing platform Scalar in an alternate structure for the elements required of a historical dissertation—historiography, artifacts, data, analysis, citations. In particular, the digital presentation allows me to foreground the visual materials of study, both within my analysis and as project elements on their own. This approach surfaces sources rarely seen, like those centered on the organizations’ employees, the parents of poster children, and most crucially the poster children themselves.
This dissertation is presented digitally in Scalar. Please email Celeste (celeste.sharpe@normandale.edu) for full access to the site, as it is currently password protected due to image permissions. The Introduction and Front Matter are available to read in PDF.
