Executive Director of Alumni Relations Mark Thaden
Executive Director of Alumni Relations Mark Thaden ’02 and Associate Professor of History and American Studies Erin Devlin were interviewed in The Free Lance-Star about Mary Washington’s LGBTQ Alumni Oral History Project. UMW Libraries’ Special Collections and University Archives just launched the oral history collection, made up of recorded interviews and transcripts by students in Devlin’s oral history seminar in 2019.
When Mark Thaden first arrived at the University of Mary Washington in the late 1990s, the campus LGBTQ group met quietly, behind closed doors, in an upstairs room of the campus center.
“It was a social group, but it was very much about support,” said Thaden, a 2002 graduate of UMW who is now the university’s executive director of alumni relations.
Thaden said he was not out when he came to UMW from rural Maryland and a small, Catholic high school. At the club carnival early his freshman year, he was excited to see that there was an LGBTQ campus group, but he was too nervous at first to approach members.
Associate Professor of History and American Studies Erin Devlin
Luckily, a friend signed him up to receive the group’s emails and the meetings became formative in his journey toward self-acceptance.
“That’s where I started feeling more comfortable, being with people who were comfortable with themselves,” Thaden said. “That’s where I started feeling like it was OK.”
Thaden’s memories and those of two dozen other LGBTQ alumni were recorded and transcribed in 2019 by students in Associate Professor Erin Devlin’s Oral History seminar. Read more.
“This book examines how a group of U.S. Millennial friends in their late twenties embed both old media (books, songs, films, TV shows) and new media (YouTube videos, video games, and internet memes) in their everyday talk for particular interactional purposes. Multiple case studies are presented featuring the recorded talk of Millennial friends to demonstrate how and why these speakers make media references in their conversations. These recorded conversations are supplemented with participant playback interviews, along with ethnographic field notes. The analysis demonstrates how the speakers phonetically signal media references in the speech stream, how they demonstrate appreciation of the references in their listening behaviors, and how they ultimately use media references for epistemic, framing, and identity construction purposes, often (but not always) when faced with epistemic, or knowledge, imbalances as well as interactional dilemmas, or awkward moments in interaction. The analysis shows how such references contribute to epistemic management and frame shifts in conversation, which is ultimately conducive to different forms of Millennial identity construction. Additionally, this book explores the stereotypes embedded in the media that these Millennials quote, and examines the effects of reproducing those stereotypes in everyday social life. This book explores how the boundaries between screens, online and offline life, language, and identity are porous for Millennials, and weaves together the most current linguistic theories regarding knowledge, framing, and identity work in everyday interaction, illuminating the interplay between these processes.”
On June 30, College of Business Senior Lecturer Kimberley Kinsley and Professor of Economics Robert Rycroft will have a book published, Inequality in America: Causes and Consequences, Santa Barbara, CA:ABC-CLIO. 
