As Kauffman Museum continues its programming around the current special exhibit, it will team with Bethel College’s convocation planners to bring a speaker from Fort Hays State University to campus.
The Sunday-Evening-at-the-Museum event (later than normal Sunday programming) with Dr. Kim Perez, a professor of history at FHSU, will be April 21 at 7 p.m. in the museum auditorium.
Perez will speak in Bethel’s convocation the next day at 11 a.m. in Krehbiel Auditorium in Luyken Fine Arts Center.
The presentations are in conjunction with “A Day with the Birds: Community Science & the Audubon Christmas Bird Count,” the Kauffman Museum special exhibit that celebrates the Harvey County connection to the world’s oldest citizen science initiative.
Perez specializes in the history of community science and citizen science. In her two Bethel lectures, she will explore the role and impact of pioneering women in birdwatching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on figures like Mabel Osgood Wright and Florence Merian Bailey and their relationship to the burgeoning field of ornithology, their activism, and their role as authors.
The title of her Sunday evening lecture is “Making the World a Better Place for Birds: Women’s Authorship and Activism in Ornithology.” In convocation, she will speak on “The ‘Women Before Me’: From Female Scientia to Helpmate to Scientist.”
Both events are free and open to the public, and are underwritten by the Bethel College Women’s Association’s Carolyn Schultz Lecture Endowment, and by Humanities Kansas, a nonprofit cultural organization that connects Kansans with stories, ideas and each other to strengthen communities.
Dr. Kim Perez fell in love with nature as a child and continued the relationship into adulthood. She has a B.S. in wildlife biology from Kansas State University, where she worked at the Konza Prairie as a research assistant to several graduate students and faculty.
She pursued her own undergraduate research projects and considered a career in biology, but her trajectory changed when she took a History of Science course at the University of Oklahoma and decided it was fascinating to study scientists themselves.
After completing an M.A. and a Ph.D. in the history of science at OU, Perez accepted a position in the Department of History at FHSU, where she has been for 23 years. Her research interests include women in the field of science, the nature study movement, and the boundaries between amateur scientific participation and professionalization.
Regular Kauffman Museum hours are Tues.-Fri. 9:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 1:30-4:30 p.m., closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission to the special exhibit, “A Day with the Birds,” and permanent exhibits – “Of Land and People,” “Mirror of the Martyrs” and “Mennonite Immigrant Furniture” – is $5 for adults, $3 for children ages 6-16, and free to Kauffman Museum members and children under 6. The museum store is open during regular museum hours. See kauffmanmuseum.org or the museum Facebook page for more information.
