National Council on Public History

DRR was inspired by Dr. Guillory’s undergraduate seminar “iReligion: Religion in the Digital Age,” which explored how religious life has changed as the result of digital technology and Internet communities. Working under Dr. Guillory’s supervision, a team of undergraduate and graduate students collaborated with Rochester residents and clergy to document historic places of worship. In 2016–18, the DRR team profiled sites located in southwest Rochester, with the intention of expanding to the other three quadrants of the city, as well as the suburbs. Undergraduate researchers Madeline Blackburn, Sophia McRae, Sarah Ogunji, Seyvion Scott, and Courtney Thomas, Jr. wrote essays and produced reference materials about religious sites, the surrounding neighborhoods, and important archival documents. Dr. Guillory moved to Boston University in 2018. This meant that, without a faculty investigator and additional funding, DRR could not easily expand beyond southwest Rochester. As a result, Gorman oversaw the completion of DRR as a pilot project. In 2018–19, Gorman met with the undergraduate researchers, who volunteered their time to finish their essays. Once the essays were edited, Gorman built the WordPress website with the assistance of the Digital Scholarship Lab staff, secured permission from community partners to reproduce archival sources online, and integrated DRR into HIS 191, a summer 2019 course on new religious movements. The HIS 191 students wrote about religious sites on Rochester’s Park Avenue and in the southeastern suburb of Palmyra. With further funding and a larger team of researchers, DRR could be scaled up to cover religious sites in the entire city of Rochester, the suburbs, and the surrounding countryside. By continuing to document religious communities throughout the city, new themes would emerge to complement and complicate the stories we told about southwest Rochester’s religious sites. The essays written for HIS 191, for instance, address the introduction of new religious movements — specifically the immigrant religions of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism — to Rochester. Above all, DRR is intended as an example of community-based religion scholarship and public history outreach. We could not have done this project — studying 180 years of urban religious life — without the support, feedback, and expertise of individuals from Rochester’s religious communities. They welcomed us into their houses of worship, opened their archives, and consulted with us as the project came together.