Our Students

Outside of university, she has volunteered with the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario London Branch for several events including the Geranium Heritage House Tour, The London Heritage Awards and Doors Open London. Rylee enjoys working with the public at community events, but most of all, exploring collections and using digital history to ensure that memories of the past are not forgotten. As a student in Western’s M.A. Public History Field, she’s looking forward to expanding her archival and curatorial skills through projects with community partners, and networking with the heritage community.

Erin Case graduated from the University of Toronto (U of T) with an Honours B.A. in History and a Minor in Material Culture and French Linguistics. Her research focused on material culture and museology, particularly on the importance of clothing in expressing identities and the implementation of equity, diversity, and inclusion practices at heritage sites around Ontario. She completed an internship with the Ontario Heritage Trust as a Collections Assistant, working with artefacts within the Doris McCarthy Fool’s Paradise collection.

Erin is a strong advocate for community and inclusion within history and heritage spaces. She served as an executive on U of T’s History Students’ Association, leading it as President in her final year, when she advocated for the eventual implementation of the History Department’s Writing Centre. She continues to volunteer her time with the Arquives, Canada’s largest 2SLGBTQIA+ archive, on their Curatorial Committee.

Professionally, Erin has worked as a Historical Interpreter and an Assistant Provincial Heritage Registrar. With the Province, she supported the provincial heritage designation process and developed a deep knowledge of Ontario’s history and heritage legislation. As an Interpreter, she created personalized guided tours, education programs, community events, and curated exhibits, particularly with a focus on Toronto’s 2SLGBTQIA+ community. Erin hopes to expand her knowledge of making museum and heritage spaces inclusive and accessible for all as a public history M.A. student at Western.

Kim DelMedico graduated from the University of Ottawa with an Honours B. A. in History (French Immersion). Her area of specialization includes Canada during the World Wars and social history during the 20th Century.

In 2022, Kim worked as a tour guide at the Juno Beach Centre in Normandy, France. The time she spent on Juno Beach made her realize that there is always more to history than meets the eye, and that it’s tremendously important to preserve the individual stories of the men and women who lived through these events. Kim has also worked as a student guide at the National Canadian Memorial of Vimy Ridge and Beaumont Hamel in France, where she was inspired to pursue public history. Her experiences abroad also fuelled her passion for Canadian and European history and travelling.

Since her undergraduate studies, Kim has taught STEM-based workshops with elementary students in Eeyou Istchee, Northern Quebec, and tutored high school students in math and science. Kim loves exploring new places and has now visited sixteen different countries! As she continues her studies in public history at Western, Kim hopes to learn more about the role that museums have on the general public and delve deeper into her understanding of how people experience historical events.

Helen Edwards graduated from Kalamazoo College with a B.A. in History. As part of her undergraduate work, she created an annotated collection of primary sources discussing “The Servant Problem” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. Following graduation, she completed a summer internship at the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, home to the son of automobile baron Henry Ford, in which she helped inventory the furniture in one of the attics. Through her work as a Preventive Conservation Aide at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg since February 2024, Helen has gained a better understanding of how museums function.

Though Helen has enjoyed learning about history since she was a child, she has more recently found herself drawn to the museum field by her interest in material culture, especially fashion history. She enjoys reading about the latter subject in her spare time and has recently begun creating some pieces of eighteenth and early nineteenth century style clothing. Helen is eager to develop her curatorial skills and visit a variety of Canadian museums and historic sites as a student in Western University’s M.A. Public History Field.

Haley Hammond graduated from Western University with a B.A. in Anthropology and Minor in Public History. Her academic interests are rooted in 19th and early 20th-century Canadian social history, with a particular focus on the everyday lives of strategically undervalued communities, including Indigenous, Black, working-class, and women. As an Anishinaabe woman, Haley is committed to amplifying Indigenous voices and prioritizing Indigenous perspectives within Canadian historical narratives.

Beyond Canadian history, she is drawn to cross-cultural histories in ancient, medieval, and 19th-century contexts. In 2022, Haley participated in a study tour in Italy, where she presented on the Mausoleum of Augustus and its transformations over 2,000 years, from imperial tomb to fortress, garden, and concert hall. Her research explored how the site’s evolving architecture reflected shifting cultural values and political agendas, particularly how modern interpretations of Roman legacy were used to support nationalist symbolism in early 20th-century Italy.

Haley worked for two summers at the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, assisting with cataloguing and organizing artifacts in the museum’s collections. Recently, she’s been a member of the Head and Heart Indigenous Research Fellowship, a program designed to prepare Indigenous students for graduate-level and community-based research. Her project involved developing finding aids for the MOA’s mid-20th-century archaeological and museological records, confronting settler-colonial narratives and Indigenous erasure while framing archives as spaces for care and community-driven interpretation. She seeks to contribute to the ongoing work of upholding museums and archives as caretakers of stories that foster connections between people across time and space.

Grace Lazzuri graduated from St. Francis Xavier University with a B.A. in History and a Minor in Celtic Studies. Since childhood she’s had a fondness for museums and historic sites, her favourites being The WWII Museum in New Orleans, The Carriage Pavilion at the Vatican Museums, and her local Antigonish Heritage Museum where she worked as a Curator’s Assistant and Digitization Assistant for two summers. She particularly enjoyed helping open new exhibits, digitize copies of the local newspaper, answering guests’ genealogy questions, and logging new artifacts. Grace was especially excited to combine her love of history and all things Celtic on a research trip to Scotland, where she studied holy wells. This trip was partially funded by a Nova Scotia Celtic Travel Bursary.

Her zeal for Public History was solidified in third year when she took courses on Celtic Folklore preservation and an introductory public history course. She also developed a special interest in archival work and artifact preservation after she worked for two summers in the local Diocesan archives, preserving and categorizing historic documents. As an M.A. student, Grace is looking forward to further exploring the depths of public history and learning more about how to preserve history for future generations.

Claire Pidduck obtained a B.A. Honours in History with a Minor in Cultural Studies from Trent University. As a student there, she published the article “Why Were Western Women So Drug Dependent in the 19th Century?: An Analysis” in Trent’s Journal of Undergraduate Studies. Claire also collaborated with the County of Peterborough on an oral history project focusing on the service experiences of former County Wardens, compiling a published report and presentation for the Peterborough County Council, and short biographies to be featured on the Warden’s Wall Website for Peterborough County. She rounded out her undergraduate studies by spending a semester in Liverpool, England, visiting many sites of historical and cultural importance.

Claire’s work experience largely focuses on collections-based management, inventory, indexing, and research. She has expanded her skillset through time at the Wallaceburg and District Museum as a Research Assistant and Curatorial Assistant, as well as with the Oil Museum of Canada as a Collections Summer Student, and the Lambton County Archives as a Digital Catalogue Summer Student. She has also volunteered at the Hutchinson House Museum in Peterborough. It is through experiences such as these that Claire has been able to share her love of history with the public and will continue to do so as a student in Western’s M.A. Public History Field.

Beth Zentner graduated from the University of Saskatchewan with a B.A. Honours in History and a Minor in Critical Perspectives on Social Justice and the Common Good. Her undergraduate coursework ranged from antiquity to the 20th century and focused mainly on histories in Europe and Canada. Beth’s interest in public history began at an early age with a love of museums. She eventually took museum studies courses at university and studied abroad in Italy during the summer of 2024. She also worked as the Educational Programming Coordinator at the Museum of Antiquities on the University of Saskatchewan campus. During her time in this position, she developed programming and led events to engage young people in the diverse histories of the ancient world.

In the last years of her undergraduate degree, Beth became fascinated by the politics of memory. She’s interested in studying how and why people think of an historical event or period differently based on how that event has been commemorated. This passion led her to the Public History M.A. Field at Western University, where she hopes to learn more about how public history impacts the world around her every day. Following the completion of her studies, Beth hopes to pursue a career in the museum field where she’ll continue to share her love of history with others.