Kitchen paper heats up La Salle

By Olivia Biagi
Collegian Editor
January 30, 2008

While some college students may spend their 21st birthdays hitting the bars with friends, senior American studies major Jaclyn Keammerer spent the weekend of her 21st birthday accepting the Dr. Francis J. Ryan Undergraduate Research Award from the Middle Atlantic American Studies Association.

“Although I was a little bummed that I couldn’t celebrate with my friends, presenting my paper was well worth it,” Keammerer said. “My parents and sister traveled to Baltimore with me for the conference so we were able to see the sights and celebrate before and after the conference as well.”

MAASA is a regional chapter of the American Studies Association, encompassing the states of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland. Every spring MAASA hosts a meeting for an academic conference, rotating the location among schools in the region. La Salle professor and director of the American studies department Dr. Francis J. Ryan, for whom the award is named after, serves on the executive board for MAASA, which plans the conference every year. It was Ryan’s suggestion to open the conference to undergraduate students.

“I was elected to the executive board about five, six years ago,” Ryan said. “The middle Atlantic conference has always been open to faculty and graduate students to present academic papers. As a member of the board, I suggested that we entertain the possibility of an undergraduate roundtable conference session. Then, the board asked me if I would be willing to oversee this initiative.

“Last year, other members of the board surprised me,” he said. “They decided for the first time to give a prize for best undergraduate paper.”

For Ryan, the roundtable conference is important in helping students network, both socially and professionally, with other students, and to share research and feedback with each other.

“It helps them engage in a centuries old dialogue — the idea of defending an argument in public,” Ryan said. Keammerer is the first recipient of the award, which Ryan presented to her at the conference March 31, 2007. Her paper, “The Catastrophe of the Continuous Countertop: How the American Kitchen Stove Became a Back-Breaker,” was completed as part of a requirement for her American studies capstone course on Food and Drink in American Culture.

“My original topic included an examination of how the layouts of American kitchens changed as a whole with a reflection on what these altering designs reveal about American life and character,” Keammerer said. “I noticed that while many things in American kitchens changed over the years, one thing remained the same — the height of the kitchen stove top and countertop.”

Keammerer, along with six other classmates, submitted research papers to a committee of La Salle professors from various departments, including American studies, English and history.

The selection process, according to Ryan, was a “blind review.” The authors’ names were left off the papers during selection in “an attempt to maintain objectivity.”

Of the seven submissions, Keammerer’s paper was chosen to be presented at the MAASA roundtable conference, which took place March 31, 2007 at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Keammerer presented her research along with students from Temple, Penn State Harrisburg, Penn State Delaware County, Rutgers, Lehigh and Franklin and Marshall.

“The members of the executive committee sat in on this session [to judge],” Ryan said. “I excused myself because I taught Jaclyn.”

Keammerer’s paper was also chosen for publication in La Salle’s American studies journal, The Eagle’s Eye. The journal is available on the American studies portion of the official La Salle Web site.

“I first became interested in my topic during an American studies seminar trip to the Philadelphia Art Museum,” Keammerer said. “Our class was shown a restored German American kitchen from the 1700s…As [the guide] mentioned what each item in the kitchen reflected about American life and was important to Americans at this period of time, I began to realize how much kitchens can tell us about American culture throughout the decades.” Researching this topic, however, was not easy for Keammerer.

“Finding research on the development of kitchens was sparse,” Keammerer said. “Researching this topic required persistence and deep digging into mostly primary documents, such as the archives of kitchen and bath companies, advertisements, and the writings of household engineers.”

Despite the discouragement Keammerer faced from the difficulty researching relevant documents to her topic, and the several revisions she made, she stayed on task to complete the project.

“I kept telling myself that scholars search and conceive new findings, regardless of how difficult and time-consuming it may be,” Keammerer said. “Several meetings and phone calls with Dr. Ryan also helped me stick with this quest.

“Completing this research project was extremely rewarding because it inspired me to research and write in a scholarly fashion; that is, the lack of secondary sources motivated me to work from primary sources to discover new, original findings.”

biagio1@lasalle.edu