#  TDM 141BD: Boston Goes Dancing 

 



The HMUI grant allowed me to hire a brilliant undergraduate research assistant, Hailey Chen (Class of 2027), for the Spring 2026 semester to conduct research on the history of dance in Boston during the 20th century. Hailey took my Fall 2025 TDM seminar, “Boston Goes Dancing,” and her research was directly related to and will inform future iterations of this course. As the history of dance in Boston is poorly documented in published scholarship, Hailey spent the first half of the semester locating and parsing relevant digitized primary sources (for example, performance reviews printed in historic Boston-area newspapers) before progressing to archival research during the second half of the semester. In archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library and Northeastern University, she photographed and analyzed rare dance scrapbooks, company, school, and organizational files, correspondence, photographs, programs, and more. These undervalued materials pertained to significant local dance artists and educators, from Beth Soll to Elma Lewis. Hailey uncovered a wealth of information—much new to me. I plan to incorporate many of the materials she found in future semesters of “Boston Goes Dancing”—as primary sources for students to analyze for homework, in class, and during class visits to Houghton, and as significant contextual background.

Grant Recipient: Laura Quinton