When I heard that Jennifer Dorner was retiring at the end of this year, I was devastated. Jennifer is the only student-facing administrator who has been with me every day of graduate school. I met her during my orientation, and consider her to be my first Berkeley comrade. I have relied on her calm, open, and responsive approach to student support in both predictable and unprecedented times during my graduate school career. I wish her well on her next adventure, and yet I know I will not be alone in feeling her incredible absence in the history department, in the gender department, and in the material and digital campus writ large.
After she announced her retirement, I spoke with the faculty about their collaborations with Jennifer. Their shared data represent how Jennifer impacted thirteen years of graduate, undergraduate, visiting, and faculty scholarship supported by the department. They note how her deep knowledge of library opportunities led to differently probative explorations of the boundaries of academic archives. They thank her for modeling for all of our students her own methodologies about how to rethink our favorite questions of voice, movement, and inclusion.
As a leader of the digital history community at Berkeley, Jennifer has been in our vanguard in the fight against misinformation and research skill erosion. She has been a steadfast actor in our work to reinforce intellectual resiliency. While sharing a story about Jennifer, one faculty member emphasized the transformative impact that collaboration can have on a project. The faculty member was inspired to create a new course that interpolated a pop culture event with their research era, which required assembling a new critical source base. “Enter Jennifer to the rescue!” Her advice was tailored, not just to the research questions of the instructor, but to the intellectual and material need of the students. Jennifer secured a variety of digital subscriptions to both academic journals and pop culture resources, validating the classroom community’s intellectual arguments by positing several publishing frameworks for legitimacy. Jennifer demonstrated the personal, equitable investment and applied expertise that we all hope to receive from professionals representing a public institution.
Jennifer models the application of institutional knowledge to build a more just world. She thinks deeply about information literacy, resource pedagogy, and access equity. As a producer and reproducer of institutional knowledge, she supplements her dynamic online guides with active instruction in research skills for both students and faculty. Multiple faculty members told me about accepting Jennifer’s standing offer to all departmental instructors to curate course-based library and research tours. One was tickled when she was “proactive in quizzing” them about their research methodology, then thrilled when she recommended to them a hitherto-unknown campus collection that became a bulwark of their course resources. Others emphasized her focus on growing—in quantity, quality, and e-access—the university’s holdings of underrepresented area and subject studies. Jennifer Dorner’s compendium of research and user guides comprises one of the more valuable institutional collections in our department, and her work has been foundational in both departmental pedagogy and knowledge production.
Jennifer Dorner is an exceptional librarian and an invaluable community actor. Her critical and clever approaches to research and pedagogy have immeasurably improved the historical work produced at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been a wonderful colleague in our campus’ pursuit of intellectual rigor and pedagogical excellence, and we wish her the best in her next adventure as she retires from the university.