Professor Kabria Baumgartner created a scholarship honoring Angel David Nieves to support students pursuing internships in public history.
History professors Kabria Baumgartner and Angel David Nieves crossed paths a few times before they became colleagues at Northeastern University.
Baumgartner admired Nieves’ commitment to public history, so when Nieves died unexpectedly at age 52 in December 2023, she decided to memorialize him through a scholarship.
The Angel David Nieves Memorial Mellon Scholarship supports students pursuing internship opportunities in public history, particularly those focused on community archiving, digital storytelling and oral history.
“He was smart, kind, selfless and funny with a cheeky sense of humor,” Baumgartner says.
Nieves, who joined Northeastern in 2020, served in multiple leadership roles, including director of the graduate program in public history and director of the humanities center.
Along with Baumgartner, Nieves was one of four founding principal investigators of “Reckonings: A Local History Platform for the Community Archivist” — a project funded by the Mellon Foundation, Northeastern and private philanthropy.
“This grant would not have been possible without him,” Baumgartner says.
She emphasizes how crucial paid internship opportunities were to Nieves, noting that he was deeply aware of the financial barriers some students faced.
“We noticed — and this was something that was important to Angel as well — that a lot of students who are in our public history program were interested in pursuing internship opportunities, but those internship opportunities were often unpaid or underpaid,” Baumgartner says.
The scholarship enables graduate students to engage in real-world experiences in museums, libraries and social justice organizations.While the scholarship is designed with public history students in mind, Baumgartner says, it is open to students in other programs within the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Graduate student Emma Beckman, who received her bachelor’s degree in linguistics and English from Northeastern in 2018, was among the inaugural cohort of the Nieves Scholars last year. She returned to Northeastern to join the public history program after working at an antiquarian bookstore in her hometown in California and realizing how much she loved talking to people about books as historical objects.
The scholarship allowed Beckman to spend the summer of 2024 working as a research intern at the West End Museum. The museum preserves the history of the West End neighborhood of Boston and tells the stories of the people who were displaced from their homes during the urban renewal period in the late 1950s and 1960s.
“It felt like a good way to extend the memory of Dr. Nieves’ scholarship into this program,” Beckman says.
The deadline to apply for the Angel David Nieves Memorial Mellon Scholarship is Feb. 28.