Maggie Zehr Wins the Alice Hastings Murphy Award

Ms. Maggie Zehr won the 2025 Alice Hastings Murphy Scholarship. Ms. Zehr is a dual degree graduate student, enrolled in the Information Studies (archives and records management track) and English programs, and expects to receive her MSIS in December 2025 and MA degree in May 2026.

Ms. Zehr’s valuable work on the M. Watt Espy Executions Records project has advanced the project significantly. The Espy project features an index over 15,000 cards detailing capital punishment since 1608, an immense and valuable body of work used by researchers and capital punishment abolitionists. However, these materials in both the original source material and summaries may be offensive or harmful due to the age of its language and subject matter. Ms. Zehr’s attention to detail and critical analysis has ensured that harmful language is flagged and or removed when needed. Ms. Zehr’s immense contribution to the creation of metadata records of executions furthers the valuable mission of the National Death Penalty Archive and Watt Espy’s life-long project.

Ms. Zehr also completed a thorough inventory of a recent collection of over 400 boxes, one of the department’s largest acquisitions ever. Ms. Zehr spent countless hours in the Science Library basement creating a survey and a processing plan to ensure the collection gets arranged and described appropriately. This large-scale project has been a success due to the hard work and dedication of Ms. Zehr.

From all of us in the department, Congratulations to Ms. Maggie Zehr!