Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

424 REMEMBERING THE SPACE AGE
Margaret A. Weitekamp is a Curator in the Division of Space History at the
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC.
As curator of the Social and Cultural Dimensions of Spacefight collection, she
oversees over 4,000 individual pieces of space memorabilia and space science
fction objects. These social and cultural products of the Space Age—including
toys and games, clothing, stamps, medals and awards, buttons and pins, comics
and trading cards—round out the story of spacefight told by the museum’s
collection of space hardware and technologies.
Her book Right Stuf, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women In Space Program
(published by the Johns Hopkins University Press) won the Eugene M. Emme
Award for Astronautical Literature given by the American Astronautical
Society. The book reconstructs the history of a privately funded project that
tested female pilots for astronaut ftness at the beginning of the Space Age. In
addition, Weitekamp has also contributed to the anthology Impossible to Hold:
Women and Culture in the 1960s, ed. Avital Bloch and Lauri Umansky (New York
University Press, 2005). Weitekamp won the Smithsonian Institution’s National
Air and Space Museum Aviation/Space Writers Award in 2002 and served as
an interviewer for The Infnite Journey: Eyewitness Accounts of NASA and the Age
of Space (Discovery Channel Publishing, 2000). She spent the academic year
1997-1998 in residence at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Headquarters History Division in Washington, DC, as the American Historical
Association/NASA Aerospace History Fellow. She is a 1993 Mellon Fellow
in the humanities. Weitekamp received her B.A. summa cum laude from the
University of Pittsburgh and her Ph.D. in history at Cornell University in 2001.
Before joining the Smithsonian Institution, Weitekamp taught for three years
as an assistant professor in the women’s studies program at Hobart and William
Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.