Skip to Main Content Skip to Footer Toggle Navigation Menu

Jennings Mergenthal ’21
Jennings Mergenthal ’21 poses at a table covered with plush food props and canned goods, while a large red devil puppet dressed as a chef stands behind them holding a cleaver.
Jennings Mergenthal ’21 poses at a table covered with plush food props and canned goods, while a large red devil puppet dressed as a chef stands behind them holding a cleaver.
In terms of giving me a philosophical underpinning for the work I want to do, Mac prepared me to approach the world with healthy skepticism.
Jennings Mergenthal ’21

History and Biology Majors
Community Engagement Specialist, Science Museum of Minnesota
First Job • Museums • Activism • Science Education

Doing community engagement based on museum collections means everything from putting together a multilingual engineering activity for 4th and 5th graders to working on a collaborative project between this museum and Casa Na Bolom in Chiapas to digitize their Maya textiles and build an online collection. My current position is grant funded, so will last two more years. Then I hope to move more towards the research side of collections work, possibly through a PhD program.

I had this job full-time for two years and was able to keep it part-time while I did an MA in Public History and Heritage Studies at the U [of Minnesota]. This MA program draws from and feeds back into museum, archives, and research jobs, emphasizing meaningful community engagement and thinking about how to move past oppressive colonial hierarchies of museums. I have also been involved in unionization efforts at the Science Museum, which is part of the bigger picture of how we make these institutions more equitable. 

The connections between my work in museums, in grad school, and in labor organizing got their start at Mac. My history coursework helped me see how to approach study skeptically. In Intro to GIS, I learned mapping and visualization principles that have been the single most important skill I got from a class. I also had a huge education outside the classroom: doing student activism prepared me to look critically at how institutions work. I did independent research projects on the history of the institution and the history of the History department because I was passionate about the topics. I undertook an anticolonial mapping project, supported by great mentors, in the hopes of telling a story about how we can learn to be better. 

I learned that institutions are composed of individuals who are often filled with turmoil over the relationship between their job and their values. And I have come to believe that the precipitating force for action—whether its external factors or internal values—doesn’t matter as much as the impact. What is this person utilizing their position of power to do? This is a much interesting question than: Who is telling them to do this?

Last updated: July 2025