This biography of Jenka Mohr was sourced from the Harvard Plate Stacks website on January 14, 2024. It was written by Samantha Notick, Curatorial Assistant at the Harvard Plate Stacks, in 2022. Please note that this information may have been updated since it was added to our database; for the most current information, check their website at https://platestacks.cfa.harvard.edu.
Born: 1902, United States
Died: Unknown
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
Jenka Mohr (b.1902) was a research assistant and lecturer with the Harvard College Observatory from 1927 to around 1940.
While with the Harvard Observatory, Mohr studied galaxies, nebulae, variable stars, and star clusters.1 She gave lectures on the subjects at several ‘open nights’ hosted by the Observatory.2 With Harlow Shapley and Virginia McKibben, she published two articles related to these subjects, and the Large Magellanic Cloud. In 1932 Mohr published a well-known account of the Harvard Observatory, and a bibliography of Edward Charles Pickering and Solon Irving Bailey, respectively. Mohr also made at least one trip to work at the Maria Mitchell Observatory on Nantucket.
Mohr was born in Pennsylvania to immigrant parents from Austria and Poland.3 In an oral history with Leo Goldberg of Harvard, she was described as “very sharp and personable”.4 When the Observatory put on its annual HMS Pinafore parody play in 1929, the ‘Observatory Pinafore’, Mohr played violin and conducted the music.5
Works cited
1- “Women as Stargazers Prove Worth in Field of Research: Early Worker Excel at Camera Work,” Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA) Dec 28, 1936 : “Harvard Astronomers To Attend Meetings of Inter. Union in Sweden,” The Cambridge Tribune (Cambridge, MA), July 29, 1938. Accessed June 2022.
2-“Harvard ‘Open Nights’ Lectures Begin Monday,” The Boston Globe (Boston, MA), Nov 6, 1936.
3-U.S. Bureau of the Census. 1930. United States Federal Census. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Accessed using Ancestry.com, June 2022.
4-Leo Goldberg, interviewed by Owen Gingerich, August 9, 1983, Transcript, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD USA, www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/28196-1
5- “Resurrected from Files of Long Ago,” The Cambridge Chronicle (Cambridge, MA) January 17, 1930.