 |
| The Stanford Humanities Center, at 424 Santa Teresa St. |
Research within the humanities can seem like a daunting task. We’re used to short quarter sessions, where terms and dates fly by in a conceptual whirlwind of midterms and profoundly caffeinated essay writing. In our classes, we might spend one week analyzing a book, two weeks on a social phenomenon, three on an entire epoch. So, how do we escape the curse of the cursory?
The Stanford Humanities Center, an intellectual haven stocked with visiting and on-campus professors, international artists, graduate students, researchers and, most importantly, delightful lunches, provides undergraduates with all of the resources and scholarly Sensei they need for an in-depth research project. Four undergraduate students, coming from any and all disciplines, spend an entire year at the Center developing a single topic with one of the Center’s annual fellows, academic giants in their fields (from a pool of 250 applicants, 6 are awarded fellowships). So, yeah, it’s a little intimidating. But that’s to be expected when you travel deep into the complexities of an intellectual movement, when you look a concept squarely in the face and decide it needs some reconstructive surgery.
The Center: A Bubble Within a Bubble
Luckily, the students have exclusive researching tools and the fellows’ sharp wits to guide them. Fellows at the Center, external faculty with fresh, outsider perspectives, spend the year working on a specialized focus, with students taking on a subset and making it their own. Students build unique, symbiotic relationships with their advisors: they help fellows further their research, by reading assigned materials and pitching new ideas, and the fellows help them engineer independent projects. They also get paid—$1400 per quarter, for 10 hours a week. To conclude the experience, the students present their work during one of the Center’s weekly show-off-your-research lunch meetings. These presentations, called the Undergraduate Symposium, took place at the Center on May 25.
These luncheons are miniature academic ventures in themselves. Professors, students, and artists come together to chat over Indian food and brownie squares. Harley Adams, an undergraduate fellow researching the colonial archives of the Indian Ocean with Giorgio Riello, loves being brought into these conversations. “At this one lunch table you have guys that are doing global history from so many different perspectives, Giorgio is working on cotton, someone else is working on Chinese history, or Greek instruction manuals, and they all have different ideas about how history should best be done,” said Adams. Alongside conversational companions, the Center provides a beautiful, reclusive area for studying, its courtyard sprinkled with whimsical plant-life and burbling fountains.
A Wonderful Alternative
This project provides firm grounds for research, without one having to commit to an Honors Thesis. “I ended up not doing an Honors Thesis, because I’m double majoring, so this is my way of doing a mini-thesis,” said Richard Sajor, majoring in English and Archeology, who’s currently researching the perception of death in Medieval London alongside faculty fellow Amy Appleford. Sajor was itching for the exposure: “So I’m somebody who has taken all the Medieval courses that I could take…this filled in a lot of places where I felt like there weren’t enough classes,” said Sajor.
Sometimes, the Center is the only place you can turn to. For Elizabeth Rasmussen, a junior focusing on Latin American Studies, the Center’s an academic jackpot. Cecilia Mendez, a fellow investigating civil wars in 19th century Peru, offers a wealth of knowledge about Latin American political trends and social customs. “At Stanford, I would not have learned anything about this time period ever.” Furthermore, she does all her reading and writing in Spanish, and she and Mendez always communicate in Spanish. Having taken all possible language courses, this was her one chance to master the foreign tongue. She has been writing profiles on key guerilla leaders in Peru, “organizing them in a more concrete fashion that really hasn’t been done before,” said Rasmussen.
Carving Academic Pathways
In some cases, the applicant may have only vague inklings of what they’re interested in, which, turns out, is totally fine. Elias Rodriquez, a sophomore undertaking his first research project, entered into it thinking, “Yeah, the mind is kind of cool and I like this book…I didn’t really know what I was doing.” But the guidance of his fellow, Heather Love, led him to a thesis on the transience of identity in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which relates to her topic, the power of group stigmatization. “She recognized what I was interested and pushed me in certain directions,” said Rodriquez. “Now, I feel like a lot of questions she asks are the questions I ask about all my other papers, basically anything I’m really interested in. She helped me figure out a method of better intellectual engagement, just by virtue of interacting with her.”
The students meet with their fellow every week, simply to bounce ideas off each other and clarify their goals. For Sajor, sometimes when he mentions a certain idea to Appleford, “all of a sudden she gets a spark and I’ll have 50 million books piled up on my desk the next week that I have to pore through. It’s just awesome to have someone who knows everything about what I want to do.”
Resources? Yes please.
The fellows got connections. The external faculty, coming in from top universities nationwide, provide students with off-campus and eye-opening resources. Sajor, who needed to do tons of manuscript reading, got most of his information from Appleford. “She was able to hook me up with resources from where she works and that was really helpful as well…she’s from the East Coast and that’s where all the manuscripts are,” said Sajor.
Harley Adams has been working on a quantitative spreadsheet of every factory and every node in the Indian Ocean from 1500-1800, so as to view the exchange of commodities within a more globalized trading structure. Under Riello’s tutelage, Adams was able to work with the Spatial History Lab to digitally render this information on an interactive map, which shows geographic and chronological changes. “What’s interesting is that this information has never been collected in such a way before, centered in one place…it is an important, new way to view history,” said Adams. The course of his voyage has led him to believe that “through just looking at the Indian Ocean, you can see the entire world.”
That Personal Touch
These guys get to do some pretty cool things. Beyond that, they get to work with mentors who are as relatable as they are brilliant. Adams, who found his sole-interest-mate in Riello, says that together they “look at and admire pictures of Dutch vessels, or 17th century drawings of Canton ports, so we get to mutually admire and engage in art from the field.” Rasmussen and Mendez always start of their meetings with the latest in South American politics, always in Spanish. Sajor and Appleford commiserate and procrastinate together. Love and Rodriquez, always gushing over the same authors, were literarily meant for each other.
And the fellows are not just resources to cling to now—they serve as a lens into the future. Adams states, “Right now, I feel like I know nothing, and then I look at someone like Riello who knows so much and can speak and touch on any subject…So as well as giving me actual quantifiable help, it’s also an inspiration to know that if you work on something, you can get to a level where it really is rewarding, and you can really understand history in a much deeper way.”
View the Stanford Daily article here: http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/06/02/honing-in-on-the-humanities/
Email the Fellowship Program Manager at rbarrick@stanford.edu for further information
