On May 22, an audience assembled at the Stanford Humanities Center for a “Tuesday Talk.” Internal and external fellows, international visitors, graduate students and Center staff crowded the Board Room. This was no ordinary “Tuesday Talk;” it was the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, in which five students reported on the research they had conducted during the year.
These five students, each paired with one of the Center’s fellows, spent the year researching a single topic related to their and their fellows’ common interests. For undergraduates, this provided an opportunity to experience the intellectual life of the humanities early in their academic careers. For fellows, it was a chance to work with Stanford students and receive helpful research assistance.
For historian David Gilmartin, an external fellow from North Carolina State University, it became much more. Gilmartin worked with Albert Pak, a junior double majoring in Philosophy and Political Science, examining voting laws in India and Pakistan. “It was quite interesting because, in a certain sense, he worked as a research assistant, but in another sense, he really just worked as somebody who provided me with an opportunity to try out ideas with somebody who comes from a very different disciplinary background than I do,” Gilmartin said.
For his part, Pak was also influenced by the exchange. “Working on this project forced me to think about my work inter-disciplinarily. This experience will shape my ongoing research for my honors thesis, which is on personal autonomy, but in the realm of addiction [not on South Asian politics]. I hope this will enable me to give a more balanced perspective.”
During the year, Gilmartin asked Pak to look at works on the idea of the voter as an autonomous being in election laws and consider philosophical arguments about the nature of autonomy in political science in order to gain a new perspective on his historical research of voting laws in India and Pakistan.
“We met every week and we had discussions about different authors, mostly coming from disciplines that I wasn’t directly familiar with, mostly philosophy,” Gilmartin said. “And that provided a great opportunity. He would read things and suggest things and prepare outlines and then we would just meet once a week and talk about it. And that was really valuable for me and I hope it was valuable for him as well.”
Other 2011-12 undergraduate fellows were Laura Groenedaal, who worked with historian Kristen Harinh, helping to investigate a side question in Haring’s research concerning a prehistory of text messaging, specifically regarding pager usage. Stephen Hilfer, a senior majoring in English, partnered with Leah DeVun looking at transgender and intersex rights. Kyle Lee-Crossett, a junior majoring in English and Archeology, assisted Paula Findlen in mapping Galileo’s correspondence between 1588-1616. Freshman Cody Leff worked with Margaret Cohen in researching the life of underwater painter Zarh Pritchard.
