This section of The Muse is all about the different kinds of research going on at Loyola. Whether being conducted between the library’s shelves or underneath microscopes, academic research serves as an essential component to the college experience. Professors’ work informs their course material, undergraduate research builds critical analytical skills that can help our future careers, and all the studies serve to strengthen intellectual discussion around our campus.
In recognition of these programs’ importance, I reached out to some of the students who received funding for research this summer via the Center for Humanities Summer Research Program.
I started by talking to Liam Holden, the student who used their grant to travel overseas, on a mission to explore the steps of one of Christianity’s most influential figures.
Berger: To start, can you please tell us what your research is about?
Holden: I took a course over in Athens on St. Paul, his life, and his works. So we went letter by letter, city by city, through what his ministry looked like, through the kind of issues he was addressing in the Christian communities; through what his influences were. What was his Greco-Roman context? What was the state of Athens when he came to Athens? What was the state of Corinth when he went to Corinth?… And what directly influenced him, right? His rabbinic thought? Was there some Greek stoic philosophy influencing him? His personal circumstances? We’re pretty sure he was a Roman citizen – how does that influence him?
B: That sounds incredible, so obviously you were there overseas, in Greece. How did having that physical connection with your research change it; did it enhance your experience?
H: I’d say absolutely! Yeah, you know we’re coming from an institution where we’re deeply embedded in Jesuit education here, and something that Jesuit education is very, explicit about, is the difference between vicarious experience and direct experience, as far as learning goes. There’s a place for vicarious experience, lectures, reading — all that stuff is important. But, direct experience, Jesuit education and pedagogy says is where the magic really happens… So to be able to go and see the Acropolis, see the Parthenon — not only after talking about it in this course, but talking about it last year in my Ancient World course — it was incredible!
B: For any students interested in applying for a Fellowship Grant themselves or funding through the humanities center, do you have any advice?
H: Yeah, go to the information sessions. I think they said that Dr. Butler is doing those ([email protected]). Those are great, and find a faculty member whose field of study is relevant to what you want to do, but who you also think will be there to encourage you, to support you. I had the privilege of a wonderful advisor in Dr. Martha Taylor, she was great, really encouraging along the way. And I think that’s the key to it too, someone who’s going to support you on that front.
The next student that I interviewed was France Jimenez, whose presentation The Initial Question tackled the importance of perspective and preserving the original meaning and context of others’ experiences.
B: Can you please tell us what your research is about?
Jimenez: I spent this summer reading and writing and researching about experiences that aren’t my own. Last year I was awarded the grant from the Center for Humanities as well to do an unpaid internship at a refugee center here in Baltimore. There were just a lot of things I encountered and witnessed during that time that left me with a lot of questions, and very unsettled feelings. They were sporadically coming up, I was thinking about them all the time, so I spent this summer trying to find some answers; a way to retell all that, because I don’t want it to be forgotten.
That’s what The Initial Question is; how do we write experiences that aren’t our own?
B: That’s certainly a big question to tackle. Working with that material, trying to preserve that memory, what were the biggest challenges that came up for you? What were some ways you found around them?
J: As an English and Writing Major, we obviously come across a lot of literature that isn’t there. We talk about indigenous people and how white settlers wrote their stories, and I was coming into it with that fear that I would be writing and talking over somebody. That was a big thing for me, so everytime I would write about something I did my best never to guess, but just recall from the diary entries that I made the year before while I was experiencing it. I did my best not to put my own emotions into it, I wanted to give the most impartial recounting of what I saw.
A lot of that, what I had to draw on, was me coming here as a seven year old girl, and being an immigrant, and what it’s like to accurately name those experiences. Obviously we get exposed to dislocation, but we’re always a little bit removed from it because sometimes we don’t know what that’s like for other people.
For me, it was important to try to do justice where I can, but distance myself enough to understand that while it’s still their stories, it’s also my own and how I’m perceiving it. I have to take a lot of my own preconceived notions, my ideas, and take them out of that so I can express what it is that I saw.
B: For anyone who’d want to apply for a Humanities Grant, do you have any advice?
J: Choose something that you’re really, really passionate about. I wouldn’t go into this thinking that you can give it half the effort that it requires, because in that span of the summer you will run into a time when that work gets challenging and you’ll want to put this down, and feel like you’re done with it. So choose something that really does inspire you, that makes you want to get up and explore.
And be honest. Be very very honest with yourself about that; the internship that I did last year and this one again are both very closely related to my life: the things that I’ve grown up seeing, the things that I’ve grown up wondering about. The trajectory of this research is I’m going into this kind of work, I’m going to be an immigration lawyer, so all of this is deeply intertwined into who I am, the things I want to advocate for, and see in other people.
The last student I interviewed was Jason Rowe, presenter of And We’re Going to Sing it Again: Hadestown and the Evolution of Orpheus and Eurydice, who studied the evolution of a musical thousands of years in the making.
B: Jason, can you tell us about your research?
Rowe: My project began examining Hadestown, it’s a modern musical based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. My initial plan was I’ll take a look at the original myth, I’ll take a look at the play, and see what changed. That became pretty darn hard, because there’s a bunch of original different versions. For my research, I decided to focus on two; one by the Roman poet Virgil, another by the Roman poet Avid. I analyzed what changed throughout time.
The initial story is the shortest by far, it’s only about 73 lines of poetry. The next version by Ovid is a couple hundred lines. A lot of it tells the same basic story, but it adds criticism of Emperor Augustus, the ruler during Ovid’s time. Essentially, Augustus made a lot of new rules regarding sexual orientation… in short banning homosexuality throughout Rome, which had been a part of Roman culture for thousands of years. So Ovid adds a second song to Virgil’s initial poem where the bard Orpheus sings about all these homosexual characters from Classical Antiquity… its his message to Augustus saying “you’re telling us we can’t do this, but it [same-sex couples] has been a part of our society for thousands of years.”
The modern version also has its own fair amount of criticism. The underworld goes from being lifeless because it’s like a desert wasteland to it’s lifeless because it’s a capitalistic hellscape; it’s full of oil and coal machines. The shades of antiquity don’t talk, speak, or hear from anyone because they have no soul, in Hadestown they don’t talk or hear because all they do is work.
B: What was it like studying that period of change where people used old stories to talk about new things, and how did you do it?
R: It was really fun! I would read the first story, then read the second one and write down everything that was different. That’s when while meeting with my advisor Dr. Taylor, we’d start asking the why. I had read scholarship about the Augustan laws I had mentioned, and thought that seemed familiar. Then looking at the stories that Orpheus sings about the couples, almost every single one responds to a different subset of those laws… It’s literally a one to one relationship.
B: What tips do you have for students interested in Humanities Grants?
R: Start with something that you really like… Ultimately, it [this project] stems from passion. Essentially what you’re doing is focusing on one thing you really like over the summer, so find that thing, find a question you can ask about it, and meet with an advisor that knows a lot about that thing.
Thank you again to Liam, France, and Jason for sharing their brilliant research from this summer. If you’re interested in exploring stipends for your own research, and other opportunities made possible through the Center for Humanities, you can find information via the following link: https://www.loyola.edu/department/center-humanities/grants-funded-opportunities/student/summer-study.html.
Stay tuned for our next issue, where Dr. Austin Parks from the History Department discusses research and the topic of War Memory.