For the second year, the College of Arts & Sciences offered its summer Humanities Fellowships to interested students. The program aims to match students interested in conducting research with a professor in the college. During the summer of 2008, 13 Fellows studied with various professors from different departments within the college, including history, English, psychology, communications and international area studies.
The students and professors were matched as follows:
Fellow |
Professor |
Area of Research |
Lea T. Burns |
Dr. Doreen Alvarez Saar |
English and Philosophy |
Andrew Damron |
Anne-Marie Obajtek-Kirkwood |
International Area Studies |
Madison Eggert-Crowe |
Scott Knowles |
History and Politics |
Jennifer Fromal |
Dr. Scott Warnock |
English and Philosophy |
Sharyn Hewlett |
Mary Ebeling |
Culture & Communication |
Katherine Kelly |
Wes Shumar |
International Area Studies |
Steven Leitner |
Christian Hunold |
History and Politics |
Amanda McArthur |
Barbara Hoekje |
English and Philosophy |
Carol Moniz |
Susan E. Stein |
Culture & Communication |
Stephaine Nguyen |
Dr. Rakhmiel Peltz |
International Area Studies |
John C. Parrish |
Michael Sullivan |
History and Politics |
Jordan Schilling |
Kathleen Volk Miller |
English and Philosophy |
Jamie Siegel |
Naomi Goldstein |
Psychology |
Research topics themselves varied from team to team. Stephanie Nguyen's research in international area studies, for instance, focused on cultural reparations made after genocides, comparing those of the Holocaust to reparations for the genocide in Rwanda.
"[Dr. Peltaz and I] found that there is a lack in reparations geared towards cultural aspects," Nguyen said. "Most of the money went to welfare programs in the case of German reparations to Jewish peoples. In places such as Rwanda, however, where the guilty party had less money to give to the victims, there was more focus in cultural reparations because the government did not have money to put into welfare programs."
Other research focused on topics closer to the area. Madison Eggert-Crowe's focused on the topic of Philadelphia in the year 2009 for a chapter in a book. Eggert-Crowe's research focused on Philadelphia's most famous urban planner, Edmund Bacon, and his essay "Philadelphia in the Year 2009."
"In the essay, Bacon imagined the city of Philadelphia 50 years in the future with the Bicentennial Fair as a tool for its realization," Eggert-Crowe said. "I worked in three archive locations in Philadelphia doing primary research on Bacon and his role as a head planner of the Bicentennial celebration in Philadelphia."
But experience conducting research was not the only advantage for Fellows. Students also benefited from working closely and professionally with professors.
"Working on historical research with Professor Knowles was incredibly rewarding," Eggert-Crowe said. "It allowed me to hone my research skills while giving me a greater appreciation for historical research."
Eggert-Crowe was able to continue her research work as an independent research project, which culminated into a final paper analyzing Bacon's planning role in the pedestrian mall on Chestnut Street.
"I hope to one day publish work, so this fellowship helped me broaden my research skills and pushed me closer to achieving that goal. I plan to continue this independent research project as I enter my senior year," Eggert-Crowe said.
The Humanities Fellowships offered other Fellows an opportunity to see different sides of their majors. Jordan Schilling, for example, worked with Painted Bride Quarterly to research funding and grant writing opportunities that are available to the literary magazine.
"Being that I'm an English major, the fellowship gave me a taste of business and management which I rarely get to experience," Schilling said. "The grant writing projects exponentially helped my writing skills, especially in writing for audience. Awareness of audience and tailoring language is essential in writing winning grants."
Schilling's experience also taught him out-of-the-classroom lessons and allowed him to develop not just his writing skills.
"Working with Volk Miller and participating in a national literary magazine like PBQ ultimately developed my leadership and research skills," Schilling said.
Other English majors had topics on the opposite end of the spectrum. Amanda McArthur spent her Fellowship working with Dr. Barbara Hoekje, a socio-linguist and head of Drexel's English Language Center. Her research was in the fields of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP).
"We looked at materials from [http://rareconservation.org/]Rare, a conservation program working in developing tropical areas in the world," McArthur explained. "Part of what the group does involves teaching English to people in rural Costa Rica for the purposes of eco-tourism – the program both aids in conservation by raising money and awareness through tourism and gets people jobs in rural Costa Rica by teaching them the language and skills they need to be tour guides."
A few years ago, Rare compiled a How-To manual for setting up similar language programs in other areas of the world, which also includes a sample curriculum, program, and materials. While all the materials and examples are specifically for Spanish-speaking people, the manual could theoretically be applied anywhere. However, the group never finished getting the manual, which was divided into five volumes, out to the public. McArthur worked to compile the research that Rare had done, research similar work that may have been done, and get the materials out to the public through Drexel in an accessible way.
However, for McArthur, "accessible" meant reading the entire five volumes and creating a simple explanation and navigation for them in electronic form, as well as writing reviews of them to accompany the documents and outlining the original creator's vision. The research has yet to appear online, though, because of a breakdown in communication with the original writers, whose permission was needed.
McArthur was also able to continue her research project as an independent study during her senior year.
"The additional, optional, benefit of the Fellowship is having a parallel independent study," McArthur said. "I chose to do a study on language learning theory and teaching English as a Second Language. I studied the theory for six weeks, while observing classes in the English Language Center twice a week."
McArthur then had the opportunity to teach her own class for the last three weeks of the term.
"It was an experience that not many students have the opportunity to have, and I learned more about teaching English by actually observing and doing it than I could ever have hoped through just reading about it," McArthur said.
McArthur's immediate goals are to teach English as a second language abroad, and ultimately to go into the field of Linguistics. She has applied for a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship for the 2009-2010 school year in Bulgaria. While she has always had the idea to teach abroad, she gives the Fellowship opportunity credit for providing her with the skills and experience she needed to have a chance at the Fulbright scholarship.
"My experience with Dr. Hoekje enabled me to enter her world of socio-linguistics," McArthur said. "The biggest benefit of working directly and having a one-on-one relationship with a faculty member is the frequent opportunities to learn about how they got where they did, what they do, and what would be involved in the mentee following a similar path. It's eye-opening as far as the ‘real-world' of academics. The student also, of course, gets hands-on experience with academic research, including talking to other people in the field as a sort of peer, which can be empowering."
Other Fellows felt the same way about their experience working with a professor. Jen Fromal worked with Dr. Scott Warnock to assist in his ongoing LeBow Writing Assessment project, which aims to see if business professionals and English professors look for different characteristics in a student's writing to determine if it is "good" or not. The secondary aim of Fromal's research was to help LeBow evaluate its students' writing capabilities, and make adjustments in areas where these students were, overall, weak.
"I had a great experience working with Warnock," said Fromal. "He is genuinely interested in the research that he is doing, and was eager to help me come up with a research project on my own. He assisted me in any way that he could – including giving me tips on the best way to organize a spreadsheet of 30 evaluators with 600 documents, and helping me research the topic of my side project. From working with Warnock, I learned how to better collect and analyze data, and the process of getting a scholarly article published."
Overall, students found the fellowship opportunity stimulating, rewarding and educational.
"Working with Dr. Saar enabled me to get a feel for real research — the process, the pitfalls," said Lea T. Burns.
Burns' project focused on researching Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and his influence in Orange County, New York. She researched anti-Catholic sentiments in this area, in conjunction with de Crevecoeur's religious choices.
