Department of Languages & Literature
Amount Awarded: $3,923.50
Awarded for 2016-17
Title: Workshop to Facilitate Undergraduate Research in Medieval Text and Image Studies
I seek funding to sponsor a workshop to facilitate interdisciplinary faculty collaboration to foster undergraduate research in medieval text and image studies. The workshop would include students and faculty from the UofU and from USU as well as an outside expert. The workshop (Fall 2016) will introduce faculty and students to innovative medieval digital humanities resources to prepare undergraduate research projects that will be presented in a symposium (Spring 2017).
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The grant I received was to support a faculty workshop to encourage and facilitate students and faculty working with manuscripts. The main goal was to show undergraduates and professors of undergraduate classes that manuscript study is more accessible than ever because of the incredible number of resources currently available online at places like the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale. The workshop piggybacked on my Honors/Humanities Research Professorship and drew all nine of the students enrolled in that. The following majors were involved: French (3), English (2), Philosophy, History, Art History, HB 60.
The first event was a faculty workshop where the invited speaker, Jessica Brantley (English), Yale, Jesse Hurlbut (French), BYU, and Tom Stillinger (U of U) and Disa Gambera (U of U) facilitated a discussion in the Marriott Library’s Rare Book Room. The discussion included Luise Poulton and Jon Bingham from Marriott. Faculty from Honors, English, and World Languages and Cultures attended. Students were also invited to this faculty workshop and we had most of the group and a few students from Honors IT classes.
With funds from the World Language and Culture Department I took a small group of the faculty to lunch at the Fine Arts Museum.
The second event was a talk by the invited guest, Jessica Brantley. Professor Brantley introduced faculty and students to forthcoming work on a fascinating manuscript handbook that she is writing. A selection of the new book was delivered electronically one week before the talk. The talk lasted approximately one hour and discussion filled the remaining 30 minutes. The discussion was lively and quite a dialogue, with many students participating. Professor Brantley smartly asked all the students what their biggest problem or challenge was in trying to work with manuscripts. The question led to a roundtable-type discussion with other faculty and all students getting involved. The most common challenge was the remoteness of manuscripts, their difficult script, their indecipherability, the lack of material and intellectual context for working with them.
The third event was the student workshop and flowed directly out of the questions posed and dialogue initiated in the talk. It was more individually focused and allowed students to speak at some length about their own projects. Though many students were tired and the subject seemed difficult, most walked away with fairly concrete plans for moving their H2 projects forward.
With funds from the World Language and Culture Department I took a small group of faculty to dinner at Mom’s Café. It was a splendid end to a long day for all.
My grant application invoked the possibility of a student conference in Spring 2017 but did not ask for funds for the conference. With the limited institutional support that I had, I judged it better to help students seek opportunities to present their work at larger, more recognized forums (see Outcomes below).
Since IMS was unable to provide any support for recording the workshop, and I was quite involved as a participant in the workshop and could not myself take pictures, I am afraid I have no media to document the event.
Outcomes:
Of the students involved in the workshop, three gave papers in November at a student research conference in Logan (USU) that Alexa Sand (Art History) has been organizing for the past two years. The papers were incredibly well received, even by the visiting outside speaker, a preeminent national authority in Art History. Another student presented her research at two additional conferences: the first at Utah Valley and the second at the annual undergraduate research symposium at the U. Two other students moved their projects more into a research and writing mode. One finished her thesis in Spring 2017; the other will finish his in Summer 2017.