Humanities Moments

Items in the Graduate Student Summer Residents 2019 Collection

First Archival Visit
I hope I am not the only person who struggled to narrow their moment to a single episode. I am grateful for the prompt, though; in a summer full of dissertation writing and classroom prep, this prompt provided me an opportunity to appreciate how many…

Unexpected Lessons in Empowerment
My Humanities Moment involves a connection between two individuals that might not initially seem to have anything in common: Jane Austen and Quentin Tarantino. One of the first places I found inspiration for the tenacity that has always kept me going…

What About the Jesus Movement?
My humanities moment came with my conversion from Islam to Christianity. It opened a wide world for me and enabled me to see that my new faith was distinct, but shared some of its humanistic values which we find in religious traditions around the…

"The Town that Freedom Built": Preserving Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville
This plaque, and several others, are sprinkled throughout Eatonville, Florida to guide a walking tour of America's first legally established self-governing all-African American municipality. Eatonville was established in 1887. The town gained…

Damaged Goods? Learning about (Mis)information about Sexuality in the Clinic
My humanities moment connects to a book, titled Damaged Goods: Women Living With Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases written by Adina Nack, a sociologist and women’s and gender studies (WGS) scholar writing about health, sexuality, and society.…

Be What You Want to Be
In this audio recording, graduate student Jingyi Li describes how a late twentieth-century academic study of the book in Japan upended her expectations by rejecting the Eurocentric and Orientalist bias of many comparable scholarly works. Her…

The Day I Decided to Major in History
Graduate student Justina Licata explains how a junior high school teacher's passion and influence led her to embrace the study of history as a lifelong vocation.

Votes for Women at Mystic Seaport
The year 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in the United States. I don’t think I truly grasped the reality that (white) American women have only had the right to vote for a century until I met a woman living in the…

The Power of Oral History
I think I’ve always been an oral historian, but I didn’t always know to call myself one. When I was a young kid, I used to spend countless evening hours bombarding my father—always at the end of his long workdays—with questions about his life in…

Rolling with Difference
The image I chose for my humanities moment is representative of how I have come to understand myself, society and the cities around the world. While many might see poverty and struggle in Africa, this man is a waste-picker (recycler) in Johannesburg…

From a Cultural Perspective
In this audio recording, graduate student Margherita Berti describes how an ordinary encounter while studying abroad gave her a new outlook on cultural differences, practices, and perspectives.

All Thanks to Olivia Pope
I decided to go into academia at a panel about Scandal. It was 2015 and I was a college senior.

Like millions of other fans, one weekly joy was Shonda Rhimes’ Thursday night primetime takeover: Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with…