A historian, an artist, and a statistician walk into a bar….
Faculty members Rebecca Brückmann (Associate Professor of History), Jade Hoyer (Assistant Professor of Art), and Claire Kelling (Assistant Professor of Statistics) engaged in a research circle funded by Carleton’s Humanities Center in Summer 2023. Through regular summer meetings, we became more familiar with one another’s research, and discussed future collaboration opportunities in our research and teaching. Since that time, we have been able to set our plans for collaboration developed over the summer into motion, and we will discuss some of this progress below.
Beyond finding one another’s research fascinating (Brückmann studies the transnational history of Black ballet in the 19th and 20th centuries across the Atlantic; Hoyer in her creative research uses reproducible printmaking media to address social issues; Kelling studies the use of statistics to understand issues related to public policy), we were excited to discover opportunities for integrating our teaching practices. For example, Brückmann’s teaching on the Civil Rights era could engage with Hoyer’s teaching on printmaking and poster art as a form of political protest; Hoyer’s teaching conveying visual hierarchy and principles of design could engage with Kelling’s data visualization work; and Kelling’s use of natural language processing tools in statistical analysis is relevant to Brückmann’s teaching of analyzing historical sources. We also found that our research and teaching practices share a common emphasis on promoting access and equity in classroom spaces, and so many of our summer conversations highlighted how we engage in such work in our various fields and teaching spaces.
Thanks to these conversations that began in the research circle, in 2024, we were able to put some of these plans into action. For example, students in Bruckmann’s HIST 126, “African American History II: 1865 until Today” collaborated with Hoyer and the Office of Intercultural Life. Students synthesized their knowledge of African American history and the ongoing Black Freedom Movement and created their own text-based artworks as an homage to the letterpress artist, Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. This work was displayed in Upper Sayles in Winter and Spring terms. Kelling and Hoyer are currently working on a grant proposal to create an artistic data visualization of climate change in Rice County.
Through this accountability structure in summer 2023, we were able to support our research practices. We are excited to see that model bear fruit for us, to engage with one another across disciplines, and to practice the liberal arts ethos we promote to our students.
