The Humanities Center and Ethical Inquiry at Carleton (EthIC) are pleased to announce the recipients of summer break Student Research Partner (SRP) awards for 2023. Congratulations to all!

Palmar Alvarez-Blanco (Spanish) and Grace Wallace-Jackson’24 will travel through northern Spain to record new interviews for the Constellation of the Commons’ project, a digital archive and ongoing research project that is open access. The archive has become a critical tool for political thinking and socio-cultural analysis of contemporary Spain, containing more than 90 interviews with collectives of practice operating in Spain who are reclaiming the system of the Commons. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Sarah Anthony (French and Francophone Studies) and Sarah Raman ’25 will look at how digital tools (such as Readlang, Quizlet, etc.) can support vocabulary acquisition through meaning-focused input and output, language-focused learning, and development of fluency, which are considered to be key strands of effective vocabulary teaching and learning. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Cecilia Cornejo (Cinema and Media Studies), Jeremy Gautama ’26 and Drew Rodriguez-Michel ’25 will work on The Wandering House ~ Sound Archive, an interactive archive and sound-mapping website that explores notions of home and belonging from the perspective of three river towns in southeastern Minnesota: Northfield, Lanesboro, and Red Wing. Funded by the EthIC Joan Hanson Fund.

Catherine Fortin (Linguistics) and Maika Danford ’24 will explore Indonesian syntax with a corpus investigation.  They will read and discuss a body of pertinent scholarly literature on the topic and compile, store, sort, code, and analyze that data. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Silvia López (Spanish) and Mitch Porter ’25 will work on the comparison of sources, evaluation and editing of texts and abstracts, as well as on the general preparation of a manuscript. The project “Ideas en su lugar: la teoría crítica en el sistema mundial” is scheduled for publication in 2024 in Spain. Funded by the EthIC Joan Hanson Fund

Austin Mason (History and Digital Arts and the Humanities) and his team of student researchers were awarded money to travel to Grinnell, IA and up to Moorhead, MN to meet with other team members of “The Virtual Viking Longship Project: A Study in the Future of Liberal Arts Teaching and Research,” a project to develop 3D models and virtual reality experiences around a Viking Age longship. The project directors and students from Grinnell and Carleton will collaborate with local and international museum partners, and will document the workflow and learning outcomes, including recommended best practices, to share with other undergraduate institutions, researchers, developers and the interested public. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Jake Morton (Classics) and Emery John ’24, Charlie Solomon ’25 and Nahome Lantyderu ’26 will do fieldwork in Greece toward a history of the Athamanians and the Dolopians, ancient Greek peoples who controlled key mountain passes and had a period of relatively outsize importance during Rome’s initial invasion of Greece between 200-167 BC. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Bill North (History) and Tim Abbott (’26) will work on collating the two known manuscripts to prepare a critical edition of a 12th century Latin commentary on the book of Lamentations by the monk William of Fly (Flaix), who was converted from Judaism as a young boy. The commentary forms part of a cluster of works on Lamentations that emerge in the first half of the 12th century and therefore can offer important insights into the changing meanings of Lamentations and the fall of Jerusalem. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Timothy Raylor (English) and Drew Rodriguez-Michel ’25 will work on Raylor’s edition of Thomas Hobbes’ De Corpore, and in particular on producing printable versions of the diagrams drawn by Hobbes and his scribes for the geometrical chapters of the text. This will require examining facsimiles of manuscript diagrams alongside the edited transcriptions and translations. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Jordan Rogers (Classics) and Samantha Zimmerman ’24 will travel to Italy to work on the Pompeii I.14 project, an archaeological excavation at the ancient site of Pompeii. This project is examining the development of one portion of the city, Insula I.14 in the modern address system. The project aims to uncover every phase of human habitation in our area below the 79 CE level, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted and buried the city under ash, and to collect and analyze data pertaining to the evolution of infrastructures for water and waste in this portion of the city. Funded by the Humanities Center Trustee Endowed Research Fund.

Ambar Galaviz ’26 and Riley Gibson’26 will assist Serena Zabin (History) in working through the nearly nine thousand petitions recently scanned by the State Library of Virginia. Such petitions allowed citizens and others to send complaints, requests or suggestions to the government. Zabin and the SRPs plan to organize these by type, gender, and other categories of claims to citizenship as a first step towards making sense of this enormous but underused source.