Hoyas in the Humanities

Last month, the College of Arts & Sciences celebrated the opening of a dedicated space for the Georgetown Humanities Initiative.

By housing the initiative in historic Old North - the oldest academic building on the Hilltop - the university is symbolically and formally recommitting to, and celebrating, the humanities. Since the university's founding in 1789, the humanities have been central to a Georgetown education.

Today, they offer students an entry point into interdisciplinary research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge and facilitates journeys of personal growth.

"The humanities will broaden a student's perspective of the world around us through a deeper understanding of the human condition and cultures," said Toni Boucher, (P'98, '00, '04), one of the initiative's founding donors. "The skills developed through the humanities include communication, writing, evaluation of ideas, problem-solving and critical thinking skills, which are essential in any profession."

Getting Into the Gilded Age

Davis Fellow Melinda Reed (C'25) spent the summer bringing the humanities into her personal passion project, a novel set in the Gilded Age.

"I wanted to turn a novel I'd started as a teenager into a historically accurate, textured work that I could send to literary agencies," said Reed, a justice and peace studies major and creative writing minor. "In service of that specific personal goal, my alien-in-the-archives mentality worked-it allowed me to be curious and to approach my research with the mind of an artist as well as a historian."

Reed began working on the book when she was 16 during a summer writing camp at Georgetown.

"We went to the National Gallery of Art and were supposed to write something based on a painting," said Reed. "So, I picked a painting, "Study of Lilia" by Carolus-Duran, and started writing what would become my first novel that I finished in quarantine. Fast forward five years and I started building an academic project around my creative writing, realizing that there were a lot of gaps in that novel because originally I was writing it for fun and not for historical accuracy."

The book begins the same year Carolus-Duran painted his piece: 1887. A bildungsroman, it follows 19-year-old Lilia Daley from her sheltered rural life through an unplanned pregnancy and a clash of cultures as she begins working as a maid for a wealthy family on the New England coast.

Reed cites several faculty and staff members at Georgetown as being instrumental to the completion of the project, including creative writing professor Phil Sandick and historian Michael Kazin, who helped point her in the right direction when she began doing research. Outside of class, Reed worked as a student employee at the Center for Research & Fellowships, where the staff were able to help her reframe her creative project as a piece of academic research.

Reed began her summer in Rhode Island, where she conducted formal research and informal exploration of one of the settings in her work.

"I'd visited Newport when I was a kid and I remembered these mansions that are typically associated with the Gilded Age and the incredible amount of wealth that certain families had to have these summer homes on the coast," said Reed. "I was there looking at the current experience and talking to anybody who would talk to me-all of the tour guides were lovely and would talk about the period and help me get a sense of the physical space that the story was set in."

Once Reed was back home in New Jersey, she began commuting into New York City to do archival research. There, she looked through journals and letters from the Gilded Age to get a firsthand look at how her characters should speak, act, and think.

"I got so invested in the stories of the people that I was reading about-reading very personal documents that they probably never intended for anyone else to look at," said Reed. "I was very aware of that kind of privilege and that distant violation of privacy-to be able to read these documents and meet people who had lived so long ago and had all these emotions and feelings that they put on the page. I honestly felt honored to get a glimpse into their lives."

"After doing the research, I realized how much work the book needs in order to make it something I'm willing to send out. Now, I have a clearer sense of what I want the book to look like.

"Research, broadly defined, is the process of discovery," said Reed. "But in our attempt to define it more specifically, we've narrowed our understanding of what research can be, creating laws and a locked gate professing that only the qualified are allowed to enter and discover for themselves."

Reconstructing Paradise in the Humanities

Inspiration struck Alex Wang (C'25) during an introductory English literature course when she first read John Milton's Paradise Lost.

"All the texts we were reading were canonized-that's why they're in a survey course," said Wang. "I read Paradise Lost and it was such a long, dense, and incredibly beautiful text. It was so good and so amazing, but in many ways it didn't provide a foundational story that was relatable to me, personally, and to the community that I identify with."

Wang, who also received a Davis Fellowship to pursue her humanities research over the summer, scripted a one-act theatrical adaptation of Paradise Lost. At the end of the summer, she marked the completion of her script with a reading staged and attended by her close friends.

"I sought to create a world, a paradise, that I wish to live in," said Wang. "Even with minimal tech, I attempted to envision a coherent space. Having been a director and designer, I often see a world on stage more vividly than I can on paper-and that's where the audience comes in."

Wang is a double major in English and political economy with a minor in theater and performance studies.

"Paradise Lost can establish aesthetics often aligning with mainstream productions, I sought to create a world, a paradise, that I wish to live in. Even with minimal tech, I attempted to envision a coherent space. Having been a director and designer, I often see a world on stage more vividly than I can on paper-and that's where the audience comes in.

"Universal might not be the right word, but I believe that the script reflects a queer experience that is not just Chinese or only related to one religion," said Wang. "I hope this work is the first step toward creating more intersectional and cross-cultural projects."

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.