During the months of June and July of this year, I explored the realm of Middle English Literature with Professor Dorothy Kim. Working with Professor Kim, I studied medieval manuscripts and analyzed one in particular, Laud 108, to produce a topics map. The topics map is essentially a list of all of the scholarly work that has been written about Laud 108 in the past 100 years. Our goal in creating this map is to make articles, books, and papers more readily available to medievalists hoping to study Laud 108. With an easy to read, organized list of sources, complete with author, year, date, publication, and key words, scholars will be able to streamline and simplify their own research.

As Professor Kim’s research assistant, I also helped her to plan an upcoming conference, “Making Early Middle English”. This is a conference that Professor Kim and her research partner, Professor Williams Boyarin of the University of Victoria, have been organizing and will host together this September at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. My duties relating to the conference have involved setting up and managing social media accounts, communicating with scholars to arrange travel, and finally, writing a paper of my own to present at the conference. Tying in with my topics map research, I have written a paper about one of the texts in Laud 108, Havelok the Dane. During the Making EME conference, I will present my paper as a part of a panel of scholars.

My conference paper focuses specifically on gender and vulnerability in the Havelok narrative. Using my topics map, I analyzed modern scholarly work about gender and Medieval Literature to interpret this over 600 year old manuscript. While Havelok the Dane is one of the oldest English Romances, I wanted to examine it through a modern lens. Through my own reinterpretation and that of current Havelok scholars, I found that Havelok is a character that combines masculinity and femininity and challenges our perception of the standard “Medieval hero”.

This summer experience has been one I will treasure long after I graduate from Vassar. Not only did I gain invaluable research skills, but my particular Ford experience brought me to London in July, where Professor Kim and I researched at the British Library. Having never traveled to England before, I relished in the experience of studying and living in London for four weeks. Being surrounded by the rich literary history of London and working in the remarkable environment of the British Library massively enhanced my Ford experience. I am so grateful Professor Kim and the Ford Scholars program for this wonderful summer. Additionally, I am appreciative of the continued support of Vassar in sending me to present at the Making EME conference.

My Ford Scholar project consisted of my taking scholarly editions of music from the Middle Ages up through the late Renaissance and using the music notation software Sibelius to turn them into performance scores that could be used by ensembles.

In completing this project, I gained exposure to an incredible amount of early repertoire to which I would not have otherwise been exposed. In addition to giving me music with which to work, my Ford Scholar mentor, lecturer Drew Minter, encouraged me to spend time browsing the parts of the Music Library where all the reserve, anthology editions of early music are kept. Drew pointed out to me that before the Internet made music-browsing incredibly simple from one’s desk, the way that generations upon generations of people discovered and became familiar with musical literature was by searching through libraries. I learned that being able to quickly and easily navigate a music library is itself a skill that I would like to cultivate.

In completing this project, I learned the countless aspects of a piece of music that make the score easily readable and accessible for a musician – facets that I had never considered before. These qualities include but are not limited to spacing, alignment, and size of: lyrics, note-heads, note stems, bar lines, staves, systems (sets of staves), clefs, time signatures and key signatures. As someone who struggles with visual processing issues, being able to create visually clear scores was extremely satisfying for me.

I had the experience of translating a great deal of Latin, in addition to Spanish. I decided that the clearest way to insert these translations into the scores was to put them right next to the original Latin or Spanish lyrics, a feature that most performance scores do not have.

I was also tasked with creating clear keyboard reductions of all the vocal parts. My experience in playing keyboards gave me many good ideas on how to make those keyboard parts as neat and clear as possible.

I am pleased that I was able to acquire solid proficiency with Sibelius this summer. I realized that this is a skill set that I will absolutely need at some point, since I would like to pursue a career that focuses on sacred music, and therefore much early music. I look forward to incorporating score creation into my career trajectory.

The Voter Education Project (VEP) was a civil rights program that operated in the American South during the 1960s.  Over the course of this summer, we focused largely on the first iteration of the Project, which registered over one million African Americans between 1962 and the 1964 election, which was a major feat one year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act.  VEP was administered through the Southern Regional Council (SRC), a nonpartisan, biracial group based in Atlanta.  Three private foundations–the Stern Family Fund, the Taconic Foundation and the Field Foundation–provided an overwhelming majority of the funding for VEP.  Over the course of the Project, the SRC distributed almost $1 million to civil rights groups, such as SNCC, the NAACP, CORE, and the SCLC, among others, for voter education and registration.  During this Ford project, we worked with documents from the Taconic Foundation, stored at the Rockefeller Archive.  Additionally, we worked with microfilmed documents from the Southern Regional Council that pertained to the Voter Education Project.  

Despite VEP’s remarkable results, very little has been published about it.  We examined VEP from several different angles, including some of SNCC’s files, some of SCLC’s files, in addition to the SRC’s own files on VEP.  In conjunction with the limited secondary source material available, we gleaned a slightly different picture of the origins than some of the published material.  Stephen Currier, the President of the Taconic Foundation, seems to have in the end played a larger role in the creation of the project than he had previously been given credit for.  By focusing on primary documents from both sides (the grant recipients and the grant-making organizations) we were able to see some of the tensions caused throughout the process.  Smaller organizations often had problems with the reporting requirements, leading to many letters asking for documentation from the grant-makers.  Being able to view this dynamic, and how it was not nearly as much of an issue for the larger organizations such as the NAACP was quite fascinating.   

Working on a project about voting rights during an election year, especially one as fraught as the 2016 election, placed our research in a broader perspective.  Especially in light of the recent near-gutting of the Voting Rights Act, recognizing the absurd lengths white registrars went to in Mississippi to prevent black voters from voting has rarely ever been so important.

This summer, I had the pleasure of working with Professor Amodio on editing papers for a collection of essays in memory of John Miles Foley, a titan in the study of oral tradition and a great friend to the contributing scholars. Foley was instrumental to the study of oral tradition, or the transmission of stories, histories, genealogies, etc., through not only his impressive corpus of books and articles, but also through his founding of the Oral Tradition journal, making access to scholarly articles on the subject possible to readers all around the world.

John Miles Foley in 2011

The concept of an oral tradition is especially important to keep in mind when considering texts that were originally composed orally, so that the texts can be considered in the original context in which they were created and performed. This extends to any orally-composed text, whether it is an Anglo-Saxon epic, like Beowulf, a Kirghiz epic, or a Nigerian oral poem composed in honor of a political election, spanning multiple historical periods, cultures, and geographical borders. Placing a text back into its performative context helps bring the text to life for the reader in a way that the written text often is not able to fully convey.

Thus, the core of my work this summer was to read through the essays sent in by scholars, each one detailing Foley’s study of orality as it relates to their specific field of study. Our editing process consisted of going through each essay multiple times, each time taking care to make sure that the version conformed to the proper citation style and ensuring that the necessary changes were inserted. After we had both gone through an essay enough times (which could be anywhere from three to six times) that it became sufficiently polished, the essay was sent off to its author for approval, along with any questions we may have had concerning the text, and was only then considered ready for the next phase of editing.

Me and the many essays I worked on during the course of the project.

Aside from copy-editing essays, I also helped with preparing other details necessary to producing a completed book, like writing short summaries of the essays for the front piece, securing the rights to reproduced images, working on the logistics of incorporating an audio component into a book, and communicating with the various contributors to get feedback on our edits and smooth out any textual uncertainties.

I have learned a considerable amount this summer, not only about editing a book, but also about oral tradition and its application to texts as a means of preserving the performative context that is lost when a text is written down. Oral tradition is alive and well today, and I am glad to have been able to help with the book dedicated to honoring Foley’s memory as a scholar and friend to all of the authors involved.

Ford Scholars Program: Anish Kanoria & Neal Bhandari

Vassar College has successfully received an exploration grant from the Luce Foundation on the study of China’s environment. Over the Spring of 2016, Professors Su and Zhou taught the annual International Study Trip class about China and its development and environment. The class went on a study trip to China with 27 students and 10 faculty members between March 11 and 25.

The Ford Scholars project throughout the summer, following the semester-long course, focused on compiling research from the trip, helping faculty members to develop teaching modules for the future, preparing for the faculty pedagogy workshop, and researching about China-related topics. In addition, the project also assisted in preparing materials for the application of the implementation grant from the Luce Foundation. As a part of this, a ten-minute video summary of the class, trip, faculty workshop, and summer research was also created. This video is in the post-production stage and will be available very soon. 

We created annotated bibliographies for 7 professors on topics ranging from urbanism to genetics in China. In particular, we researched China before, during, and after the Paris climate talks (COP21); food, crops, farming, and energy in China; maps and research articles on Chinese cities and urbanism; potable water in Fiji, Singapore, and NYC and biodiversity and marine ecosystems in China.

These annotated bibliographies were used as a basis for a pedagogy workshop conducted from June 14-15 in which faculty discussed ways and modules through which China and Asia could be incorporated into existing and/or new courses. This interdisciplinary meeting also discussed best teaching practices, the participating faculty’s experiences from the trip and how their disciplines intersected.

Using this research, an online database was created as an infrastructure for a larger initiative to foster a community of resources regarding Asia and the environment between students and faculty at the college. Eventually, as this initiative grows, these resources will be made available to the public. The hope is to make this a convenient, cohesive, and reliable database on information related to Asia incorporating not only the environment, but also politics, economics, society, and culture.

Database screenshot 1

Database screenshot 2

Throughout the course of the project, the scholars also visited the Princeton Club of New York to attend a lecture called “Learning from New York: New Urbanism in China” by Paul Whalen. Students also traveled to Providence and Washington D.C. for related activities.

The project has been a dynamic and rewarding experience through which we sharpened our research and computer skills while making valuable connections and memories.

This semester, Professor Simpson and I worked on a theoretical framework of autobiographical production in hip-hop culture. As reference, we used a range of texts: Reality Hunger, by David Shields; Memoir: A History, by Ben Yagoda; The Vibe History of Hip Hop anthology; and cultural criticism by Imani Perry, Tricia Rose, Russell A. Potter, Jeff Chang, and Steve Stoute.

George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

The holy grail of “keeping it real” is one that concerns scholars and artists alike. Authenticity is a central mandate of hip-hop, a fact that becomes increasingly contested as the genre courts more mainstream audiences. What does it mean when hip-hop—a black American art form with strong regional ties—enters the realm of popular culture as an alleged testimony to black experience? What does it mean when popular artists deliberately invoke urban poverty in order to shore up their own credibility? What cultural narratives are reinforced when they rap about bootstrapping their way to success, incorporating specific racial performances—”badman” posturing and braggadocio; lavish displays of consumerist excess—into their branding as “the real thing”?

We connect the rise of popular hip-hop to shifting trends in cultural production: namely, the cult of the individual as expressed through autobiography. Autobiography has always been a political pursuit for black Americans, beginning with slave narratives in the eighteenth century. Claims of authenticity have plagued this tradition since it began, a result of its role in political conflicts between pro-abolitionists and supporters of slavery. We also link anxiety about “realness” to the contradictory nature of autobiography itself. On one hand, memoir claims to tell the truth; on the other, it fabricates its vision of the self based on the narrative the autobiographer has assigned. Hip-hop performers engage with these realities through complex strategies of self-branding, often using social media.

“Ill Na Nas, Goddesses, and Drama Mamas,” from The Vibe History of Hip Hop, feat. Lil’ Kim.

By raising these questions of memory and realness, we hope to determine the means and the ends of the black “subject” that hip-hop produces.