Humanities Night: Giving a Platform to Liberal Arts Research
Since 1998, Upper School students at Riverdale have been able to present at the Science Symposium, a celebration of their hard work in science research. It was only last year that a similar event for the liberal arts was created: Humanities Night.
Humanities Night centers around presenting the English, language, and history-related research conducted by Riverdale students. This year, it fell on Monday, February 24th, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm. Students were required to make posters of their findings to be presented at the beginning of the night in the Multipurpose Room (MPR).
The content on the posters ranged from the methods of research (academic journals, old posters, microfilm) to the analysis offered by the researchers themselves (such as tying a small event back to a larger social movement). The diverse information written on these posters demonstrated the wide variety of experiences and perspectives that students had when conducting their investigations.
In the MPR, friends, family, and faculty took a gallery walk around the room and listened to the people explain their work. Then, from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm, students each presented a five-minute slideshow that further explained their research.
The Chair of the History Department, Dr. Laura Honsberger, said that the first Humanities Night last year was “a great chance for families, students, and teachers to come see student work, hear presentations, and to think about the deep thinking that’s happening outside of the classroom.”
Dr. Honsberger’s goal was to uplift humanities students by giving them an opportunity to educate community members about their research. As a result, she has created a place where student passion projects are supported and honored by others. In addition, she feels that Humanities Night fosters the curiosity of the students who attend and encourages them to pursue their own areas of interest.
Ninth-grader Annie Singh, for instance, developed an English research project over winter break that analyzed the similarities between two epic poems, Beowulf and The Epic of Gilgamesh: “I mostly used J-Source to look at academic journals,” she said. Singh was inspired to research this topic over winter break after reading the Epic of Gilgamesh and being gifted Beowulf for Christmas.
For Humanities Night, she prepared a short presentation as well as a poster with the four key similarities that she found while cross-referencing articles and opinions on each work. These academic papers consisted of Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics by J.R.R Tolkien (before he wrote Lord of the Rings), Gilgamesh and the Powers of Narration by Liesbeth Korthal Altes, and a dozen other sources.
Sophomore Keira Chen, on the other hand, did her research as an intern at the New York Historical Society last summer: “The internship’s main theme was ‘Fredrick Douglass’ America During the Reconstruction Era’. The interns were split into groups where they could create different types of digital humanities projects. My group chose to do a website.”
Chen’s group focused on Chinese immigration and activism on the West Coast during the late 19th century. Their website contains a timeline of events related to those topics that happened during the Reconstruction period (1863 - 1877). In addition, the website also includes a map and an analysis of an 1874 pamphlet titled, The Chinese Question From a Chinese Standpoint, which was written by five Chinese merchants to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.
Chen presented her website on Humanities Night by showing it on her computer during the gallery walk and later projecting it for her presentation. She hoped that this website will be used as “...an educational resource for students because a lot of the time the voices of marginalized groups in history aren’t heard.”
Humanities Night provides students with the opportunity to teach the Riverdale community about a niche interest or an important historical event for an underrepresented group of people. Above all else, students are digging deeper into fields of study they care about and sharing that with others.
Dr. Honsberger had hoped this would be the case when she first launched the event: “I think that it can be easy for humanities research to be really isolating. It’s important for students to have a chance to talk to other people about the work they’ve been doing.”
Humanities Night is a chance for students to connect with other community members over their passions. But it also demonstrates that like science research, academia in the liberal arts is just as deserving of a platform for recognition.
