Panel Title: Storytelling and Humanities Research in the Real World
Panel Moderator: Emily Wood ‘09, MHC Art Museum
This panel explores lessons learned about storytelling, independent research, and constructed narratives during our 2024 summer internships and projects. Stretching from the Mount Holyoke campus to as far as South Korea, our respective adventures led us to different facets of public history-making and working in the humanities. Among the four panelists, one student worked at the MHC Archives on the “History of Clapp” exhibition, one student was a reporter at a local newspaper, one student independently researched how museums in South Korea represented WWII Japanese colonization, and another student participated in a two-month archaeological excavation of a Roman town in Türkiye. We learned to analyze different materials in an archive, to tell the stories of people grounded in a local community, to conduct qualitative research on postcolonial memory in museum spaces, and to understand how archaeological evidence helps to reconstruct the lives of people typically left out of literary records.

• Speaker 2 Name: Kiera McLaughlin
  Title: Talking it out: Reporting and Writing Local Stories
• Speaker 3 Name: Christina Li
  Title: Postcolonial Memory: Representations of Japanese Colonialism in Korean Museums
• Speaker 4 Name: Audrey Chen
  Title: Peeling off Time: Digging and Reflecting on a Late Roman Archaeological Site