Running After Questions

After working on the journal for six years, Dr. Caroline Sherman is passing off the baton of Faculty Co-Editor of Inventio. Dr. Sherman is an Associate Professor of History at Catholic University, joining the University’s staff in the Fall of 2007. Newly appointed Associate Dean for Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Dr. Sherman has her hands full with a new kind of work, alongside the continuation of research for another book. 

Growing up in a college town, Dr. Sherman knew from an early age that she would pursue a life in academia. At the age of three or four, she dressed up as a professor for Halloween. This comes as no surprise considering her father was a professor of biology at Oberlin College, Ohio and her mother working in development and advancement, also at Oberlin.

“There were certainly other things that interested me in the world, but it was kind of always there, calling to me,” she said, referring to her ambitions to study academia.

Of course, she had doubts about her path along the way. After graduating from Harvard in 1999 with her B.A. in History, Dr. Sherman took a year off, deciding that, “it would be good to look at graduate school from a distance to make sure it was really truly what I wanted to do.”

It was. Dr. Sherman went on to complete her M.A. in History at Princeton University and began teaching at Catholic University in Fall of 2007, receiving her Ph.D. from Princeton the following year. Dr. Sherman’s studies focus on early modern intellectual history, or “the history of ideas and the role that ideologies, or ways of thinking about the world, influence what we actually do.”

Regarding first beginning to teach at Catholic, she said, “It was different having a whole stable of courses that I was responsible for, unlike as a graduate student, learning from the professors while also doing these small discussion sections.” 

Despite the newfound challenges of being a full-time professor, Dr. Sherman said that, “It felt comfortable to me to work at a religious school so I was glad to have that opportunity.” Outside of religious appeal, Dr. Sherman was drawn by the university’s emphasis on research and location, being in the nation’s capital.

While at Catholic, Dr. Sherman took on her own research endeavor, publishing a book in 2018 on the history of cy-pres doctrine, a charitable trust law. The book grew out of a class Dr. Sherman teaches on the history of European law. While lecturing on the tradition of cy-pres doctrine, she thought to herself, “that doesn’t make any sense.”

She then began to search for an answer to this question in canon law, but the more she dug into it, she realized that it wasn’t there. 

“I just ran after a question I found very interesting.”

It was Dr. Sherman’s intellectual curiosity that made her the perfect fit for Faculty Co-Editor of Inventio. 

Dr. Sherman was first approached about Inventio by Peter Shoemaker, the Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the time.

“Inventio was Taryn Okuma’s brainchild. [Shoemaker] was looking for one other faculty member to come in and help support this so it wouldn’t be her doing this all on her own. They pitched the idea to me and I said, ‘this would be amazing.’” 

The concept of a research journal for undergraduate studies struck Dr. Sherman as such a rich opportunity for her students. Year after year she watched senior history students write incredible theses that deserved to be read more widely

“They write it, maybe use it as a writing sample, and that’s the end of it. I’d long-wished there was something more they could do.”

Then there was. 

When the journal’s first call for submissions came and went, Dr. Sherman said, “I remember sitting down with [Dr. Okuma], we had mapped out all these papers and said, ‘who are the faculty we’re going to ask to read these?’”

That then became her job: getting the papers, passing them onto the appropriate faculty to read, and getting comments back. Sometimes the comments were serious enough to send them back to the student for revisions, but many times the papers had already been thoroughly edited between the student submitting it and a faculty advisor. 

The process was: “We get the supervisor’s opinion, we get an outsider’s opinion, we package it, and then send it to the [student editorial] board. At that point, Taryn would take over.”

The applicants for the first student editorial board were “a small, but very healthy group.” The meeting to select the students that would comprise the board was very exciting for both Dr. Sherman and Dr. Okuma. “We were just sitting with all these applications and reading through and seeing who would be a match for this, who would make sense for that.”

Dr. Sherman has enjoyed watching the trajectory of the journal’s growth, noting that, “A couple years in, it became much easier to get papers, and applications to the student editorial board.”

There’s nothing more sensational than unboxing the freshly printed newest issue of Inventio, opening up that first page, and knowing that you played a hand in putting those words in print. “Seeing the finished project,” in that same intimate sense, is what Dr. Sherman will miss the most about working on the journal. She is looking forward to reading future issues, but recognizes that she is saying goodbye to her involvement between the pages. 

Instead of publishing research, Dr. Sherman is focusing on writing her own.  Her next book focuses on the research dynasty of the Godefroys, a family of scholars who worked from the 16th through the 19th centuries in France. Their research concerns “law and history and the intersection between the two fields,” topics with which Dr. Sherman herself is deeply fascinated. 

Next semester, you can find her at the University’s Rome Center, exploring the intersection of these two fields further in her course, Roman Law and Legacy.

We wish her all the best in her travels, teaching, and research. Thank you, Dr. Sherman, for all that you’ve done for the journal; it could not have made it this far without your dedication to broadcast the intellectual curiosity of our students.