Research Team

The Researcher

Katharine Nusbaum is an Honors College senior with a major in Linguistics and minors in History and Medical Humanities. Her primary academic interests include looking at the intersection of sociocultural linguistics, history, and library science. It is from this combination that this project was conceived!

She is proud to be a College of Arts and Science Dean's Scholar Award recipient, which helped fund her Honors Senior Project research and enabled her to present her work at the Undergraduate Research Forum. Additional supplements to this project include her work as a Student Assistant at the Walter Havighurst Special Collections library and her collaboration with her faculty mentor, Rachel Makarowski.

Faculty Mentor

Rachel Makarowksi is a Special Collections Librarian at the Walter Havighurst Special Collections library. Her help in narrowing the focus of research, writing letters of recommendation, and editing the finished product has been paramount to the success of Katharine's project. Along with this, her extensive knowledge in the fields of library science and academic research has guided Katharine's entire education at Miami University - not just within the scope of this endeavor. Much gratitude is extended to her for these incredibly valuable contributions.

Career-Readiness Skills

The rich experience of conducting a large-scale independent research project has enabled Katharine to gain a variety of NACE career readiness skills, which include:

• 1 - Critical Thinking: Creating a multi-faceted project that required compiling a large bibliography of relevant scholarly sources, writing a meta-analysis based on the source's methods, and ensuring clairty of findings in both the physical project and verbal presentation.

• 2 - Equity & Inclusion: Analyzing and synthesizing a variety of cultures into a study that attempts to advocate for the cultural preservation of each linguistic mystery's history.

• 3 - Teamwork: Working with Rachel Makarowski to strengthen research skills and narrow the scope of the project. Meeting regularly and staying on track with the broader timeline to help one another complete respective goals within the project. 

• 4 - Communication: Designing and outlining a research study that accurately communicates the finding of the analysis, to be accessible to outside audiences while still retaining the scholarly niche that the topic explores.

It is with no understatement that these skills directly result from not just the completion of this project, but also from the close collaboration with Rachel Makarowski and experiences as a student in the Miami University Honors College.