Student Products
Featuring work by students enrolled in coursework through the Departments of English and Humanistic Studies.
Humanistic Studies Students who were enrolled in the upper-level course Colloquium IV: Modern History directly engaged with our project. Using displacement as a theme to connect the various works of literature and nonfiction read throughout the course, the students constructed digital museum exhibits as a final project. These students also went to the archives and conducted archival research using the sisters' materials from the Civil War. Additionally, the students worked with digitized items from the archival materials from Cambodia/Thailand, El Salvador, and Lebanon. Students had to incorporate both material artifacts and archival texts into the project. Crafting a digital exhibit was also a chance for students to practice writing museum labels, which was a required component of the project.
Sample student work is listed below.
Becca Strom: "This particular exhibit aims to analyze how storytelling serves as an act of survival for displaced persons. The exhibit will utilize archival research from the Sisters' work during the American Civil War and Cambodian conflict, along with analyses of The Plague by Albert Camus, "Dulce et Decorum est" by Wilfred Owen, Sergeant Carney and the Death of General Shaw by Hale Woodruff, and an oral history account."
Mary Coleman: "I use World War I poetry and Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle to analyze how displacement is depicted in literature and how it influences how we think about displacement. . . . I explore a piece of refugee art from Cambodia that is held in the Sisters of the Holy Cross' Archive. I dig deeper into the Holy Cross archives and examine displacement in the American Civil War and Lebanese Civil War. The Sisters’ archive helps form connections between different wars and crises, but also pushes the idea of displacement further than just those who were in the regions affected."