Marisa Hollywood, H&A Director of Humanities Internships
Supported by funding from the H&A Mellon Foundation grant, the Humanities Experiential Learning Partnership Seminars (HELPS) program allows Humanities & Arts faculty the unique opportunity to plan and implement a seminar in partnership with a NYC-based museum, archive, or cultural center in order to create unique learning experiences with hands-on research for a small cohort of students. Open to any Full-Time faculty member teaching undergraduate courses within the Division, faculty develop a 3-hour seminar for a small student cohort and provide mentorship during internship hours worked at their partner site. On successful completion of the seminar, students receive 3 credits as well as a stipend for their participation in the internship hours that complement the seminar.
This fall HELPS is implementing three new courses:
Jayne Cole Southard, Ph.D., Lecturer (Art – Art History)
Partner Site: Think!Chinatown
Seminar: Curating and Cultivating Asian American Art
This internship/course serves to aid Think!Chinatown, an integrational arts-based non-profit, as they transition to caretakers of the work using best practices. Though Think! Chinatown has Mellon Foundation support for the direct care of the objects during this transition period, they do not have financial support for the necessary cataloguing and research. The related seminar course will consider issues, ethics, and histories concerned with curating Asian American art to supplement their internship.
Rosalia Reyes Simon, Lecturer (CMLL - Spanish)
Partner Site: Cervantes Institute of New York
Seminar: Documenting Contemporary Latinx Literature in New York
Students in this seminar will work in person at the Cervantes Institute of New York to help create a digital archive about the Latino literary movement that is taking place in New York City. Students will conduct interviews with Latinx and locally based Latin American authors and publishers, which they will analyze and catalog for uploading into a website.
Regina Castro McGowan, Ph.D., Assistant Professor & Deputy Chair (CMLL - Portuguese)
Partner Site: Hispanic Society of America
Seminar: Documenting and Cataloging Portuguese Language Archives
Students will work in locus at the Hispanic Society of America organizing a large collection of Portuguese language novels in the Society’s library. This collection (called the Lloyd Kasten Collection) has never been catalogued. Kasten, a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was at the forefront of the teaching of Portuguese in the USA. Similarly, students will organize and catalogue another large and never catalogued collection of Portuguese language literature: the Jean Longland translated poetry and corresponded by and with Brazilian poet Harold de Campos. Campos is regarded as one of the most important figures in Brazilian literature since Modernism. He was a founder of the literary avant-garde concrete poetry movement that arose in Brazil in the late 1950s. Jean Longland was a researcher and noted translator of Luso-Brazilian poetry. She was also the curator of the modern library of the Hispanic Society.