If I could only describe the Brackenridge Fellowship in two words, I would have to say it is “research demystified.”

Before the fellowship, I had only engaged with the research process in a class context: projects and experiments I didn’t plan on extending past a single semester or presenting to an audience outside of my professor and classmates. Within the limits of pre-specified audiences, methodologies, and purposes, I was often baffled by how scientists, historians, and other researchers could apparently seamlessly turn research questions into specific, well-argued answers. I thought, “If I struggle to write an abstract, or my results are never statistically significant, or my questions about this part of history sound really dumb, how could I ever make a career doing research?”

Over the course of the summer, talking with my fellow Fellows about our research projects as well as professional historians, I realized that research is very seldomly a clean process from question to result. First, research questions almost always end up changing or breaking apart into smaller questions based on the literature review or initial data collection. Second, trying to answer your research questions with your data, whatever form that data may take, is a complex, messy task. In my own project, answering my research question has come with answering a lot of counter arguments. Every time I think I have finally made sense of how colonial perceptions of pirates were influenced by climate, my brain starts thinking, “But didn’t Dr. So-And-So say on page whatever of that one book they wrote that every conclusion you’re making is unfounded? Delete everything you’ve written and start from scratch.” 

One of the most valuable parts of the Brackenridge Fellowship has been having the structure of a seminar and writing activities to get out of my own head. I can’t spend time ruminating over my own imposter syndrome when I need to describe my research project in thirty seconds or less to 35 other people or when I need to write a purpose, problem, and significance statement by next Tuesday. While engaging with works that challenge how I think about my findings has made my writing and argument more complex and insightful, the structure of the Brackenridge Fellowship has helped me gain more confidence in my ability to describe the value of my work. Not only is this helpful for communicating my work to academic and general audiences, it also gives me a point to come back to when I hit a roadblock in my project.

In the final weeks of the fellowship, I will be finishing a draft application for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) which funds graduate students in STEM and social science fields, including the history and philosophy of science. I hope to build off of my research this summer in graduate school by studying how environmental knowledge was used to construct ideas about morality and social relationships in the early modern British Atlantic world. Additionally, over the course of the fall I will be developing my research on climate and piracy in the British colonial imagination into either an honors thesis or a paper that I will submit to undergraduate history journals. On a more personal level, I’m going to spend at least a week reading only fiction books to give my brain a break before classes start this fall!