My Brackenridge experience this summer has been both challenging and rewarding, and I’m incredibly grateful for this opportunity to have strengthened skills I can use moving forward in my academic journey. 

One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is that research is an explorative process. Although I set out on this project with what I thought was a very specific plan, I’ve learned that research can in reality be quite fluid. New potential paths opened up with new sources I discovered, and I started to see patterns I hadn’t anticipated when writing my original proposal. At the same time, I had to make sure that I didn’t become so focused on the details that I lost sight of the bigger picture and the underlying significance of this research project. Balancing my focus on both the minutiae and the broader implications of my project was difficult, but it was a necessary skill for me to build. 

This summer also made me think more about the purpose of historical research. The past is in the past, so why should we still care about it? What makes it interesting to us? How is it tied to our experiences in the present and our paths toward the future? I’ve often struggled to verbalize why I find history so fascinating and, in turn, struggled to justify why my research should matter to anyone else. Throughout meetings with my faculty mentors, seminars, and discussion posts, Brackenridge has given me the opportunity to think about how my research relates to issues prevalent in the world today and how it could be relevant to people outside of History as a field. This encouraged me to think more about the similarities and differences between people’s relationships to politics today and during the interwar period while still making sure not to project my own modern-day perspective onto historical situations. 

However, I not only learned more about how to communicate the significance of my research to others but also learned how to better understand research in areas outside the humanities. One of the most eye-opening activities we did in our weekly seminars was the “Idea Tree.” Each member of my cohort came up with a research problem related to our field to start, and everyone else got to add their own perspectives as we passed the topics around. The end results were truly multidisciplinary ways to approach specific problems, and it opened my eyes to how projects can benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration throughout the research process.

Brackenridge ultimately allowed me to further develop my love for historical research as a way of bridging the past and the present. One of my favorite moments from this summer was randomly finding a 1920s insurance certificate belonging to someone from my grandparents’ small town in northeastern Italy. I couldn’t believe it at first, and I immediately asked my grandmother if she knew anything about him. The person ended up being the uncle of one of my grandparents’ friends. The family lost touch with this uncle after he immigrated to the US, and it was a happy coincidence being able to find a piece of his life a century later. This also made me reflect more on how every document or article I sifted through had an entire story behind it even if it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for to address my research questions. 

In the near future, I intend to refine this project into a senior thesis to wrap up the research and critical thinking skills I’ve worked on throughout my undergraduate studies. My use of resources from the University Library System and the Heinz History Center has also made me more curious about archival work as a career. Archivists and librarians are indispensable to research, and my experience this summer has made me much more appreciative of how their hard work makes valuable historical materials available to the public.