The humanities has a reputation for being a discipline without opportunities that are immediately recognizable and achievable for “cutting-edge” research. However, I find this misconception to be completely false and quite the opposite of my personal experience as a History and Latin American and Iberian Studies double major. In reality, research in the humanities is more attainable in a field that people dismiss as passive and uninteresting. I have been able to take classes, conduct independent research, and attend conferences that are exciting and producing fantastic new scholarship in history. All of this involvement is directly related to my membership in the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) that supplies me with a stipend each semester and summer to conduct my own research. In addition, MMUF provides opportunities to attend summer programs for learning research writing and methodologies.
More importantly, MMUF specifically supports underrepresented minorities in their pursuit of obtaining a PhD in the humanities and social sciences. Being of Salvadoran and Irish heritage, my background guides my research interests in the legal history of race in the United States and Latin America. Through MMUF and my passion for rewriting marginalized histories and those relegated to oblivion in history, I have been able to reverse historical narratives about Native peoples and bring Afro-Salvadoran and indigenous stories out of the dark. My faculty mentor, Edgardo Pérez Morales, has been instrumental in guiding me in my pursuit of knowledge and in shaping my historiographical methodologies. I know that this can sound incredibly boring to people not interested in the humanities, but I would like to clarify that research opportunities do exist for students in the humanities and that our work is incredibly important.
As I continue to develop and expand my research, I am taking advantage of all of the resources that Dornsife has to offer for student research. For instance, this upcoming spring I will be going to Cuba as part of a Maymester that is focused on experiencing Cuban culture and history for two weeks. While I am there, I plan on researching the phenomenon of coartación in the nineteenth century Cuban legal system. I will be using Student Opportunities for Academic Research or SOAR funding in order to pay for part of the cost of this program. Following that, I will be going to El Salvador and Guatemala to visit archives in both of their respective capitals to begin research on nineteenth slave emancipation in Central America. Because of all of these opportunities, I strongly believe that nobody should be deterred from studying the humanities because of a purported lack of research opportunities because clearly that is not the case.
