New Directions:
Undergraduate grants help young scholars conduct original research in the humanities

Last summer, Marty Schultz-Akerson found himself in the Princeton University archives, digging through the papers of Chilean writer José Donoso. Crystal Finn spent a few months in London researching all-female performances of Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe Theater. And Amy Pradell delved into a comparison of the works of writers William Faulkner and W.G. Sebald.

Irish actress Fiona Shaw’s performance in Richard II inspired Crystal Finn’s interest in cross-gender Shakespeare

While their work might not be unusual for graduate students or professors, all three have yet to receive their bachelor’s degrees. Schultz-Akerson and Pradell were funded by the Berkeley Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), while Finn was named one of the College of Letters and Science’s Haas scholars.

“It was really invaluable,” Finn says of her fellowship. “It gives you one year to do something that undergraduates usually don’t get to do.”

The Haas Scholars program, designed for students with financial need, awards 20 undergrads $3,800 summer research grants as well as financial support the following school year. The SURF program provides 30 students with $2,500 stipends to support summer research and is open to all undergrads. Each program connects young scholars with faculty mentors and aims to develop research skills. The programs are especially important in the humanities, where monetary support for undergraduate research tends to be thin on the ground.

Finn’s interest in female performances of Shakespeare was originally inspired when she saw Irish actress Fiona Shaw portray Richard II in 1995. After spending last summer in London at the Globe Theater – where she interviewed those involved in staging all-female performances of Richard II and The Taming of the Shrew – she returned to Berkeley to direct a cross-gender performance of Twelfth Night. Finn, an English major, is currently finishing a thesis on cross-gender performances of Shakespeare’s plays.

For SURF recipient Schultz-Akerson, his work in the Princeton Archive was his first attempt at archival research. “There were boxes and boxes of correspondence,” he says. “There was a temptation to sort through it all.”

Pradell, Finn and Schultz-Akerson

Schultz-Akerson, an English and Spanish major, focused on the different use of pronouns in the first, second and third drafts of Donoso’s novel Hell Has No Limits, which features a transvestite as a main character. “I found that in the final version, Donoso was much more careful with his word choices. They were less arbitrary,” Schultz-Akerson says. “The criticism of the novel focuses on the fact that the character was a transvestite. The obvious place to start was with gender. Looking at the revisions, I found that the focus was not only on gender, but the problem the character had on finding himself/herself in language.”

Pradell, also a SURF recipient, stayed closer to home, choosing to undertake comparative readings of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom and Sebald’s Austerlitz, both works that deal with societies emerging from morally compromised eras: In Faulkner’s case, the South under slavery, and for Sebald, Nazi Germany. “It’s a charged corner of literature,” Pradell says. “There is little on the descendants of perpetrators, who are neither guilty nor totally innocent. Only in the last few years has it become more discussed in Germany. Faulkner, on the other hand, tackled the subject head on.”

A comparative literature major, Pradell analyzed the work of both writers using the theoretical lens of trauma theory as it relates to storytelling. “There is a compulsion to repeat history, and storytelling is an attempt to master it,” Pradell says, noting that both Faulkner and Sebald blend fact and fiction and work their own family histories into their novels.

Chilean writer José Donoso, the subject of Schultz-Akerson’s research

The three undergraduates, who are all currently seniors, view their research projects as boosts to their future work. Finn will be attending the Brown University Conservatory to study acting, and Pradell is seeking to conduct further research in Germany before pursuing a PhD. While Schultz-Akerson is not exactly sure what the future holds, he says the work done on the fellowship has opened up new avenues.

“It was an opportunity to see what scholars do, to see what it is like to do research in the humanities” says Schultz-Akerson, who also delved into Donoso archives at the University of Iowa. “It inspired me to go in the academic direction.”

-- Doug Merlino