2019 Cohort
Name: Nilanjana Bhattacharya
Area of Study: International Development
Internship Organization: Slum Dwellers International
Internship Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Description of Organization: SDI is a transnational social movement of urban poor bringing together community based organizations comprised of slum dwellers in over 30 countries throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. SDI drives a collective, bottom up change agenda for inclusive and resilient cities to secure tenure and increase access to basic services, housing and livelihoods.
Description of Internship: Nilanjana interned at Slum Dwellers International (SDI) which is a transnational social movement of urban poor communities across 32 countries in Africa, South Asia and Latin America, headquarted in Cape Town, South Africa where she was based for two months. Nilanjana chose to intern at SDI because she strongly identifies with their vision to work towards inclusive and resilient cities that are pro – poor and provide agency to urban poor communities to change their own lives and influence the shape of their cities. During her time there, Nilanjana gained a first person perspective into SDI’s unique approach to transform the lives of slum/shack dwellers across the world by driving a women – led grassroots agenda characterized by strategies such as savings groups, community profiling, enumeration and mapping to enable urban poor communities to engage with local and national governments as partners in development rather than as beneficiaries. Nilanjana joined the SDI Secretariat as an intern with the Learning, Monitoring and Evaluation team at a time when SDI is maturing from its activist origins to put in place sustainable systems of governance that will grow its influence and voice in the development sector worldwide among donors, governmental agencies and global forums. The Secretariat works primarily as the central conduit between affiliated urban poor communities across cities and external stakeholders. Nilanjana channeled her instruction as an MPP candidate at the Harris School of Public Policy to draft up a Monitoring and Evaluation plan to align with SDI’s Strategic Plan that will govern programmes over the next five years. SDI’s key focus on transforming urban environments by building social cohesion and strategic influence of slum or township communities meant that such an M&E plan had to be significantly removed from standard practice. Nilanjana’s proposal is the foundation for the LME team’s engagements with development consultants, major donors and Board in the coming months. She also leveraged her background as an engineer to develop a Portfolio Reporting and Risk Assessment framework working with the team of Project Officers based at the Secretariat that will enable better management and oversight of financing, government relations and technical design as SDI activity in extending water, sanitation, energy and market access ramps up across the world. In addition to bringing a theoretical perspective, Nilanjana brought practical insights by participating in community design meetings for an ongoing housing project for Cape Town residents in an informal township called Philippi. To do this, she fired up her old AutoCAD drawing software after a not – so – short hiatus! She was also part of the SDI delegation to a Design Workshop to tackle the challenges of electrifying townships organized by the City of Cape Town and moderated by Ernst and Young. When she wasn’t working, Nilanjana was out and about hiking the stunning trails around Table Mountain, enjoying “hake and chips” at the beach, spotting penguins, seals, lions, rhinos and other wildlife, tasting wine at the beautiful Western Cape Winelands and imbibing the vibrant culture of the Mother City. She comes back to her second year at Harris with an incredible new appreciation for the importance of agency and community voice in the current discourse on development policy accentuated by her topical exposure to the effect of South Africa’s history of segregation in today’s spatial planning challenges. She is energized to finish graduate school and pursue a career in Development that furthers the cause of co-production of urban infrastructure access to deprived communities.
Name: Andrea Bonaccorsi
Area of Study: Cultural Policy
Internship Organization: Ford Heights Community Service Organization
Internship Location: Ford Heights, IL
Description of Organization: The Ford Heights Community Service Organization (FHCSO) is a minority, community based not for profit agency located in the Village of Ford Heights. Since 1968, it has provided an array of services to its client bases, which consist primarily of low income individuals in social and economically challenged areas of Cook County. The agency’s core mission is to “improve the quality of life for the underprivileged and to assist others in a time of crisis’, emphasizing emergency, supportive and educational services to individuals and households until they stabilize. While maintaining strong collaborative relationships with a number of area providers, FHCSO practices a “one-stop” approach to service delivery.
Description of Internship: Andrea’s 2019 GGI Internship is working as a Programing Coordinator at Ford Heights Community Service Organization (FHCSO) in order to establish a “community learning garden.” The project requires facilitating a working partnership between the non-profit, The Village of Ford Heights School District 169, and the Ford Heights Park District in order to create a youth-driven agricultural education program that addresses the broader issue of food insecurity in the Village. Andrea’s day-to-day responsibilities as a GGI Intern include working to create a garden curriculum, for Cottage Grove Upper Grades Center students, as well as creating and carrying out a development plan detailing the garden’s: purpose, goals, and the role of media and storytelling to community stakeholders while assisting with facilitating community meetings regarding site build-out and pilot programs.
Name: Claire Bowman
Area of Study: Housing justice movement in Detroit
Internship Organization: Charlevoix Village Association
Internship Location: Detroit, MI
Description of Organization: A longstanding community group fighting displacement, evictions and inequitable development in their neighborhood on Detroit’s Lower Eastside.
Description of Internship: Claire worked with longterm residents to research, produce and print a neighborhood-level history booklet for free distribution to community members. This booklet used archival photos and oral histories of residents to tell the story of the strong, vibrant community built and sustained there for decades by working-class Black Detroiters in spite of housing segregation and disinvestment. The booklet preserved memories of the neighborhood in the context of residents’ present-day resistance to gentrification and displacement.
Name: Laurel Chen
Area of Study: Equitable Housing and Community Development
Internship Organization: East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative
Internship Location: Oakland, California, United States
Description of Organization: East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC) aligns the technical, financial, and organizational inputs necessary to support Black, Indigenous, People of Color and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, purchase, and steward properties in Oakland & the East Bay, California. EB PREC is pioneering a new model of housing that removes property from the private market, creating permanently affordable, democratically controlled assets.
Description of Internship: Laurel’s internship focused on the areas of communications and organizational development. In the area of communications, Laurel developed materials that depicted EB PREC’s unique story, housing model and vision for transformation to both the press and general public. This included developing a press kit and press list, writing press releases, and creating a general overview and FAQs document for outreach purposes. In addition to communications work, Laurel’s work focused on improving EB PREC’s internal systems in the areas of self-directed management, partner and member tracking, and internal communications. Laurel approached all of her work in alignment with EB PREC’s vision of anti-oppressive, collaborative organizational culture and structure.
Name: Bastien Craipain
Area of Study: Francophone Caribbean
Internship Organization: Digital Library of the Caribbean
Internship Location: Miami, FL
Description of Organization: The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is an international, multi-institutional digital library dedicated to the development and management of data curation projects with various archives and libraries in the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. Since its foundation in 2004, dLOC has worked across national borders, in collaboration with its partner institutions, to create the world s largest open access collection of resources (books, manuscripts, images, etc.) from and about the Caribbean
Description of Internship: As the Digital Humanities Data Curation Intern at dLOC, Bastien worked under the supervision of Miguel Asencio, Executive Director, and Hadassah St. Hubert, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at dLOC, to help organize, digitize, and promote Caribbean collections. During this one-and-a-half-month internship, Bastien undertook and participated in both new and ongoing dLOC projects, such as the processing and archiving of the Haitian Studies Association papers, the examination and classification of visual content in the Bernard Diederich Collection, the preservation and digitization of the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator Collection, and the editing and translation of dLOC’s newsletter.
Name: Tessa Di Mantova
Area of Study: Human Rights/International Relations
Internship Organization: World Relief Chicago
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: World Relief Chicago brings churches and vulnerable immigrants together to transform communities economically, socially, and spiritually through immigration services and refugee resettlement, both pre and post.
Description of Internship: Tessa supported World Relief Chicago in a variety of things, as often happens within non-profit organizations. This included grant writing opportunities, volunteer and community outreach and system building. Through this internship, Tess was able to expand her skills in both the profession
Name: Michael Fischer
Area of Study: Creative Writing
Internship Organization: Storycatchers Theatre
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: Storycatchers Theatre is a nonprofit organization that works with criminal justice-involved youth, helping them to tell their stories and transform their lives through the production and performance of musical theatre.
Description of Internship: Michael worked in Storycatchers Theatre’s Changing Voices program, a supported arts employment program for justice-involved youth between the ages of 17 and 24. Changing Voices participants progress through a formal curriculum that prepares them for employment or education after Storycatchers.
Name: Arianna Gass
Area of Study: English and Theater and Performance Studies
Internship Organization: Headlong Dance Theater
Internship Location: Philadelphia, PA
Description of Organization: Headlong is an activator of performance research, of cultural inquiry and of overlapping layers of communities. We incubate projects by supporting and sponsoring artists and we engage audiences by asking people to participate in the work. Headlong fosters the creative ecosystem by providing educational opportunities, financial advice and strategic planning as well as by asking the questions that shape the cultures in which we live.
Description of Internship: This summer Arianna worked as an archivist for Headlong Dance Theater. A cornerstone of the Philadelphia performing arts scene for over thirty years, Headlong has amassed a treasure trove of video tapes, including rehearsal tapes, movement research, and performances of the company’s work. Arianna worked to digitize and catalog approximately 70 hours of video tapes and 1000 photographs, programs, and costume items in addition to conducting over 10 hours of interviews with former and current Artistic Co-Directors and frequent collaborators. Her hope is to make as much of this content publicly available through a longer collaboration with Headlong, and looks forward to co-curating a “Basement Tapes” event to share some amazing archival finds with the larger dance and performance community in Philadelphia in October.
Name: Marcos Gouvêa
Area of Study: Roman Literature; History of Ideas
Internship Organization: Mars Hill Audio
Internship Location: Charlottesville, VA
Description of Organization: Mars Hill Audio produces high quality audio journalism on the relationship of culture and the church in modernity. MHA pursues the goal of illuminating the circumstances of the church in late modernity in a few ways: through the Mars Hill Audio Journal, which features interviews with academics, theologians, artists, poets, doctors, pastors and musicians; producing audio books and audio reprints of essays; sponsoring the biannual Areopagus Lecture in Charlottesville; and making other occasional interviews available on their app on a weekly basis.
Description of Internship: Marcos’ project aids the transition of MHA from a model in which content was delivered in batches of 5-6 interviews every two months (e.g. the MHA Journal) to a model of weekly interviews delivered via app. The back catalogue of audio journals was also to be retrofitted to this model. To this end he was asked to listen to as much of the catalogue as possible, with three tasks in view: 1) record what parts of the script and production in each interview require rewriting or recording to suit the new model; 2) record keywords and themes to aid in ordering the journals by broader themes and designing a pedagogical ‘index’; 3) noting places where 30-60 second ‘teases’ might be lifted from an interview to give listeners a brief preview. All the tasks required listening to as much of the over 200 hours of material as possible, and producing a template for further work. Lastly, MHA staff assigned reading for further context and education on their goals.
Name: Emre Hakguder
Area of Study: Typological sign language syntax
Internship Organization: Networked Insights
Internship Location: Chicago
Description of Organization: Networked Insights is a data analytics startup in downtown Chicago.
Description of Internship: Emre created two text classifiers: one that is capable of predicting an individual’s educational attainment from analyzing their written language performance on Twitter and another that can be used as a template for identifying political inclination on certain events by looking at the tweets in question. By studying the 2018 Christine Blasey Ford/Brett Kavanaugh assault accusation case, Emre found a positive correlation between educational attainment and victim support/empathy.
Name: Pia Hecher
Area of Study: North Africa and Iran
Internship Organization: European Stability Initiative
Internship Location: Berlin
Description of Organization: A think tank with the aim of promoting European Stability. ESI focuses on South East Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Central Europe and the South Caucasus.
Description of Internship: I started my ESI internship one month ago and it has been a highly rewarding experience. I focus on refugees and migration, for which I have written reports on a number of issues – including the deportation of asylum seekers from Austria and Germany, conditions in Greek refugee camps for disabled people and even on Vietnamese refugees arriving in Germany in the 1980s. In addition to writing reports, I have gained experience with quantitative data. For instance, I created charts comparing Germany’s GDP and life expectancy to those of developing countries and collected as well as compared migration statistics.
Name: David Hogue
Area of Study: Early China
Internship Organization: Wuhan University
Internship Location: Wuhan, People’s Republic of China
Description of Organization: The Wuhan University Center of Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts specializes in the study of ancient Chinese excavated texts.
Description of Internship: The Wuhan University Center of Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts operates an English-language academic journal that publishes leading research in the field of early Chinese excavated texts. In my internship, I have served as an academic linguist and editorial services support staff member, translating Chinese-language articles into English for publication in the Center’s peer-reviewed journal, “Bamboo and Silk.”
Name: Kévin O. Irakóze
Area of Study: Social and Political Philosophy
Internship Organization: Institut de Recherche Scientifique pour le Développement
Internship Location: Bujumbura, Burundi
Description of Organization: The Institute does research on historical consciousness among Burundian youth. It seeks to map what the young people know about the national history of ethnic conflict, what they don’t know, and what they are interested in knowing. The goal is to develop programs that aim at appropriately educating the youth in order to build a future that is free of the conflicts of the past.
Description of Internship: Kévin works with a research team looking at the historical memory of Burundian youth regarding the history of ethnic conflict in the country. His role is to coordinate the work of different field researchers, to gather the data collected, and to write reports on the research.
Name: Katerina Korola
Area of Study: Modern Art and Media
Internship Organization: Art Institute of Chicago (Photography Department)
Internship Location: Chicago, Illinois
Description of Organization: The Photography Department at the Art Institute of Chicago houses one of the leading photography collections in the country, with significant holdings in nineteenth-century photography, American and European modernism of the 1920s to the 1960s, and more recently has became a pioneering center for exhibitions on conceptual art and new media. The Photography Department also boasts a Conservation Laboratory, which has made an important name for itself in the field.
Description of Internship: This summer internship involved two main projects. The first consisted in researching, interpreting, and cataloguing a mid-nineteenth-century photo-collage album–likely the work of the wife of a French diplomat based primarily in Stockholm–with the end goal of producing an accessible resource that offers insight into the practice of photo-collage in nineteenth-century, the sources of the various images used, and the social function of photo-collage albums in the 1860s and 1870s. The second involved serving as curatorial assistant for an upcoming rotation of the permanent collection. This second task involved selecting, researching, and writing curatorial texts for a number of objects from the Art Institute’s collection which will be exhibited for the first time in November 2019 in collaboration with Curator Liz Siegel and Exhibition Manager Rebecca Schlossberg.
Name: Eduardo Leão
Area of Study: Contemporary Latin American Literature and Cinema
Internship Organization: Restless Books
Internship Location: New York City
Description of Organization: Independent, nonprofit publisher devoted to championing essential voices from around the world, whose stories speak across linguistic and cultural borders.
Description of Internship: As a publishing intern, he assisted the Restless Books staff in a variety of areas including: marketing, publicity, nonprofit development, editorial, sales, and production. He was responsible for, among other duties, aiding team members in these areas by drafting copy for newsletters and blog posts, overseeing social media platforms, developing marketing plans, organizing large-scale mailings to reviewers and booksellers, reading submissions (in Portuguese, Spanish, and English), providing critical feedback on manuscripts, and identifying potential funders and grants for the publication and translation of forthcoming titles.
Name: Lauren Ledin
Area of Study: Archaeology
Internship Organization: The Field Museum
Internship Location: Chicago, Illinois
Description of Organization: The Field Museum is a natural history museum in Chicago. Now in its 125th year, the Field Museum is a forward-thinking scientific leader on a mission to explore, protect, and celebrate nature and culture. The Field takes part in groundbreaking research all over the world while maintaining one of the world’s largest collections of artifacts and specimens, used to inspire discovery, spark public engagement with science, and uncover solutions for a better world. To share its scientific and educational mission, the Field welcomes 1.6 million visitors every year.
Description of Internship: For her internship, Lauren will work at the Field Museum in the Ganz Family Collections Center. More specifically, she will spend eight weeks in summer 2019 working with researchers and professional bioarchaeologists in the Repatriation division, focusing specifically on documenting North American human remains. She will participate in the Field Museum’s ongoing IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) project titled “Collaborative Curation: Building a 21st Century Model for the Care of North American Human Remains.” This project is a NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act)-compliant, three-year pilot study for improving the approach that museums take in the resp捥晴汵挠牵瑡潩景栠浵湡爠浥楡獮映潲慃慮慤愠摮琠敨唠楮整瑓瑡獥ମ畳浭牥㈠䈹瑨灴㩳⼯牤癩潧杯敬挮浯漯数㽮摩ㄽ㠳克兮㙰䍍㤱夹硈
Name: Patrick Lewis
Area of Study: Anthropology of education, value; Lingusitic Anthropology
Internship Organization: Mesopotamian Foundation
Internship Location: Diyarbakir, Turkey
Description of Organization: Works on Kurdish language standarization and education
Description of Internship: helping with translating and compiling a report on the feasability of opening a Kurdish-language education course for foreigners
Name: Rivky Mondal
Area of Study: Modernism
Internship Organization: Critical Inquiry
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: “Critical Inquiry is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities. Founded in 1974, it has been called “one of the best known and most influential journals in the world” (Chicago Tribune) and “academe’s most prestigious theory journal” (New York Times). Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent and emerging scholars, critics and artists on a wide variety of issues in contemporary criticism and culture. Associated with no single school of thought, tied to no single discipline, Critical Inquiry is dedicated to providing a forum for cutting-edge thought while reconsidering traditional concepts and practices”
Description of Internship: Rivky was the editorial intern at Critical Inquiry for the summer of 2019. She helped copyedit the autumn and winter issues, fact-checked footnotes, and proofread and formatted posts for the blog.
Name: Renuka Shah
Area of Study: Emergency Management, Disaster Preparedness
Internship Organization: Will County Emergency Management Agency (WCEMA)
Internship Location: Joliet, IL
Description of Organization: WCEMA is responsible for coordinating the emergency and disaster mitigation, as well as preparedness, planning, response and recovery efforts of Will County and its political subdivisions in conjunction with the State of Illinois, private organizations, businesses, and the public.
Description of Internship: Developing and implementing a new premise alert program for Will County as well as assisting with the State of Illinois Premise Alert Program for nuclear counties. Updating the Will County Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP) as well as the Will County Continuity of Government Plan. Participating in the biennial full-scale exercise for the Dresden Nuclear Station. Implementing and maintaining a Will County Access and Functional Needs registry database through community outreach to encourage special needs individual preparedness in the event of a disaster. Working with local municipalities, townships, and fire and police districts to ensure an integrated incident response approach at Will County.
Name: Zhenzhou Tan
Area of Study: Anthropology
Internship Organization: The International Rights Department at the University of Chicago Press
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: The University of Chicago Press (UCP) is one of the largest and oldest academic publishers in the United States. It publishes academic books, journals, and the famous Chicago Manuel of Style. The International Rights Department is responsible for marketing UCP titles for translation into other languages, and handling all aspects of that licensing.
Description of Internship: His primary task was to assist with special marketing initiatives aimed at better reaching the Chinese market – UCP’s largest market – in advance of the Beijing International Book Fair in August, 2019. This entailed translating marketing materials from English into Chinese. He also explored UCP’s backlist for translation licensing and prepared accordingly special subject catalogs to pitch to UCP’s international partners.
Name: Brandon Truett
Area of Study: 20th- and 21st-Century Transnational Literature (US, Britain, and Spain); Visual Art; Global Modernism
Internship Organization: The Barnes Foundation
Internship Location: Philadelphia, PA
Description of Organization: Founded in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, the Barnes Foundation is both an educational institution and an art collection that includes impressionist, post-impressionist, and modernist paintings, African sculpture, decorative objects, and an Arboretum of rare trees and plants.
Description of Internship: Brandon is a curatorial intern in the department of Collections and Exhibitions. He contributes to building new knowledge about the most under-studied objects in the collection. To this end, his major project is to produce object white papers about two paintings by the Spanish artist Joan Miró. This research will be internally archived in the curatorial files, and a more public-facing version will be available on the website.
Name: Caroline Zadina
Area of Study: Clinical Mental Health
Internship Organization: FutureCourse Education, Principled Athletics Practice
Internship Location: Chicago
Description of Organization: The mission of FutureCourse is to apply best practices to leadership development in general, and within athletics to help coaches and athletic teams build the personal skills, team dynamics and coach-athlete relationships that are consistent with effective long-term leadership.
Description of Internship: Caroline is leading the creation of a research-informed curriculum for high school and college team captains that educates how to recognize and respond to the mental health pressures in sport, and the environmental pressures and interpersonal challenges present in sport contexts. The goal of this work will be to promote education, awareness, and action when it comes to mental wellness and resilience, physical safety, self-advocacy, and skills to maintain healthy and safe sporting climates as team leaders and captains.
2018 Cohort
Name: Megan Beckerich
Area of Study: Japanese Art History
Internship Organization: Cincinnati Art Museum
Internship Location: Cincinnati, OH
Description of Organization: Art Museum
Description of Internship: Megan worked as a photography curatorial and paper conservation intern. She did research and input data on recently acquisitioned Japanese portraits, catalogued and did minor conservation work on a collection of cyanotypes depicting various countries in East Asia from 1905, worked on miscellaneous cataloguing and print cleaning projects, and wrote for the museum website.
Name: Du Fei
Area of Study: Early Modern South Asian and Indian Ocean history
Internship Organization: UChicago Library
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: Library of the University of Chicago
Description of Internship: During his time as an intern at the Southern Asian Collections at the University of Chicago Library, Fei’s work sought to cross the boundary between the world of a historian and that of a librarian. Under the close supervision of the Southern Asian Librarian, Dr. Laura Ring, and the Southern Asian Bibliographer, James Nye, Fei started developing his first digital history project tentatively titled ‘Topography of Knowledge’ which aims to visualize the distribution and circulation of Hindi manuscripts in north India between 1700-1900. This ongoing scholarly project benefits from the hands-on skills which Fei learned from his professional training in cataloging and collection development. Such skills will continue to facilitate Fei’s future research which will involve a complex set of primary sources. At the same time, Fei’s academic background in South Asian history prompts him to consider how historians could bring their perspectives and expertise to collaborate more closely with librarians in order to develop strategies of collecting and presenting materials that better speak to the need of the scholarly communities.
Name: Simone Levine
Area of Study: Art History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Internship Organization: Smart Museum of Art
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: The Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago is a site for rigorous inquiry and exchange that encourages the examination of complex issues through the lens of art objects and artistic practice. Through strong community and scholarly partnerships, the Museum incorporates diverse ideas, identities, and experiences into its exhibitions and collections, academic initiatives, and public programming.
Description of Internship: Simone’s GGI project primarily involved contributing research and writing for an exhibition of contemporary art titled The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China. For this project, she completed artist files on each of the 23 artists whose work participated in the exhibition. She would also drafted three artist profiles for the catalog, for which she was acknowledged with a credit in the final publication. Following her graduation from MAPH, Simone joined the staff of the Smart Museum as Curatorial Research Assistant for Global Contemporary Art.
Name: Eszter Ronai
Area of Study: Psycholinguistics
Internship Organization: EduBase
Internship Location: Budapest, Hungary
Description of Organization: A start-up that provides a free cloud-based educational platform.
Description of Internship: EduBase aims to influence the Hungarian and broader regional Central European educational environment in two ways. First, they provide a platform for teachers and students to upload, share and test learning and examination materials. Second, they wish to provide a database of exercises themselves. As a linguist, Eszter’s main task was to contribute to EduBase’s database of English as a foreign language exercises. She started with collecting and analyzing the questions and question types from the most well-known foreign language exams (as well as the official national school-leaving exam) in Hungary. The EduBase platform was initially designed for Math exercises, so in consultation with tech developers, Eszter identified gaps and what developments were needed to accommodate English tasks. She also created full practice language exams at the A2, B1 and B2 CEFR levels, so that when EduBase meets with potential users (teachers or language centers), they have full tests available that can showcase what the platform can provide.
Name: Emilie Sarrazin
Area of Study: Egyptian Archaeology
Internship Organization: Oriental Institute Museum
Internship Location: Chicago
Description of Organization: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is a research center for ancient Near Eastern Studies. Its museum contains thousands of artifacts from ancient Egypt, Nubia, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Levant (Syro-Palestine), on display for the public to see and in storage for scholars to study.
Description of Internship: During the summer of 2018, Emilie completed a 10-week internship as a curatorial assistant for the Oriental Institute Museum. Specifically, she used her Egyptological training to help re-install and improve the Egyptian gallery. Her work was tied to the Gallery Enhancement Project, a broader initiative which aimed at renewing all exhibits in anticipation of the centennial celebration of the Oriental Institute during the 2019-2020 academic year. Emilie performed a variety of tasks in close association with the museum’s Chief Curator and Deputy Director. For instance, she assisted with the selection of objects and the installation of new cases. She also worked on writing object labels and case panels, which entailed both generating new content through independent research and reviewing texts written by faculty members and museum staff. Finally, she contributed to the design of panels through the selection of historical photographs and the creation of images such as maps.
Name: Charlotte Saul
Area of Study: British literary, visual and material culture of the long nineteenth century; the museum and the collection
Internship Organization: Chatsworth House
Internship Location: Derbyshire, UK
Description of Organization: Chatsworth House is home to the Cavendish family (the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire) and is set in the most beautiful stretch of countryside, the Peak District National Park. The house is also home to the impressive Devonshire Collection, an important collection of paintings, Old Master drawings, books, furniture, jewelry, and other decorative objects.
Description of Internship: Curator Charles Noble designed this research-based curatorial internship with an eye towards teaching Charlotte more about the documentation of prints and drawings. She worked specifically with the Devonshire Collection’s group of 450+ Inigo Jones drawings, all of them costume and set designs for 17th-century court masques. About half of their masque drawings had been previously cataloged. Charlotte’s task was to update the catalog entries for the remaining drawings and to write both physical descriptions and critical narratives with attention to recent scholarship for each unique object. This presented the opportunity to learn the intricacies of working with EMu, a collections management system commonly used by collecting institutions. For a student of literary and visual culture, the chance to work with the drawings in the archive was the most interesting part of this experience; Charlotte valued the opportunity to study these rare and unique works on paper and was grateful for the space and time to think about the spectacles that these drawings represent.
Name: Laura Stigliano
Area of Study: Theoretical linguistics
Internship Organization: Speeko
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: Speeko uses technology to reimagine traditional communications training methods to enable individuals and organizations to reach their goals.
Description of Internship: I did some research on various topics.
Name: Elizabeth Weiss
Area of Study: Clinical, School Social Work
Internship Organization: Recovery and Empowerment After Community Trauma
Internship Location: Chicago
Description of Organization: Healing Hurt People – Chicago is a partnership of the University of Chicago Medicine Comer Children’s Hospital the Trauma Department. of John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County, and The Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the Drexel University School of Public Health, where the Healing Hurt People model was developed. Thanks to a $2 million, five-year federal grant that Stolbach received from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, he and his team will be able to expanded its services to Gary Comer Hospital and created Recovery and Empowerment After Community Trauma (REACT).
Description of Internship: The REACT Summer Arts Intensive (RSAI) was a collaborative community arts initiative that investigated identity, trauma, and healing in community arts spaces. This project was conceived by GGI Recipient Elizabeth Weiss in collaboration with Recovery and Empowerment After Community Trauma (REACT) and Healing Hurt People (HHP) who serve survivors of violent injury from community violence. The REACT Summer Arts Intensive aimed to develop works of art that ultimately connect participants with the Chicago art community, expanding the arts discourse to include nuanced conversations around identity and healing that is grounded in the experiences of the artist/participants, stories of pain and resilience that are often marginalized.The program was structured so that artist/participants would receive introductory lessons to photography, painting, drawing, and collage. Chicago-based artist Marcelo Eli visited the program to lead a two day painting class and conduct a visiting artist conversation. Artist/participants spent the last two weeks of programming developing independent projects. Artist/participants produced a wide array of paintings, collages, and photographs ranging from playful explorations of paint, color, line, and fantasy, to personal and intimate meditations on loss, trauma, and healing.Due to additional funds pledged by REACT, artist/participants were offered a stipend for their participation and transportation to and from programming was provided. Elizabeth was awarded a grant from the University’s Student Creativity Fund that covered the cost of art supplies for the program. The Logan Center for the Arts hosted the 6 weeks program. The works of art were showcased in Amplify’s Summer Showcase at the Logan Center for the Arts. In November 2019, the resulting learnings and works of art of RSAI will be showcased in the American Public Health Association’s Annual Expo as part of their poster competition.
2017 Cohort
Name: Eufemia Baldassarre
Area of Study: Italian Studies
Internship Organization: The Newberry Library
Internship Location: Chicago
Description of Organization: Public research library
Description of Internship: Eufemia was an intern at the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library. There, she engaged in various activities while focusing her attention primarily on one major project, the Center’s development of a website devoted to Italian Renaissance Paleography. Eufemia’s work on the Italian paleography website involved the close study of medieval and early modern Italian manuscripts in the Newberry’s collection as well as the compilation of a master list that comprises all the Newberry Italian manuscript books dated between 1300-1700.
Name: Jacob Harris
Area of Study: Fin-de-siècle and early 20th century fiction
Internship Organization: Center for the Documentation of the Tibetan Cultural Area
Internship Location: Paris
Description of Organization: A research group committed to the preservation and study of Tibetan Buddhist religious manuscripts, which operates under the auspices of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, a premier research institution in Paris.
Description of Internship: I served as a manuscript editor for a forthcoming volume of conference proceedings
Name: Emma Heidorn
Area of Study: Clinical Social Work
Internship Organization: East Jerusalem YMCA Rehabilitation Program
Internship Location: Beit Sahour, Palestinian Territories
Description of Organization: The East Jerusalem YMCA Rehabilitation Program provides psychosocial support services to Palestinians in the West Bank affected by political violence. These services include mental health counseling, emergency psychosocial interventions, disability rehabilitation programming, case management services and job training.
Description of Internship: The internship involved shadowing and supporting social workers based out of the YMCA offices in Beit Sahour and Hebron. Activities included home visits in refugee camps, recreational activities in refugee camps, job training support, emergency psychosocial interventions, and support for therapy groups. The internship also involved writing a literature review for the organization on secondary traumatic stress among aid workers in areas of conflict.
Name: Emily Masghati
Area of Study: 20th Century U.S. History
Internship Organization: NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund
Internship Location: New York, NY
Description of Organization:Through litigation, advocacy, and public education, LDF seeks structural changes to expand democracy, eliminate disparities, and achieve racial justice in a society that fulfills the promise of equality for all Americans.
Description of Internship: Emily employed the LDF’s archives to assemble materials for an online exhibit commemorating 50th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The exhibit is a timeline showcasing 100 years of LDF’s work promoting fair housing. The exhibit includes details about major legal cases, community organizing work, and major campaigns in support of fair housing legislation. By showing how the battle for fair housing has taking place on so many different fronts, the exhibit encourages the public understand both why fair housing has not yet been achieved in this country as well as the historical roots of many current fair housing issues. The exhibit launched in April 2018.
Name: Natalia Pavlou
Area of Study: Linguistics
Internship Organization: Cyprus University of Technology/ Cyprus Interaction Lab
Internship Location: Lemesos
Description of Organization: The Cyprus Interaction Lab (CIL) of the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology is an interdisciplinary research lab which specialises in Educational Technology and Human Computer Interaction.
Description of Internship:For my GGI summer internship funded by UChicagoGRAD, I worked at the Cyprus Interaction lab at the Cyprus University of Technology during the summer of 2017. In more details, the project concerned an eye-tracking experiment capturing the eye gaze and movement of people reading sentences on the screen. The equipment used for the experiment was owned by the lab and the stimuli presented targeted the study of attention and memory of participants with respect to reading Twitter posts. Choosing this particular topic targeted (a) the understanding and promotion of the use of hashtags as a strategy for increasing the interest and awareness on political news (b) hashtags as the current market’s strategy on product and services marketing.
Name: Sasha Rohret
Area of Study: Egyptian Archaeology, Zooarchaeology
Internship Organization: The Oriental Institute
Internship Location: Chicago, IL
Description of Organization: Within the Oriental Institute, the Oriental Institute Museum (OIM) and Department of Public Education and Outreach promote interest in and understanding of ancient civilizations of the Middle East, and their connections to the modern world, for a broad and diverse audience. The OIM tells the story of the rise of civilizations, communicates the excitement of archaeological, linguistic, and historical discovery, enhances understanding and appreciation of cultural similarities and differences, shows connections between the ancient and modern worlds, and highlights the research of the Oriental Institute.
Description of Internship: In the summer of 2017, Sasha worked with the Museum Education and Public Programs department at the Oriental Institute Museum, to learn more about the process of developing educational programming at the museum for families, adults, and student groups. As part of this internship, she participated in youth, adult, and family programs, observed and partook in the planning process, and ultimately created a program of her own design. As part of the internship, Sasha assisted with events such as Ancient Earth Day, which focused on the use of natural or recycled materials to explore the creative engineering needed to build with limited resources, and Ancient Game Day, where families played games developed in the ancient Near East. When not working on these programs, she assisted the Education office with their day-to-day activities, preparing for the various group and adult programs that occur during the week. Over the course of the summer, Sasha created a ‘Families Day’ program centered on zooarchaeology. The program, which has become part of the department rotation, educates museum goers on what we can learn about human and animal interactions in the ancient world in a fun and engaging manner using both pieces on display in the galleries as well as hands-on activities with real animal bones from the collection housed in the OI Museum Zooarchaeology Lab.
