In March 2023, I set sail from Carleton’s campus in Northfield, MN to head to a spring and summer abroad in Europe!
Off-Campus Study in Rome
This time abroad began in Italy, where I lived for ten weeks as part of the Carleton College Off-Campus Study program “History, Religion, and Urban Change in Medieval Rome.” Alongside 25 other Carleton students and two Carleton professors who specialize in medieval Italian history, I studied the built history of the medieval city that is so often overshadowed by the ancient ruins glorified by the country’s tourist industry. Alongside working on projects that allowed further public access to this medieval history, like the Carleton Guide to Medieval Rome, the length of this trip allowed for extremely fulfilling immersion in Italian culture.
Because we were centered in Rome, living in apartments dispersed throughout the Prati neighborhood, we were able to get to know people living around us. From the couple who ran the bar under our apartment to the old pair running our cheese stand to the neighboring family across the hall, we came to know and be known by the residents around us and felt a part of the community in which we lived.
We were also able to get out and see the rest of the country on program-wide trips across the country. We visited Venice, Padova, Assisi, Siena, Sicily, and Cefalù to learn from physical medieval spaces on long-term trips, and took day trips to places in the Roman hinterlands like Subiaco and Ostia on shorter say-trips. It was a truly wonderful experience that allowed not only for exploration, but also intimate connection. When we left, we not only had to say goodbye to the Tiber and the Vatican, but also the people whose spaces we had become regulars at over our months-long stay. Looking back now, it is these double-kisses on the cheek that spark the deepest pangs to return.
Boyd-Niles Travel Fellowship
While in Italy, I also received additional funding to visit the island of Ischia with a friend through the Boyd-Niles Travel Fellowship. We designed an experiential learning project studying the Castello Aragonese d’Ischia, a smaller, fortified island protecting one of the main cities on Ischia, in an effort to explore the medieval confluence of architecture and power projection.
The rock has held fortifications since the 5th century BCE, but in its current state most visibly represents the 15th century construction projects undertaken after Alfonso of Aragon conquered the island and the castle in 1423. Throughout this time, it not only served as a site of state power projection over the island and the Bay of Naples, but also as a place of popular safety. When pirates threatened the coasts of Ischia, invading navies crossed the horizon, or regional volcanoes began erupting, people from across the island would be given refuge in the castle’s walls to wait out the threat.
The castle is incredibly well-preserved to this day, and the island has put an immense amount of effort into its presentation to the public. You can walk through the vast majority of the grounds on a planned but unguided route; essentially only the dilapidated upper ramparts and tower are inaccessible as of our visit. The route’s stops range from the ruins of a classical Roman-era temple to frescoed medieval crypts. There is even a chamber preserved where Poor Clare nuns would leave the corpses of their dead sisters on thrones with holes on the seats. Originally, pots would be placed under the holes to collect the humors of the decaying sisters.
While the site is remarkably preserved and the route is incredibly interesting, my friend and I both agreed that more detailed descriptive labels for the sites would have been useful. Oftentimes, dates and contextualizing information were completely omitted. Still, it was one of the greatest public history sites I’ve ever visited, and I still wasn’t tired of it after almost four hours of touring the site.
We spent the rest of our trip touring the island. We actually circumnavigated the entire coastline thanks to a mislabeled bus, but it turned out to be a wonderful adventure. The voyage offered the opportunity to see just how populated and lived on the island truly was. While there is certainly a tourist presence in Ischia, there is also a much larger population of locals living their normal lives among gorgeous volcanic cliffs and medieval fortresses.
Kuennecke Fellowship
At the end of our program in Italy, I traveled to Berlin on the Kuennecke Fellowship, which funded a week-long archival research project in Berlin in early June. For the most part, I spent the mornings and early afternoons conducting my research at the Deutsches Kinemathek, one of Germany’s film museums and archives, studying the changing perceptions of Marlene Dietrich’s Hollywood filmography in late-Weimar Germany. This research helped me contextualize the topic of my senior History Comps project, the Nazi German and Irish Free State censorship of Marlene Dietrich’s films in the 1930s.
After leaving the archives, I spent the rest of these days exploring Berlin. I walked around 120 miles in that time, seeing a huge amount of the city and many of the public history sites I had wanted to visit in person. Perhaps the best day, though, was the free Friday I spent exploring every trail in the Tiergarten, which is perhaps the best city park I have ever visited. Enjoy some photos from my wanderings below!
At the end of the week, I was sad to say goodbye, but was excited to pursue the next phase of my research project!
CGRS Fellowship
I followed my research project in Berlin by visiting Frankfurt and Dublin through the Center for Global and Regional Studies Junior Research Fellowship. I began in Frankfurt, where I conducted research on Nazi state and popular documents related to Marlene Dietrich at the Deutsche Filminstitut, whose archive was located in the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The archive staff of the Filminstitut were truly wonderful to work with, helping me navigate the huge amount of sources related to Dietrich’s work. On my days off, I took to the streets of Frankfurt to explore the city. There was a lot of beauty, especially in the medieval architecture (which can be hard to find in major German cities), but my favorite stop was probably either the Senckenberg Museum or the Botanic Gardens, relics of Frankfurt’s past as the capital of European natural history!
After my time in Frankfurt, I took a plane to Dublin, where I stayed for three weeks. While there, I conducted research on film censorship in the Irish Free State using documents at the National Library of Ireland and the National Archive of Ireland. Not only was I able to use the actual state censorship records relating to my case study of Marlene Dietrich, but I was also given access to the complete personal papers of James Montgomery, the Official Film Censor of the Irish Free State! Once again, the archival staff were so very helpful in helping me navigate this plethora of information, and it was a very successful research experience! I also had plenty of free time to explore the city of Dublin, make some wonderful friends at the café and climbing gym that I frequented, and even get out of the city and see the cliffs at Howth, a lifelong dream of mine!
These various off-campus experiences abroad really brought together almost all of the previously distant strands of academic interest I had developed during my time at Carleton prior to the trip. I was able to study the confluence of memory and physical space in Italy, connect nationalism to film history in Germany and Ireland, and immerse myself in the linguistic and cultural environments of all three of my regions of academic interest. The only thing that was left was to bring these experiences back to campus!