As the semester ended, 45 students from the Humanities Scholars Program (HSP) in the College of Arts & Sciences (A&S) presented their work May 2 at the annual Humanities Scholars Spring Research Conference.
The all-day conference offers a candid look into the research that concludes many students' senior year. Projects spanned topics from Confederate cemeteries to Korean textiles, from Indigenous short stories to Latin poetry, and from the Federalist papers to Chinese economic nationalism.
Colette Rose Jarrell presented her research on French protest movements of the 1960s during the Humanities Scholars Spring Research Conference.
During her presentation, Colette Rose Jarrell '25 held aloft a tattered collection of pages, explaining to the audience her decision to represent the artwork of a 1960s French protest movement in the format of a newspaper.
The newspaper she cautioned, was a prototype, laid out on printer paper, but the intention behind it remained clear.
"The [paper] is both the exhibit guide and the exhibit itself," Jarrell told the audience.
Jarrell's project idea began with a class she took on political memory, which she applied to the posters of resistance made during May 1968 - a particularly turbulent time of French history marked by student protest. In France, she said, this history remains surprisingly unacknowledged, so she chose to showcase the political posters in a newspaper as a departure from this lack of shared memory and from the rigid salon-style display used in previous museum exhibits.
Jarrell received an HSP research grant that allowed her to conduct vital research in local archives in France over February break.
"I wanted to present this history, specifically to the Cornell population, and I wanted to do so in a format that would kind of break the structure of a [traditional] exhibit," Jarrell recalled. "[My design] would allow the viewer to come closer to the material that they're being presented with."
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