Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences celebrates the class of 2023! To commemorate their upcoming graduation, we’ve connected with a few seniors about their time at Weinberg College and future plans. Carolina Stutz will be graduating in June with a major in History and minors in Spanish and Portuguese Language & Lusophone Cultures.
What did you study at Weinberg College and why? If applicable, please explain if your interests transformed or evolved during your time here.
I majored in History and minored in both Spanish and Portuguese. I love the kinds of questions one asks in the discipline of history, the importance of storytelling in the field, and the fact that research crucially depends on engaging with primary sources (e.g., newspapers, letters, photographs, etc). The summer after my freshman year proved to be a formative time in which it became clear that I particularly enjoy working with primary source material. I had the privilege of conducting research for Professor Scott Sowerby on the toleration of Irish Catholics in the context of a Protestant elite hegemony, and found it thrilling to sift through Irish newspapers from the 1770s! This experience and subsequent independent research through summer grants set an important foundation for producing a senior thesis this year under the advising of Professor Michelle Molina and Professor Keith Woodhouse. My project was on the mass migration of Italian immigrants to Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and how their experiences of crowdedness onboard the ship and then in the capital, Buenos Aires, fundamentally shaped the way these migrants related to each other. I studied Spanish because it is one of my native languages and I was drawn to the possibility of engaging its literature more deeply. I minored in Portuguese because I was drawn to the musicality of Brazilian Portuguese.
What has your coursework taught you about yourself?
My coursework taught me that I could always enter into the “groove” of studying—that I could find a sense of joy or fulfillment in completing most assignments, even if they were somewhat removed from my pointed interests. Probably the hardest class I took was a 300-level linguistics course called Fundamentals of Syntax, a required course for Weinberg College distributions, and which involved picking apart the structures of sentences using diagrams called syntax “trees.” Despite its challenges, I found myself enjoying the ritual of going to the library and listening to music while I worked on the problem sets. I think cultivating this mindset—of taking each assignment on its own terms—was also a compartmentalization strategy. Focusing on the present task helped me avoid feeling bogged down and overwhelmed by long to-do lists.
Do you have a favorite or transformative Weinberg College course you took? Or a professor that taught you?
Professor Sean Hanretta’s Global History of Death and Dying was a particularly transformative course. I had chosen the Global History concentration for the major, and been struggling to parse out what doing “global” history could really look like in practice. I remember being struck by how Professor Hanretta’s course creatively balanced and interconnected many geographies and time periods, which he organized thematically. One week, for example, we would look at histories of enslaved people in the United States and Brazil, and another week, we would explore plagues and pandemics, and read about the dramatic impact of the bubonic plague on Florence in the mid-14th century. This approach was methodologically eye-opening. I also enjoyed the final research project assignment. I wrote a paper exploring late-19th century female mourning in Latin America and the role of women’s black mourning dress, called luto. I think this work on the materiality of mortality planted the seed for later interests in a field called material culture studies. These studies treat objects as valuable sources of historical information, and will be informing my graduate research in the fall.
What advice would you give to your freshman self?
There is always time for rest and prayer.
What are your plans after you graduate?
In September, I will be pursuing a Comparative History master’s at Central European University in Vienna. I will be researching how devotional objects shaped early modern (roughly the 16th-18th centuries) Italian women’s mobility in everyday life. I plan on conducting close readings of early modern Italian women’s ego-documents, or autobiographical texts, and paying special attention to descriptions of ordinary objects in order to grasp how they informed female mobility and autonomy. In short, I am interested in exploring—through women’s textual production—how faith practices and such objects as rosaries, books, and paintings inspired local travel in the quotidian, impelling women to move across space, say, from home to church, or from church to market. I am very grateful to Northwestern’s Office of Fellowships and my advisors in history for guiding me through the process of graduate school applications!