Grad Students Abroad: Saints & Scholars/Merry Old England Edition

Sometimes our grad students’ research interests take them far from home, and we are fortunate enough to hear from them about their experiences. This year, Theo Campbell, MA ’23, earned a graduate summer research fellowship and pursued research abroad in Ireland and in the UK. Here is their story:

“The research I did this summer was a continuation of a project that started as my term paper for the Literary Theory class last fall. For that paper, I read the memoir of B. N. Hedderman, a district nurse who worked in the Aran Islands in the 1910s, through lenses of vulnerability and post-colonial studies. My plan for my research this summer was to look at other accounts from district nurses in rural Ireland from around the same time period to see whether Hedderman’s memoir and the conclusions I drew from it are indicative of the district nursing program as a whole, or whether she’s an anomaly.

“My research involved going to several different archives to try and find those other accounts. Hedderman’s memoir is the only long form firsthand account of district nursing in Ireland that exists from this time, but I knew from secondary historical sources I had read that there were smaller testimonies from nurses in documents I could only access in person. For example, I went to the National Library of Ireland to look at the Annual Reports and monthly meeting minutes of the Congested Districts Board for Ireland, which partially funded some of the district nurses, including Hedderman. And I contacted the Queen’s Nurses Institute, a charity that evolved from the district nursing program I’m interested in, to see if I could come to their offices in London to look at the relevant issues of a magazine that was published by the institute for the district nurses and often contained mini diaries from nurses working in various places.

“I spent two weeks in Dublin and one week in London, going to five different archives in total. The coolest was definitely the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin. It holds accounts, most of which are handwritten, created by folklore collectors who interviewed elders in various communities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. It’s a completely unique cultural record and it was such an incredible experience to get to read parts of it. It was also just great to be in Ireland—most of my research interests are focused on Irish literature, but this summer was the first time I spent significant time there. There also happened to be a literary festival happening in Dublin while I was there, which was a great bonus.”

Theo learned a great deal during their summer of travel and research.

“Prior to this summer, I had some experience in archives, but I had never done anything on this scale. Going to five different archives in three weeks was definitely a bit of crash course that broadened my skills—for example, the process for accessing items at a huge institution like the British Library is much different from the process at a smaller, specialized collection like the National Folklore Collection. I am now much more familiar with different kinds of finding aids and with the different procedures for handling delicate materials. I also got really good at skimming thousands of pages efficiently to find what was actually going to serve my research and to make the most of the limited time I had in each place.”

As is often the case with research, Theo’s findings took them to some unexpected places.

“My most interesting research findings are very different from what I thought I was looking for. I didn’t really expect to learn anything about Hedderman herself, but I ended up finding several mentions of her in the government documents I read. These mentions led me to other sources and allowed me to piece together a really interesting picture of her life that dramatically shifted the way I read her memoir. So now I’m working on a paper that is more focused on Hedderman’s life and on why she chose to write her memoir the way she did, which I was able to present in part at the IASIL conference in Limerick.”

We are happy to have Theo back with us in the US, and grateful to them for sharing their experiences with us!