Today is your last chance to register for Alumni Weekend and see what’s going on inside MAPH’s new journal, Colloquium. Colloquium is an online journal run entirely and independently by MAPH alumni and current students.

We’ll be launching our second issue at MAPH’s Alumni Weekend event, and it’s going to be fantastic. Issue 2.1 has Bauhaus, the Italian avant-garde, rebels and militants, sitars and soundscapes, three poets, short fiction, a cat called Mouloud, and a not-inconsiderable amount of spectroscopy.

At the University of Chicago and in MAPH in particular, we joined – for a lifetime – a community of humanists, world-changers, and fierce question-askers. We chase the ineffable and, in one form or another, we chronicle that pursuit. Those chronicles are how we talk together when we can’t talk together. When we founded Colloquium last year, it was to give a home to these chronicles-as-conversations.

The only thing better than having all these conversations happening in one online journal is having them face-to-face. Come and experience Colloquium at Alumni Weekend – or better yet, become a part of it.

Bill Hutchison

Founding Editor of Colloquium

 Continue reading for the bios of the participants in the Colloquium panel: 

Moderator

Hilary Strang (PhD ’09) is MAPH’s Deputy Director and Lecturer in the Department of English. Her research interests include nineteenth century British literature, the novel, radical culture, science fiction and Marxism.

translation of Giorgio Manganelli’s “Hilarotragoedia”

Joel Calahan (MAPH ’05) is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, where he focuses on English and Italian lyric poetry. His dissertation focuses on the influence of philology and historical linguistics in the work of nineteenth-century poets like Leopardi, Coleridge, Bello, and Hardy. He has been the coeditor of Chicago Review since 2010.

“Experimental, Inside the Box: Chris Ware’s Building Stories”

Margaret Fink (MAPH ’07) is currently working on a PhD in English at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on American prose and graphic after WWII, representation and realism, ordinariness, and the non-normative body.

“The Art of Acclimation”

Ingrid Haftel (MAPH ’10) is a curator and writer originally from Purdy, Washington. She is currently an Associate Curator at the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

“Agahi”

Rakae Jamil (MAPH ’13) has been involved in music since the age of 12 when he started learning the sitar. He completed his undergraduate studies in Musicology from National College of the Arts and is both a sitarist and vocalist. He composed music for a complilation of Allama Iqbal’s poetry, and has performed in Coke Studio season 2 with Noori, for which he is the badn’s session sitarist and keyboard player, and has performed live with Noori throughout Pakistan.

Three Poems

Gregory Lawless (MAPH ’04) is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the author of I Thought I Was New Here (2009) and Foreclosure (2013). He finished MAPH in 2004, and you can find his poems in such places as Pleiades, The Journal, Salamander, The National Poetry Review, Sonora Review, The Cincinnati Review, Paper Darts, Ilk, Transom,H_NGM_N, and many others.

Alumni Weekend 2013 is approaching! June 6-9, 2013, the University of Chicago will be holding a series of panels, lectures, and social events geared toward alumni. There are a plethora of events being put on by each division so there will be PLENTY to see and do, but we wanted to draw your attention specifically to the event where MAPHers will be making a big showing.

UnCommon Core | The Humanities Beyond the Academy: A Colloquium on Colloquium. 

Saturday, June 8th
4:00-5:00pm
Harper Memorial Rm. 130
116 E. 59th St.

Our main event! Deputy Director Hilary Strang will be moderating a panel on Colloquium, MAPH’s interdisciplinary online journal. Colloquium‘s editing staff and contributors to the latest issue will be in attendance, and the event will include readings from the latest issue by MAPH students, alumni and friends.

Alumni Beer Garden

Saturday, June 8th
2:00-7:00pm
Harper Quad
116 E. 59th St.

What would MAPH be without free food and beer? MAPHers will be making a showing here throughout the duration of the afternoon. Come by and socialize before and after the Colloquium panel.

The deadline to register is next Friday, May 31st—but space is already filling up, so the sooner you can register, the better! When you register, make sure you specifically check the box for the Colloquium event and the Beer Garden to reserve your space!

From MAPH ’11 alum Biliana Grozdanova, co-founder of El Jinete Films:

After living all over the world, from Australia’s east coast to America’s west coast and pretty much everywhere in between, the Grozdanova sisters found themselves on the premises of the University of Chicago campus about to embark on their most creative venture to date. In 2012, Biliana and Marina Grozdanova founded El Jinete Films – a documentary production company with a mission to create inspiring documentaries featuring music from all around the globe. Their first film, however, would be a tale about rock n’ roll from their very own streets of Chicago… Currently in production, “The Last Kamikazis of Heavy Metal” is a documentary about the Chicago-based band Hessler, with which the Grozdanova sisters have been on two national tours, filming their every move. A first cut of the film premiered this spring at the Bare Bones International Film and Music Festival and received the Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary. The final version of the film will be released in the national and international festival circuit in 2014.

Marina is a graduating senior in the college, majoring in International Studies. Biliana is a 2011 MAPH-er and wrote her thesis on rock n’ roll and the music documentary. This summer, the sisters return to Spain (their second home) to premiere their parallel project, “Ortigueira: Echoes at Land’s End,” a film about an international Celtic music festival on Galicia’s northern shores. Interestingly enough, what began as another crazy trip and film venture, the Ortigueira experience inspired Marina to write her B.A. thesis on this music festival, and it has been nominated for the Adlai Stevenson International Studies Thesis Prize.

In 1926, Scottish documentarian John Grierson coined the term “documentary” while studying at the University of Chicago… Who would have thought that this fact, along with the birth of Mick Jagger, 16mm film cameras, and two little girls in ex-communist Bulgaria, would lead to the epic apparition of El Jinete Films on the UChicago campus almost a century later? Indeed, the rock doc is a genre very much ALIVE and WELL, and the Grozdanova sisters plan to feed it for decades to come!

Check out the trailer for Kamikazes above, and be sure to look out for its premiere and the premiere of Ortigueira. Do you know of a MAPH alum doing exciting creative work? Let us know!

Joanna MacKenzie (AM’02) of Browne & Miller Literary Agency is profiled in the latest issue of Tableau.

“Come Together“ profiles Colloquium, MAPH’s new online journal that features exemplary, wide-ranging work by MAPH students, alumni and staff. This is not the first mention of Colloquium in other publications—if you’re itching for more meta on the magazine, check out this interview with its founders in The University of Chicago Magazine. The Tableau article has come out just in time for the journal’s second issue, which is set to launch on Friday! Don’t miss it!

“Publish and Flourish,” an article on UChicago Humanities alumni who work in the publishing industry, features three MAPH grads who are making it in publishing. Ellen Grafton (AM’11), Allison Wright (AM’08), and Joanna MacKenzie (AM’02) offer their practiced advice on how to get hired and succeed in book publishing. Ellen and Allison moved to New York to get into the business—Ellen is now Assistant Managing Editor of the children’s division at Simon and Schuster, and Allison is the US Dictionaries Editor at Oxford University Press. Joanna put down roots in Chicago, and she works as a literary agent at Browne and Miller Literary Associates—the same company where MAPH provides a paid summer internship for one current student every year.

Those are just two of the publications that are profiling MAPH alumni and projects. Know of other places MAPH alumni are popping up? Contact us!

Leila Wilson, The Hundred Grasses (Milkweed Editions, 2013) 

Leila on The Hundred Grasses:

My poems are rooted in the flatlands and lowlands: the Midwestern lawns, lakes, fields, and creeks of my childhood, and the Dutch farms, canals, and seascapes near my family’s home in Holland. Much of my poetry focuses on those instances when a space exerts itself beyond recognition, when it seems to estrange itself so that it may be renegotiated. For me this is a process of embedding my examination in the musicality of language and paying close attention to the breath of a line.

Leila will be reading from The Hundred Grasses at the Seminary CoOp on 5/21, and at the Chicago Cultural Center on 5/23. More information about her upcoming readings is available at the publisher’s website. 

You can purchase The Hundred Grasses from the publisher’s website or from Amazon.

Gregory Lawless, Foreclosures (Back Pages Books, 2013)

Greg’s one-sentence synopsis of his newest volume of poetry is, “Voyeuristic pastoralist suffers ecopoetical ravings in Ambivalence, PA.”

In an interview on his blog, Greg goes on to write:

…Foreclosure compares to any book of poetry that hovers nervously in the vicinity of the fraught pastoral, simultaneously wary of and lured by it.  Many contemporary pastoral poems regard themselves as anti-pastorals, or post-pastorals—they imagine that the pastoral is impossible because it’s terminally problematic, and, thus, they fret in the wake of that “fact.”  The poems in Foreclosure fret differently, I guess—not by abandoning convention or reference altogether, but by manifesting what I call critical ambivalence toward them—at times embracing, and at times rejecting these things, as the poems demand.  But ultimately this is a book born of familiarity with a place.

You can purchase Foreclosure from the publisher’s website.

If you know of other recent publications by MAPH graduates that you think should be profiled, email us!

” ‘MUSEI WORMIANI HISTORIA’, THE FRONTISPIECE FROM THE MUSEUM WORMIANUM DEPICTING OLE WORM’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES.”

In our last History@Work post, we charted the recent burst of academic public history jobs in the past few years. This year’s job market has continued the trend, with thirty jobs seeking either major or minor public history specialties posted on the Academic Wiki. It is yet to be seen whether this increase in job postings reflects a sustainable boom or a short-lived bubble. Regardless, this growth of public history jobs signals a visible interest in the field in dozens of history departments across the country, raising significant questions regarding the overproduction of undergraduate and graduate students in public history.

One of the major concerns of expanding public history training is that many museums and historic institutions are currently facing major budget cuts, and so we are training new public historians for a field which is under siege. As the NCPH and the wider profession continue to discuss longstanding issues of graduate training in public history, we want to suggest a broadening of public history training. Public history already trains students in research and writing, preservation, and project management among other things. By incorporating more of a public humanities approach, we could train students even more broadly for a wider array of fields. At this moment of growth, public historians have an opportunity to think about new directions, including broadening the definitions of what public history is and what it encompasses.

Some universities have begun to re-imagine graduate training more expansively in the public humanities, which are broadly defined as projects that engage the public in the humanist fields of “history, philosophy, popular culture and the arts.” Public humanities programs such as those at the Brown, NYU and University of Chicago infuse students with the belief that they can bring the specialized ideas of academic debate into the public sphere and inspire new visions about a more flexible curriculum and broad training. The growth of these programs demonstrates the expansive possibility of training the next generation of public historians not as possessors of a bound set of skills, but rather as flexible professionals who can work in a variety of cultural and non-profit settings. The majority of public history job listings call for experience in museum studies, historic preservation, and archival training. But the research, writing and public engagement skills of public historian would also work well in teaching, journalism, the arts and non-profit organizations.

As young public history professionals we come to this discussion mindful of our own experiences at the master’s level, one of us in public history and the other in public humanities. Anne received her MA in public history at New York University, a program that resides largely in the history department. The program provided her with a strong skill set for museum work and public history scholarship. In contrast, Lara trained at the University of Chicago in its Master of Arts Program in Humanities, designing an interdisciplinary degree that brought together different skill sets to her museum studies inquiry. The public humanities degree at University of Chicago, for instance, allowed students to design their own degree in various disciplines, enabling students to train themselves in ways that would be useful for their intended profession. A similar sentiment was expressed at the meeting of this past year’s NCPH Working Group on Imagining New Careers in Public History, where discussion about training MAs with business skills flourished. We might greatly benefit from looking to public humanities programs as a model for teaching students transferrable skills and broad cultural approaches. In one example, the University of Chicago’s MAPH program consistently places students in publishing, journalism, and teaching jobs, as well as other cultural sector jobs in visual and dramatic arts and public humanities organizations. According to one administrator of the program, graduates of broad humanities training are well-positioned to connect ideas generated within the academy to public spaces, events, and projects.

Beyond changes in public history curriculum, we would also be well-served to better connect what we already do to a broader array of cultural work. The kinship between our current professional moment and the rise of public humanities cannot be underemphasized. Public historians have many specific skills to bring to this conversation, our engagement with public memory and civil dialogue among them. Reimagining public history training as bringing skills of historical analysis into an array of jobs outside of museums and historic sites strikes at the heart of our field. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen persuasively demonstrated that popular conceptions of the past reside within the walls of the museum, but that quotidian historical consciousness is woven throughout social relations and the cultural sphere. We might do well to promote the value of historical scholarship broadly within the cultural sector, and empower our students to imagine their skills transferring to a wide array of professions and jobs beyond historic institutions.

This turn towards public humanities would provide students with the opportunity to self-design their education and foster more interdisciplinary training to equip them with the broad skills necessary for professional success across industries and sectors.  Thinking about public humanities also redefines what counts as public history work. Proponents of liberal arts training have long fended off criticisms that broadly trained critical thinkers are poorly equipped for the real world. Yet despite the criticisms lobbied at the generalist training of liberal arts education, some of the richest suggestions involve not becoming narrow in the transmission of skills, but rather redefining the broad principles that guide the curriculum and pedagogy. Beyond this, we could take cues from both the alternative academic careers community and public humanities circles.

~ Lara Kelland and Anne Parsons

She says of the project: “I feel inspired by artistic anatomy because these works of art visualize the uncharted and wondrous terrain of the human body, not some distant volcano or historical event, but the miraculous, complex mechanisms operating within ourselves. The study of anatomy also, historically, has brought together doctors and artists who sought to explore this corporeal space together.”

Because of this, she is also very excited about the opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration around the exhibition topic. She says: “I want to create a dialogue between these two commonly polarized fields (art and science). To that end, we are initiating collaborative programming with Massachusetts General Hospital, the College of Fine Arts, the BU Medical College & the Center for Science & Medical Journalism at Boston University, and the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. I hope to unite this diverse audience, bringing together people who are interested in art and those who are interested in medicine for a rich, shared conversation about what it means to occupy, treat, & picture our own bodies.”

Slipp admits that it has been tricky to plan the exhibition, the publication, and the programming, while also attending to her PhD coursework, conferences, and teaching responsibilities. But, she says: “MAPH made me realize that I can do anything. After packing a thesis & 8 courses into one year at UChicago, while also balancing Lake Effect weather, a marriage, and a job, it never occurred to me that I couldn’t pull this exhibition off!”

Recently, one of the funding sources for Teaching the Body fell through and the exhibition now faces a shortfall just two months before the expected installation date. Slipp has launched a Kickstarter campaign to make up the deficit. She has been surprised by the response, with many people commenting on the unique use of crowdsourced fundraising for an academic project. She is hoping that fellow MAPH alums will be interested in the interdisciplinary nature of the project and “choose to visit the Kickstarter website, read about the exhibition, catalogue, and programming, and support the project by sharing it with networks, colleagues, and friends.” She hopes that alums in the Boston area visit the exhibition when it opens January 31st and take advantage of what are sure to be some unique programming events. She welcomes feedback about the exhibition or the campaign and can be contacted at http://bu.academia.edu/NaomiSlipp

You can visit her kickstarter campaign here.

Cristopher De Phillips and Laurie Ipsen in front of City Hall in Chicago

Cristopher De Phillips (MAPH 2009) arrived at UChicago as a MAPH student in 2008. Even now, he remembers cold and cloudy days in January. “I’d say to myself–’This thesis is never going to get done.’”

As Founder and Director of Chicago Welcomes Home the Heroes, De Phillips now finds himself in familiar circumstances–looking ahead to the execution of a difficult project whose scope seems to continuously widen–though the task that he’s set in front of himself can seem even more challenging. Along with co-founder Laurie Ipsen, De Phillips is spearheading the effort to plan and execute America’s largest welcome-home parade for veterans of America’s post-9/11 wars (THIS DECEMBER 15IN DOWNTOWN CHICAGO). The organization will also host a screening of the documentary film Hell and Back at the Reva and David Logan Center on SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10 (6PM), with a panel discussion to follow.

MAPH students and alumni are welcome to attend all of the events.

All of this amounts to a huge set of logistical challenges that has demanded collaboration with civic, government, non-profit, and corporate interests (Chicago Welcomes Home the Heroes secured their first major sponsor in United Health Care on the day that I met with De Phillips and Ipsen here in Hyde Park).

De Phillips jokes that he has confidence that the work will get done in part because of his experience writing that MAPH thesis project–a project that likely seems less daunting when observed in the rear-view mirror.

He became interested in the idea of a Chicago parade after seeing Rachel Maddow’s coverage of Saint Louis’s event–which attracted roughly 100,000 people. It may seem like an unlikely calling for a MAPH alum–especially one without any firsthand experience of military life (neither De Phillips nor Ipsen has been in the armed forces). But this logistically complicated and emotional process has become the focus of De Phillips’s professional life during the past year.

“It’s important to live up to our end of the social contract that we implicitly agree to as US citizens,” he says of his commitment to the project. “Civilians are supposed to help troops transition back.” As part of the parade festivities, the organization will also be hosting a resources fair for veterans, providing free health screenings and information about higher education enrollment in partnership with Chicago organizations and educational institutions. Chicago Welcomes Home the Heroes wants to send a clear message that troops can plug into support networks, especially given that troops from recent conflicts have faced extraordinary post-combat challenges.

De Phillips and Ipsen can cite some of the most disheartening statistics about veterans of recent conflicts when they talk about the need for more resources. The US military loses more active duty personnel to suicide than actual combat. The average this year alone is one individual per day. According to De Phillips, American soldiers have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan to find that unemployment among vets of these wars remains at or near 10% (this, despite the fact that today’s BLS statistics show that unemployment figures for the broader veteran population hover closer to 7%). On top of these figures, anywhere between 18-23 veterans commit suicide each month.

To meet with veterans coping with the effects of combat has broadened De Phillips’s perspective on issues that have been in the news.

“It’s a little bit different when you meet someone with PTSD. It was an abstract thing before. Now we have close personal friends who are suffering from its effects.”

Though he readily admits that “The politics of the wars go across the board,” De Phillips asserts that he has been focused on the individuals returning from those wars. “We want to celebrate the heroes.”Above all, he emphasizes that the parade is a celebration and a way of saying thank you–or in a more simple way: “It’s up to us. And it seems like the right thing to do.”

For more information about Chicago Welcomes Home the Heroes, you can join the group’s Facebook Page.

There are other places that you can read about MAPH and veterans. Going into the Field,” from Tableau, features several MAPH alumni who have served in the armed forces. Among them is Eric McMillan, who has published a short piece on TheAtlantic.com called “This Father’s War” about his service in Iraq. He was also just awarded a “Made” Fellowship for 2012-2013 from the Richard Hugo House in Seattle. Eric will use the fellowship to finish his novel. And, as part of his MAPH internship at WBEZ, alum Mike Wilson (MAPH 2011) interviewed Nick Fox (MAPH 2011) for 848about his decision to enter the military and about his combat experience in 111th Company in Mosul.

Author Nathaniel Dell (MAPH ’12)

I hope this post finds all of you well. I appreciate that some of you may have time to read this, as much as I appreciate that many more of you may not have such time because you are so immersed in your zealous study of those recondite things we call the humanities. Whatever your passion that has drawn you to MAPH, whether literature, philosophy, music or art history—even classics—I trust that you respect the arduous labor of clarifying your thought as a labor of great importance. Between us, this feeling is mutual. However, in my personal experience with the humanities, the relevance of tarrying with the Platonic dialogues is something I have frequent need of renegotiating for myself. What ought I to do with my now clarified, or, more often, sublimely muddled thought? In MAPH, I was guided and fortified by the notion that my philosophizing should advance some common good. Credit that notion to all of the Socratic fan-fiction I’ve read from Plato; blame the generality of that notion to me. At any rate, Maren has graciously invited me to share how my experience in MAPH challenged me to think of how humanistic inquiry has informed my AmeriCorps service. I would also like to share how MAPH challenged me to re-think the spaces in which humanistic inquiry can flourish.

At the outset of my MAPH year last September, I was confident, though not certain, that I would find myself in a year or two attending some Ph.D. program in philosophy. At the same time, I thought it peculiar that I would have spent the past five years contemplating the common good along with my dead Greek friends, Plato, Socrates, and Marx (pretty much an Aristotelian) but doing little direct service towards forming the community I had been imagining. That said, towards the middle of my MAPH year, I became more confident that I would find myself working in some social service organization, which is just what happened. Through AmeriCorps’ Catholic Volunteer Network, I now work as a caseworker for the Guardian Angel Settlement Association at Hosea House in St. Louis, Missouri. GASA’s social services site, Hosea House, provides emergency assistance for persons and families in crisis who may need food, clothing, utilities or rental assistance. Hosea House also partners with other agencies to offer seasonal, public health, senior and back to school programs.

I spend my time now speaking one-on-one with clients in need of these services, listening to them clarify their situations for themselves, listening to them interpret how best to achieve the Good that they desire. When I’m with my clients, I don’t converse much about the Platonic soul’s ascension to the Good, that’s for sure. Indeed, nobody cares at my particular service site that I tarried with Plato’s Lysis in order, in retrospect, to try making sense of dialogic interactions with folks. (Nota bene: don’t tell people whose electric is about to shut off about Lucretius’ poem, De Rerum Naturae, in which a spectator witnesses from dry land a shipwreck at sea, and feels for the first time the pleasure of his own security.)  So the subject matter of my daily conversations has changed, but the skills and attitudes I cultivated in MAPH are transferrable to the discourse I now have. After all, we MAPHers take up the task of clarifying and responding to problems; we are responsible for making ourselves understood by our peers and professors; we charged with the task of listening to the justifications others offer. We can apply these skills just as well in service to other humans that don’t necessarily employ the linguistic practices that would make them “humanists” in the academic sense.

Most of all, as MAPHers we must offer our time, our minds, and our energies to persons and ideas that seem impossibly esoteric or just wrong, but whom nonetheless we must understand. If in the AfterMAPH you find yourself called to some sort of service, be assured that just as you’ve tried to contort the horizon of your thought to understand Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, so will you be demanded to open yourself to things people say that seem sometimes totally disagreeable. Or, people will invite you to share in a situation with them that just doesn’t make sense, where no tentative solutions seem available. I have shared in many of these moments at Hosea House. And unlike when I tossed aside the coming of age narrative Hegel wrote for Geist, I can’t set aside the heavy narrative that someone has told me as she sits in my office. (I mean, I could set it aside, but it seems irresponsible for me to catapult them from my office.) I must remain patient and attentive as I collaborate with the client, as we venture toward some common understanding of the situation, and locate some plan for further dialogue or other action.

And even though we may have read enough Kant to be certain of the unconditional dignity of human beings, caring for a person doesn’t become any easier because of it. I neither know in advance how to respond to the person before me, nor how to justify my presence before that person. When attending to a person who is homeless, a person uninsured and burdened with medical bills, someone whose power will soon be cut, someone fleeing an abusive domestic situation—even though they are all courageous—I cannot help but sometimes to feel desperate, desperate for them and for me. My time in MAPH then feels like a discarded experiment that should have been conducted while getting a Masters in Social Work. And yet, without the values I’ve shaped and have been shaped by through humanistic inquiry, I may not have the concern that I have now. I like that concern. It keeps me working on building community, not because I know that my time in social service will lead to success, (the measure of which is up for grabs) but because of the faith that I have. I am faithful that uniting service with humanistic inquiry can give way to unexpected pathways of thought through the most aporetic of problems. I’m confident that learning how to listen, how to dialogue, can help us come together to form a flourishing community.

You might note that this is not a rigorous apology for studying the humanities, since it boils down to a faith for which I can offer no justification. However, I did not compose this to convince anyone to serve in a soup kitchen, if that is something that isn’t already desirable to you. I would like, though, to invite you, as MAPH had challenged me, to reflect this year about how humanistic inquiry can better (in)form your own practices with the central subject of the humanities—humanity.

Yrs,

Nathaniel Dell (MAPH ’11)

Tim Fosbury, MAPH ’12

Tim Fosbury, MAPH ’12, reflections on the MAPH year and his internship at the Project on Civic Reflection.

Two phrases stick out in my mind from my MAPH year. First is David Wray’s assertion, during one of our first core lectures no less, that we could expect MAPH to be a sort of “P90X for the soul.” Those words stuck right away and proved correct in many ways, most of them good. Second was something I heard from various mentors, advisors, and professors. This was the idea that “as humanities scholars, it is easy to forget that we are actually a part of humanity.” That is, we spend so much time reading, critiquing, and analyzing humanity, that we often inadvertently forget to participate in it.  This separation was something I tried to avoid, but during the drudges of thesis and seminar paper time – those days when I started having imaginary conversations with Cormac McCarthy and the Judge from Blood Meridian began taunting me in my dreams -I began paying more and more attention to those second set of words. So, I then started to look for outlets where I could take my academic training beyond the classroom.

I was lucky when the Project on Civic Reflection was offered as one of the internships this past summer. Based on their website and the internship description, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d be doing with the organization, but there was something that drew me to it. All I knew going in was that PCR facilitated discussions, and trained facilitators to lead their own discussions, with community and civic organizations around the country. But I soon learned that these were not typical discussions that revolved around the illusion of solving large problems in an hour or creating action plans full of empty verbiage. Rather, they were spaces of reflection on why we do the work we do, or what we expect to accomplish in civic work, with no pressure to resolve anything, but only to consider closely these larger themes. And during my internship I was lucky enough to participate in discussions that ranged from education to idealism in non-profit work to racism and segregation in Chicago. What impressed me in each discussion was how the PCR model was able to bring people together from various backgrounds and foster serious and considered dialogue.

Most of my duties, however, were in the day to day operations of PCR. During the internship, I was lucky to work alongside another MAPH intern, Anna Paustenbach. Together, we worked on developing PCR’s soon to be unveiled new website, program research, and the exploration of potential partnerships for the organization. While performing these duties, I was given a sort of crash course on non-profit administration and logistics. By being behind the scenes, and acting as a sponge around my bosses, Adam Davis and Kelli Covey, I learned the amount and type of work necessary to build a meaningful organization that is capable of having a broad impact in its community. PCR, I learned during this time, is something special. It has its vision and it has its method and with each conversation and each training, it’s making a difference in our city.

Like all else in MAPH, my internship was over too quickly. Its impact, though, is lasting. During the brief twelve weeks I spent at the Project on Civic Reflection, I had the opportunity to meet and speak with people from all over Chicago who I normally would not have met. I saw the city from a new perspective. I saw its connections, its differences, and the vital role that reflective dialogue has in our culture. Finally, my experiences with PCR helped me focus my own interests and skills.  As I teach this semester at Harold Washington College, I find myself often using the PCR model to get my students thinking beyond the classroom and academics as a means to consider their connections to their community.  It may sound sentimental or sappy, but my experiences at the Project on Civic Reflection were transformative. The work they perform is necessary and to have had the opportunity to be a part of it will inform my own work for years to come.