Research is encouraged within the Humanities Scholars program. We were given the tools and understanding to seek the answers to our research questions by actively engaging professors and scholarly sources. When I found that the professors were just as excited to enable us to do our own research, it became a matter of finding which professors had the same interests that the questions required.

My primary research concerns have dealt with reexamining various topics in terms of sex and sexuality. The piece published in the UMBC Review was a comparison of primary sources to the admission records and latent goals of the mental institution system. My sources were from nineteenth century America and detailed the expected roles of women at the time. This research was meant to examine the ways the asylums were used to socialize women who stepped out of their prescribed roles, pushing them back to the conventional traits of passive femininity

Dr. Phillip Seng was one of the professors who co-taught my Humanities seminar my freshman year. As my advisor he encouraged me to submit my paper.

The paper began as a final research paper for my Humanities seminar and underwent a graduated process of outlining the topic, composing a thesis, collecting sources and solidifying the argument. After the class was over, my mentor encouraged me to polish the piece and submit it to the UMBC Review. 

I knew the general pattern of research, but synthesizing the primary and secondary sources in a meaningful way was definitely a new experience. The epistemology of the research project allowed for a better understanding of how the researcher himself is a part of the knowledge he acquires and produces. 

When the research for the asylum project finally had pieces of evidence that supported my thesis, there was also an interesting consolidation of my academic majors (psychology/sociology/gender studies) in the piece I had produced. 

The issue was organizing the research in a meaningful way to support both the claims I had presented and purposely use the knowledge I had collected. Mapping out my goals in the research helped resolve the confusion of excess information.

As I continued my research I was also working on-campus. While the research process took a considerable amount of time, it did not heavily dominate my free time. 

Dr. Seng encouraged me to submit the piece to the UMBC Review after the seminar finished. A majority of professors have encouraged students to continue their research and utilize the pieces they write as foundations for further research. 

The primary preparations required the proper formatting of the paper for style guidelines. I was asked to examine my topic in new perspectives for my revisions; for instance, although the paper relied heavily on the construction of femininity, I was asked to put a short piece on the state of manhood in nineteen century America as well.

I’ve been working in the gender studies department on other topics involving sex and sexuality. Under the advisement of Dr. Jodi Kelber-Kaye, I’ve looked at the process of emasculinization in the popular music of Ke$ha and Katy Perry as a form of empowerment and the consequential negative side-effects. This paper used content analysis that involved the combination of lyrical themes and research on manhood, as well as a situational analysis comparing current female music to the Riot Grrrl Movement.

I would definitely advise students to work with what they have: use final papers and personal endeavors as a jumping board to ask bigger questions and pursue research. Professors are often happy to hear the ideas of students and will be willing to provide some advising on where they can take their research. .