Student Research

Sebastian Cahill, class of '23, "Archival research was the highlight of my undergraduate career at UC Berkeley."

January 16, 2024

Sebastian Cahill, class of '23, is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in English and Comparative Literature. Currently, he works as a news reporter for Business Insider. He hopes to return to graduate school in the coming years to do a Ph.D. program combining his studies of Irish Literature and gender dynamics post-colonialism in Ireland. He resides in the Bay Area with his fiancé and their two cats, Edward and Fish Stick. For our series on undergraduate archival experiences, he wrote about his time researching his honors thesis on the ancient Irish...

Helen Halliwell: "For my honors thesis, I asked questions about place, learning, language, and community: what could Clare’s poetry of acute attention to place tell us about belonging?"

October 19, 2023

Field Research, of a Kind

by Helen Halliwell

Geoffrey Grigson, in the introduction to his edited collection of John Clare’s poetry (1950), wrote that “No one will find it very rewarding to visit ‘John Clare’s Country’ instead of visiting and revisiting John Clare’s poetry.” How embarrassing, then, to find myself in Helpston, Clare’s home village, not even a year after I was introduced to him. The first Clare poem I read was “The Yellowhammers Nest,” which begins with the invitation: “let us stoop / And...

Undergraduate Research Experience: Joshua Gentry

September 13, 2023

The Joy of Novel Information

Joshua Gentry

In the summer of 2022, I visited the Truman Capote Archive Located at the New York Public Library to conduct research for my honors thesis. After my first day, a profound realization struck me: beyond the ever-expanding reach of the internet, outside of the texts in the endless rows of books in Main Stacks, is an undiscovered treasure trove of invaluable information waiting to see the light of day. Prior to my archival research experience at the...