Undergraduate Research: Andrea Gustavson on teaching undergraduates at the Harry Ransom Center

We love it when we can draw your attention to the awesome teaching our grad students do and the exciting research our undergraduates do. Today, we'd like to point you toward the Harry Ransom Center's newsletter, Ransom Edition, where our very own Andrea Gustavson talks about her work teaching undergraduates in the archive. Here's a taste of Gustavson's article:

In the fall, I taught a class called "American Images: Photography, Literature, Archive" that made extensive use of the collections at the Ransom Center. Each week, the students and I explored the intersections between photography, literature, and archival theory using the Center's primary materials as the foundation for our discussions. On Mondays and Wednesdays we met to discuss the week's reading, closely reading passages or images and making connections to contemporary events. On Fridays the students had the opportunity to view rare manuscripts and photographs that illustrated, extended, and even challenged many of the concepts we had discussed earlier in the week. Over the course of the semester, the students worked within a variety of written genres as they built toward a final project for which they conducted their own original research.

Check out the full article here.Gustavson is a PhD candidate in American Studies here at UT and she worked as a graduate intern in Public Services and as a Graduate Research Assistant at the Ransom Center in 2010–2014.