Last week the trainings and discussions we had cut across the disciplines. How does the interdisciplinary nature of this program, the fact that students are focusing on such a diverse range of projects, help you think about your project and/or your academic interests more broadly?

My project, while primarily focused on literature, touches on a lot of other fields in the humanities such as history and sociology. The interdisciplinary nature of the Laidlaw program allows me to dig into all of these subjects and connect them. Progress looks very different for different projects, and so I've found it very useful talking to other scholars about the ways in which they are approaching their projects. Some people are starting with a theoretical framework, some are testing hypotheses, and others are doing literature reviews, but all these different ways of thinking about our critical questions has given me a new perspective on my work.

As you begin your individual research projects this week, do you anticipate any challenges in getting started? If so, what are they?

As my project is somewhat along the lines of a literature review and an interpretive analysis of some older texts, my biggest challenge thus far has been distilling the literature to the essentials. I intentionally chose texts with a lot of modern connections and relevance, but this also means there are a lot of research papers, books, and articles that touch on the subject. Similarly, because my primary texts are centuries old, none of them are in modern English and so the choice (or lack thereof) of the translated text becomes significant. My way of working through this has been using book reviews to determine the relevance, quality of interpretations, and guiding questions of my secondary sources.