From using a sack of potatoes as a visual aid to making cultural references to works as disparate as Plato’s Republic and television’s Desperate Housewives, the recent St. Michael’s College Research Colloquium was as entertaining as it was informative.
The annual event, held this year on March 23, showcases the research and presentation skills of students studying at St. Michael’s. The event mirrors the experience of an academic conference, where students write and submit an abstract as part of the application process and then present their research to an audience, field questions from attendees, and receive feedback from faculty respondents.
“The purpose of the event is to encourage fruitful collaboration between the student population and St. Mike’s faculty and fellows,” says Dr. Bernadette Guthrie, Interim Director of the Junior Fellows Program and organizer of the day.
“The Colloquium affords undergraduate students the opportunity to present their work publicly to members of the larger academic community. This experience also offers an invaluable experience for those students planning to pursue graduate studies.”
The day-long colloquium, which saw participation from five faculty members, featured two student panels that addressed the theme of “Labour, Leisure, and the Good Life”. In the morning panel on “GenderLeisure/Gendered Labour,” Elinor Egan (a double major in Christianity & Culture and Slavic Languages and Culture), presented on “‘Women’s Work’ through the Lens of the Christian Imagination”, while Cinema Studies major Brian Tin shared his paper, “Let’s Talk Cooking: Gendered Marketing for the Nintendo DS and User-fying Women Gamers.”
The afternoon session saw three papers presented on the theme of “The Work of Art, the Work of God, and the Work of Contemplation.” English Literature major Bridget Bowles spoke on “Withstanding the Loss of Beauty and Dignity: Bede, Caedmon, and the Labour of Poetry in Early Modern England; Mediaeval Studies major Para Babuharan offered a paper titled “Opus Dei: Worship and Work in the Rule of St. Benedict”; and Hoda Sadek, currently studying Political Science, Philosophy and History, delivered a paper titled “Enlightenment: The Importance of Outward Contemplation for a Good Life.”
St. Michael’s Junior Fellows also played a role in the day, developing this year’s theme and helping draft the language of the Call for Papers. They adjudicated the submissions, grouped the papers into panels, and helped locate respondents. Two junior fellows, Dang Pham and Joseph Dattilo, served as moderators for the student panels.
For Tin, whose research focussed on gendered video game marketing, “the colloquium could not have been timelier.” He had learned about the event from his independent project supervisor, Prof. Felan Parker. Noting that his goal had always been to publish or present his work somewhere, he took the 40-page independent study project and focused on two sections, creating a new, shorter paper for the event.
“The version I presented at the colloquium was a mixture of two parts (out of the total seven) of the original paper. …Writing a version for the colloquium did make me think about and articulate my arguments more carefully.”
The day began with a keynote address – “Irish Lumpers: Appetite and Political Economy Before the Great Famine”—delivered by Prof. Padraic Scanlon, an associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies. Scanlon, who is a Senior Fellow at St. Michael’s, gave a lively talk in which he used a sack of potatoes to challenge figures and stereotypes about the pre-famine Irish.
The day concluded with a faculty roundtable on Labour and Leisure in the Intellectual Life.
“I hope students come away from the event with a sense of confidence in their own role as budding scholars and in their ability to develop and refine their ideas through the process of conversation and critique,” says Guthrie. “I also hope that the Colloquium served as a site of intellectual friendship, one that afforded students the opportunity to forge connections with faculty and fellows beyond the classroom.”
Ever wonder how all the disparate aspects of a university fit together—how the sciences inform the arts or why breadth requirements matter or what the benefits of a degree in the humanities might be? These weighty and compelling questions will be part of the conversation this coming Saturday at the fourth annual St. Michael’s student research colloquium, where some of our community’s brightest minds will make their arguments on how the knowledge we gain in particular subjects fits together as a whole.
Knowledge, Belief, Wisdom: What’s Universal About the University? begins at 1 p.m. March 26 in the Basilian Common Room. The event presents the work of both undergraduate and graduate students in the St. Michael’s community. The afternoon will include three panels of four presenters each—one group presenting papers on Literary Visions of the University’s Mission, one on Seeking Truth in the University, and a final panel on A Feeling for Knowledge: Affect, Encounter, and the University.
Gilson Post-Doctoral Fellow Bernadette Guthrie, one of the organizers of the colloquium, says the topic stems from conversations she and some of St. Michael’s junior fellows had with students over the course of the year, reflecting their questions and interests.
The event allows students at various stages of their academic careers to present to, and to learn from, each other, whether it is an undergraduate listening to the arguments presented by a doctoral student, or a graduate student aspiring to teaching listening to the kinds of questions raised by a second-year student.
But the event is also an opportunity for the university to appear in a rich and robust way as it seeks a shared understanding in able to respond to problems in the modern world, Guthrie says.
“I am so struck by the student community at St. Mike’s,” says Guthrie, noting how impressed she is with things like student-organized reading groups, informal conversations between professors and students after class, and the welcoming atmosphere.
It is precisely that community that drew Molly Franssen Keenan to this year’s colloquium. While a first-year student at the neighboring University of Victoria College, Keenan attended a Christianity and Culture social at St. Mike’s and learned of the event through a student.
Keenan, part of the first panel on literary visions of a university’s mission, will present a paper looking at how Raskolnikov, the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, would fit into today’s University of Toronto, a paper she has designed to speak to the experience of current students.
She says she appreciates the opportunity the colloquium presents to engage in deep thought and conversations with professors, as well as to receive academic feedback outside the classroom.
“It’s a question of finding your group—and I’m thrilled to be back at the university,” she says.
Third-year St. Michael’s student Alexander Lynch, also be part of the first panel, will be presenting a paper on the relationships between the work of T. S. Eliot and the “forms” of modern academic English.
Although Lynch’s primary area of interest in 19th-century literature, he chose this topic because he feels Eliot’s creative and critical work offers a powerful reminder of the importance of art crossing historical and national boundaries to create universal categories.
“The colloquium is a great way to engage with St. Mike’s,” says Lynch, who is presenting for his third time. “The first year I got my feet wet and learned what the process is all about. The second time gave me the opportunity to speak with a higher level of sophistication, while this year I am interested in speaking on what is particular to me.”
He expresses excitement at the thought of an in-person event in the Basilian Common Room after so many online events, laughing, “It’s giving me temporal vertigo, having presented in the space two years ago.”
Arjun Thapar says he submitted work to the colloquium because “I have always been fascinated with learning how subjects fit together. While I am a math student, I had wonderful mentors at St. Michael’s who advised me to broaden my perspective and take courses in drama and other arts areas to meet students from completely different backgrounds. An exposure to content and nuance of different areas teaches you that there is no one solution that solves everything.”
Soon to graduate with a BSc in mathematics, Thapar, who will be on the panel looking at seeking truth in the university, says the colloquium is an important step in learning to speak collegially rather than speaking at each other.
“Institutions need to be self-critical and engage in self-reflection or else they are doomed to failure,” he says. “This event is a valued effort. When you attend university you want to emerge not only capable in your field but also with a better vision of yourself.”
Doctoral student Rashad Rehman, who will present on philosopher Josef Pieper in the second panel, says his experience teaching undergraduates has shown him the benefits of a forum like the colloquium, which can model what productive and respectful disagreement looks like, finding common ground with others at a time when there is so much moral disagreement in society.
Rehman says his experience teaching has at times revealed that students’ interest in historical injustices and reparative justice often stems primarily from a desire to engage in activism rather than a precise understanding of what has happened, adding that first one has to understand before one can act effectively.
The very idea of bringing together a group of students whose ages, areas of interests and academic career timelines demonstrates the existence—and value—of the universal in the university, Rehman says.
“The university is the place that preserves an understanding of what universal means,” he says, “and, in doing so, preserves the whole person.”
To a person, participants and organizers have expressed great excitement at being back on campus for Saturday’s event.
“It means a great deal to be to be in the Basilian Common Room, which is part of the history of St. Mike’s—to have intellectual conversations in a warm space—that’s what St. Mike’s can do at its best, broadcasting to a larger community what St. Mike’s is all about,” says Guthrie.
Knowledge, Belief, Wisdom: What’s Universal About the University? will take place Saturday, March 26 from 1 to 5 p.m. in the Basilian Common Room on the third floor of Brennan Hall. The event is free and open to the public; no advanced registration is required.
As the sponsor of four interdisciplinary programs at the University of Toronto, St. Michael’s emphasizes the conversational and communal nature of scholarship. On January 25, students from the St. Michael’s community will convene a wide-ranging conversation about the nature and purpose of learning and education at the USMC Student Colloquium 2020: “Knowledge, Action, Wisdom: What is Learning?”
The showcase of student research is designed to be a learning opportunity for participants, who benefit from detailed faculty responses to their work as well as dialogue with peers and professors across disciplines. Past student-participants have gone on to present their work at academic conferences and other institutions.
Their presentations will also generate a larger conversation on campus about the ideals, purposes, values, and goals that animate the university community.
“Discovery at the University exceeds the boundaries of teaching and research,” says Principal Randy Boyagoda. “At St. Michael’s College, we are committed to providing students the opportunity to seek the truth for its own good and for the greater good, and this Colloquium represents a natural forum for our academic community to do as much.”
For this year’s Colloquium, students from both the undergraduate division and graduate Faculty of Theology will present on topics ranging from theories of scientific change to the novels of John Williams and Vladimir Nabokov and the future of Catholic education. Respondents include Faculty of Theology professor Jean-Pierre Fortin, Christianity and Culture professor Reid Locklin, and St. Michael’s Fellow Clifford Orwin.
The discussions that follow each presentation place their arguments in a much larger context. “We don’t want the presentations to exist in a bubble, but to be part of the conversation,” says co-organizer and Faculty of Theology postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tristan Sharp, who has helped organize three student colloquia at St. Mike’s.
Participants also have the opportunity to benefit from the perspectives of students outside their disciplines. Dr. Sharp mentions a particularly potent combination of papers two years ago, which paired a presentation on “digital resurrection” through social media applications with a paper about concerns around science and technology during the Enlightenment. Dr. Sharp finds cross-disciplinary encounters can spur students on to deeper questions in their own work.
“One of the new trends in thinking about research is to think about it as a certain kind of conversation. What a colloquium like this permits is an opportunity for students to begin to think of themselves as real partners in the conversation rather than merely observers of it,” says Dr. Locklin, who will be participating in the colloquium as a respondent for a third time. “By reflecting on the nature and purpose of education, students also can help us deliberate about the future of the University of St. Michael’s College.”
The USMC Student Colloquium 2020 will begin with coffee and snacks at 9:15 a.m. on Saturday, January 25 in the Basilian Fathers Common Room. All are welcome, and no registration is necessary. Contact tristan.sharp@utoronto.ca with any questions.