This summer, undergraduates Madeline Walbridge and Caelinn Carraher worked with history faculty as part of Loyola’s Undergraduate Summer Research Experience (USRE) program. Each student received a $2,500 stipend to conduct four weeks of research under the guidance of Dr. Brad Hunt and Dr. Alice Weinreb, respectively.

Walbridge applied her training as an environmental policy and political science double major in an environmental history project mentored by Dr. Brad Hunt. “I worked with Dr. Hunt as he continues to document the history of the environmental nonprofit, Openlands.” She explains. “For my four-week project, I selected one of Openlands success stories: the conservation of the nation's first tall grass prairie, Midewin.”

Walbridge (top right) and Dr. Hunt (bottom right) discuss one of the Openlands lawsuits with their staff attorney, Matt Ruhter, and outside counsel, Jeff Smith via Zoom.

Walbridge researched Midewin by combing through newspaper articles, archival documents, and oral histories. By the end of the program, she had produced a research paper on the “legal battles which have threatened Midewin's survival” and Openlands’ efforts to preserve the prairie.

For Carraher’s USRE project, she worked with Dr. Alice Weinreb on her ongoing research into the rise of eating disorders in the late twentieth century. “I specifically aided Dr. Weinreb in her goal of creating a digital database ... using the platform Omeka,” she writes of her work. Like Walbridge, Carraher turned to primary sources like newspapers to conduct her research. She searched for key terms such as “anorexia,” “bulimia,” “binge-eating,” and “dieting,” to identify discussions of eating disorders in the media. Then, Carraher “crafted spreadsheets containing all of the metadata from these documents needed for Dr. Weinreb’s database.”

Carraher’s spreadsheet of primary sources to be used in Dr. Weinreb’s Omeka database.

“This project was an incredibly eye-opening experience on the study of primary sources and media,” Carraher writes of her research experience, “especially surrounding a topic as taboo and misunderstood as this one.”

Want to learn more about Madeline and Caelinn’s research? Watch their USRE presentations here.