"I feel that my Fulbright stay has certainly moved me closer to my professional goals. However, I also feel that I have been given something more: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for lasting friendships here in Innsbruck, for which I will be forever grateful."

 

I am a guest professor at the University of Innsbruck because…

I am a guest professor at the University of Innsbruck because of the deeply important work that the US Fulbright Program and the Fulbright Austria Commission are doing to create, as they express it, “lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries—building mutual understanding between nations, advancing knowledge across communities, and improving lives around the world.” I wanted to come the University of Innsbruck, in particular, because of the exciting possibilities that it presented for collaborative research between Medieval History, Gender, and Digital Humanities within the Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften und Europäische Ethnologie, the Center Interdisziplinäre Geschlechterforschung Innsbruck, and the Forschungszentrum Digital Humanities; the proximity of a key medieval source for my research in the nearby Tiroler Landesmuseen Ferdinandeum; and most of all, because of the expertise and experience of the faculty here. I feel that my Fulbright stay has certainly moved me closer to my professional goals. However, I also feel that I have been given something more: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for lasting friendships here in Innsbruck, for which I will be forever grateful.

What I will take back home from Innsbruck...

I will take back home from Innsbruck a profound sense of connection with my colleagues, now friends, at the University of Innsbruck, and a deep gratitude for the intellectual excitement and sense of possibility that I have found here. I will also take back a love of Innsbruck itself. From taking the children to school in the early dark of the dawning morning, with the lights of the villages on the other side of the valley still sparkling in the snow, to seeing the river in its green-glass swiftness lighten as the peaks above us brighten from white to gold… to exploring the winding streets of the Altstadt and its medieval buildings, and its Roman heritage, its museums, its Märchen fairyland during the Christkindlmarkt, and the changing face of the mountains always throughout the day… to the friends we’ve made in the Stadtbibliothek who know our family very well, to the final return home to our little village by bus in the evening, for the children’s homework and Spinatknödel — we have involved ourselves in the rich rhythms of a daily life here in the city of Innsbruck, and I am grateful for it.

I motivate my students to think creatively and innovatively by...

I try to motivate my students to think creatively and innovatively by involving them in the research questions that I ask, myself, and by inviting them to approach these questions from as many different perspectives as possible. The graduate-level course that I taught here at Innsbruck, UE Historische Hilfswissenschaften und Medienkunde Intro to (Gendered) Digital History, trained students in digital research methods and encouraged them to critique those methods through the analytical lens of gender. In the course, we spent each week not only looking at a different ways of using digital techniques in historical research, but also trying things out in hands-on weekly workshops. I feel that experimentation is a key value of the Digital Humanities. I very much agree with Lisa Spiro, when she explains in her article, “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,”: “For the digital humanities community, experimentation suggests not only a method of testing ideas and creating knowledge but also its engagement in transforming traditional approaches to teaching and research.” I am grateful to the University of Innsbruck, the DH-Zentrum, the University Library and the Ferdinandeum for giving me — and my students — that chance to experiment. Because of the fantastic intellectual and institutional support here, my teaching and research projects merged over the course of my Fulbright stay and produced a wholly unexpected and exciting result: an ongoing, international Digital Humanities project entitled,  The Gebetsbuch Project, which publishes and showcases the work of the students in the class AND also offers a source (a digitized and partially transcribed edition of the fifteenth-century manuscript, Innsbruck, Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Cod. FB 3172) that professional scholars are able to use, as well.

I came to my research field because...

I came to my research field because of the support and encouragement of inspiring, engaged, and motivating professors — especially Phil Niles and William North at Carleton College, Minnesota, during my undergraduate study, and through the example of the unparalleled  research, teaching, and friendship of Professor Lesley Smith at the University of Oxford. I try my hardest to follow their example.

The role of interdisciplinary collaboration in academic research is important to me because...

The role of interdisciplinary collaboration in academic research is important to me because, as a medieval historian, interdisciplinary collaboration is essential to understanding our sources, and more deeply, to understanding the real people whose desires, labor, and beliefs created and are reflected in those sources. I want to know how the paper or parchment of a source I’m working with was created, how the ink was made, the social, political, and religious context of its background, and even how a nun could get a bit of lapis lazuli stuck in her teeth while making it (!), as  the wonderful research of my fellow historians, art historians, and scientists have suggested. In my own research, I have drawn upon insights from Literature Studies, Anthropology, and Art History to understand how an account of fifteenth-century travel could be shaped for different audiences. Working in the Digital Humanities, I feel that interdisciplinary collaboration is also fundamental to our work. In my ongoing Digital Observance Digital Humanities project, I am currently learning from Geographers and Epidemiologists as I ask why religious ideas changed and spread in the Late Middle Ages, using both Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and database technology alongside traditional institutional and religious history approaches.