By Siena Giljum (COM’22)

Virginia-born Rachel Kirby landed at Boston University in 2016 with deep roots and interest in the American South. Fresh from the University of North Carolina, where she earned her BA and MA degrees in art history and folklore, respectively, her choice of Boston as the place to launch her Ph.D. dissertation on artistic, social, and commercial representations of Southern agriculture during the 20th century may have seemed counterintuitive on the surface. But dig a little bit deeper, and it makes perfect sense.

Rachel (GRS’21), a current Ph.D. candidate in the American & New England Studies program (AMNESP) at Boston University, is one of many transplants to the Boston area’s bustling academic community. In choosing BU for her Ph.D., she was searching for a way to “balance out what some people see as these extremes between [the two disciplines of art history and folklore].” Those perceived extremes, Rachel said, are part of a larger conversation about what constitutes art—is it only what you would study in an art history course, or are oral tradition and folk customs included too?

“I wanted a Ph.D. to help figure out how to help bridge those conversations, to be able to have my foot in both doors,” Rachel says. And in the AMNESP program, she found an open-minded, interdisciplinary approach that allowed her to do just that. And so she had her base from which to study Southern cultural history, all the way up north in snowy Boston.

Getting the local flavor

Boston has a funny way of drawing people into its own history and stories. Fast forward three years, and Rachel found herself taking a summer detour to intern at one of New England’s most iconic landmarks: Fenway Park. 

As part of a program co-sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities and the Associate Provost for Graduate Affairs, Rachel brought her research chops and passion for history to an internship under Red Sox historian Gordon Edes. She says she wanted to contextualize her studies and try her hand at something a little different.

“In some ways, it’s totally out of my wheelhouse, so it’s not something I would have expected to do,” says Rachel, who was not a particularly passionate sports fan before her internship. “But it’s such an iconic part of Boston’s history and the community here that it’s a neat segment of Boston culture to get to know.”

In unexpected moments throughout the summer, Rachel’s art history background and academia know-how came in handy. The internship capitalized on Rachel’s extensive research and writing skills, allowing her to dig through the team’s archives for story ideas, sit in on interviews with former players, and even pen her own piece for Red Sox Magazine about Melanie Newman and Suzie Cool, professional baseball’s first-ever all-female broadcasting booth. The pair covered the Salem Red Sox Minor League Baseball team in Virginia together, which is also a farm team for the Boston Red Sox, during the 2019 season. For the magazine story, she drew on ethnography experience and interview skills from her folklore master’s program. 

Secrets amongst the citrus groves 

It wasn’t just in Boston where Rachel found Sox lore. When she took two weeks off from the internship for a dissertation research trip to Florida, she did not expect it to have any sort of overlap with Red Sox baseball. As fans know, however, Sox nation is all over the country. Flipping through archived pamphlets on “Florida oranges and quirky tourism in the state,” Rachel says that she stumbled upon, of all things, a Boston Red Sox hat. It turns out Sox legend Ted Williams invested in an orange grove in Florida after retiring there. The grove offered a “Ted Williams special” gift basket for visitors that included oranges, the cap, and a signed baseball card.

“[This odd find] got me curious as to if there would be any other weird connections, and so I did a blog post for Gordon, actually, about quirky baseball and citrus finds that I had sort of stumbled across throughout the summer. Gordon would not have expected that and I didn’t expect it,” Rachel says. “It felt like I was bringing something to the Red Sox in a way. With oranges.”

The Red Sox also brought a great deal to her, both professionally and personally. A chapter of Rachel’s dissertation will, in part, discuss a minor league baseball team. “I will think more seriously about the role of a professional sports team in shaping [a] city’s identity, and perhaps give that more weight than I would have previously,” she said.

Additionally, the program offered a “change of pace for the summer,” giving Rachel another outlet for her creativity and skills—not to mention a break from the books.

“The dissertation process can be sort of long and isolating, just you and your library books,” Rachel said, “so it was really nice to be in a different type of setting interacting with lots of people who have different backgrounds and to see the way that history works in a setting that I had never considered before.

“I’ve thought about art museums and galleries and history museums and libraries and things like that but I’d never thought about what a history background or a humanities background … looks like with a sports team. It just never crossed my mind.”

But the Red Sox gave her a greater appreciation and perspective on her studies and the history of a completely different place. Up next, Rachel will bring that outlook as she teaches her new 2020 summer session class: an introduction to American & New England Studies course titled “Boston’s Pastime: The Red Sox and their City.” That’s an academic home run.

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Siena Giljum studies journalism in the College of Communication (’22) with a Spanish minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is from Southern California and hopes to one day write for The Atlantic. She loves podcasts and avocados, in no particular order.