{"id":42110,"date":"2019-12-16T16:26:15","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T21:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/?p=42110"},"modified":"2021-06-14T15:47:23","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T19:47:23","slug":"a-summer-at-fenway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/a-summer-at-fenway\/","title":{"rendered":"A Summer at Fenway"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Siena Giljum (COM’22)<\/p>\n

\"\"
Rachel sits atop the famous Green Monster<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s bustling academic community. In choosing BU for her Ph.D., she was searching for a way to \u201cbalance out what some people see as these extremes between [the two disciplines of art history and folklore].\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Those perceived extremes, Rachel said, are part of a larger conversation about what constitutes art\u2014is it\u00a0only what you would study in an art history course, or are oral tradition and folk customs included too?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted a Ph.D. to help figure out how to help bridge those conversations, to be able to have my foot in both doors,\u201d Rachel says.\u00a0And 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Getting the local flavor<\/b><\/h4>\n

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\u2019s most iconic landmarks: Fenway Park.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As part of a <\/span>program<\/span><\/a> 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.\u00a0She says she wanted to\u00a0contextualize her studies and try her hand at something a little different.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn some ways, it\u2019s totally out of my wheelhouse, so it\u2019s not something I would have expected to do,\u201d says Rachel, who was not a particularly passionate sports fan before her internship. \u201cBut it\u2019s such an iconic part of Boston\u2019s history and the community here that it\u2019s a neat segment of Boston culture to get to know.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In unexpected moments throughout the summer, Rachel\u2019s art history background and academia know-how came in handy. The internship capitalized on Rachel\u2019s extensive research and writing skills, allowing her to dig through the team\u2019s archives for story ideas, sit in on interviews with former players, and even pen her <\/span>own piece<\/span><\/a> for <\/span>Red Sox Magazine<\/span><\/i><\/a> about Melanie Newman and Suzie Cool, professional baseball\u2019s 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\u2019s program.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Secrets amongst the citrus groves\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
\"\"
A signature most Red Sox fans would recognize instantly<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It wasn\u2019t 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 \u201cFlorida oranges and quirky tourism in the state,\u201d 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 \u201cTed Williams special\u201d gift basket for visitors that included oranges, the cap, and a signed baseball card.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[This odd find] got me curious as to if there would be any other weird connections, and so I did a <\/span>blog post<\/span><\/a> 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\u2019t expect it,\u201d Rachel says. \u201cIt felt like I was bringing something to the Red Sox in a way. With oranges.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The Red Sox also brought a great deal to her, both professionally and personally. A chapter of Rachel\u2019s dissertation will, in part, discuss a minor league baseball team. \u201cI will think more seriously about the role of a professional sports team in shaping [a] city\u2019s identity, and perhaps give that more weight than I would have previously,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Additionally, the program offered a \u201cchange of pace for the summer,\u201d giving Rachel another outlet for her creativity and skills\u2014not to mention a break from the books.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe dissertation process can be sort of long and isolating, just you and your library books,\u201d Rachel said, \u201cso 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve thought about art museums and galleries and history museums and libraries and things like that but I\u2019d never thought about what a history background or a humanities background … looks like with a sports team. It just never crossed my mind.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/a>: an introduction to American & New England Studies course titled “Boston’s Pastime: The Red Sox and their City.\u201d That\u2019s an academic home run.<\/span><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Siena Giljum studies journalism in the College of Communication (\u201922) with a Spanish minor in the College of Arts and Sciences. She is from Southern California and hopes to one day write for <\/em>The Atlantic. She loves podcasts and avocados, in no particular order.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Kirby (GRS’21) may be studying the American South but found a new academic outlook at Boston’s ballpark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15047,"featured_media":42124,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[195,376],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42110"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15047"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42110"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42339,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42110\/revisions\/42339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}