Librarian Liaisons work closely with students throughout the year, supporting both their coursework and research, including providing in-depth assistance with honors projects. Among the over 100 seniors who engaged in writing honors projects this year are Adam Glynn and William Doak, both students in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Carmen Greenlee, Humanities and Media Librarian, along with a number of her colleagues, supported Adam’s and Will’s projects by identifying and acquiring specialized material essential to their areas of study, providing assistance throughout all phases of the research and writing process, and offering instruction in the use of citation management software.
Adam Glynn’s project, Nessuna buona punizione resta indescritta: Il contrapasso dantesco nel cinema dell’orrore italiano ed americano / No good punishment goes undescribed: Dante’scontrapasso in Italian and American horror cinema, examines how the inventive sin/punishment structure shown in great detail in Dante’s Divine Comedy appears in modern horror films. In French and Italian Café Spaces and the Third Places They Create, Will Doak employs semiotic analysis to argue that café spaces in France and Italy create a sense of an important third place (home and work being the first two) through an examination of their historical development.
Adam and Will utilized a variety of primary sources in their work including films, digitized historical materials in the target languages of French and Italian, and print texts. The library’s existing collections were supplemented with new items that were purchased specifically to support their research. In addition, staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department fulfilled many requests for obscure and unusual resources held by other libraries that they needed to consult. Both students identified essential secondary materials using Hawthorne-Longfellow’s specialized bibliographies and the many online discovery tools and full-text databases licensed by the library for use by the Bowdoin community.
The great pleasure in our work is contributing to the development of our students’ research skills and witnessing their excitement as they make new discoveries. We look forward to adding Will’s and Adam’s honors projects to the library collections at the conclusion of the semester. Congratulations to these two fine Bowdoin scholars!