Advice From Our Keynote Researchers
Offered during our in-person January Intensive, our Keynote Researcher session gives students the opportunity to focus on the real lived experience of research. Every year, we interview an accomplished scholar and discuss a current or recent project from the standpoint of their research process.
The following advice and tips are key remarks made by our panelists. Consider starting up a general conversation with a researcher that you admire.
Advice and tips
Research methods
- You may need to create your own collection.
Especially if you work with materials libraries have typically ignored. Talk to librarians as you do this! They will have tips on how to manage a collection, and may be interested in expanding their collections in the areas you’ve identified.
- If you have the luxury of a research team - it’s important to devote time to building rapport and taking time to calibrate.
- You don’t need a high-tech system.
Many historians still rely on a paper index-card method that has been taught in graduate schools for decades.
Storage and organization
- Find out what software like Zotero and NVivo can do for you.
Consult with librarians and other campus support staff to find the research software that best meets your needs.
- Actively manage shared libraries.
If you are working with a team, build in time to make sure everyone understands the protocols around shared data and shared libraries, and that everyone is actively using them.
- Take advantage of tagging and other features.
For example, use Zotero tags to identify which database(s) a particular article can be found in, to help you develop a heat map of how widely distributed different articles are.
- Keep a notebook for random thoughts.
Designate a place where you note down ideas, quotes, and other material that you don’t know yet what to do with. Return to it when you need inspiration or when you want to trace the development of your thinking.
Interviews and user research
- You may need to maintain a personal code of ethics.
While the IRB may require certain practices of you, there may be times when you are called to maintain a personal code of ethics, beyond the specifications of the IRB. Talk to other researchers about what ethical dilemmas they’ve faced and how they have handled them.
- Approach your research subjects as people.
If you need to conduct interviews or interact with people who are the subject of your research, consider seeing these interactions not as transactional, but rather as an opportunity to build relationships.
Publication
- Push back against publishers.
Do not agree to changes on your book manuscript that would transform your research project in directions you do not feel comfortable with. If you are breaking new ground it may take time to find the right publisher.
- Consider whether you’re ready to share.
If your research findings are controversial, or are likely to displease people and organizations that you’re relying on for source material, be thoughtful about what information you share and how you frame your thinking while your research is still in process.
- Use conferences to develop your ideas.
When working on a project, turn pieces of it into conference papers: if you’re lucky, you will get good feedback and new insights. At the least, you will have had an opportunity to formulate your idea for a real audience.
2024 keynote researcher, Lauren Leigh Kelly Links to an external site., is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She is also the founder of the annual Hip Hop Youth Research and Activism Conference. Kelly taught high school English for ten years in New York where she also developed courses in Hip Hop Literature and Culture, Spoken Word poetry, and Theatre Arts. Dr. Kelly’s research focuses on adolescent critical literacy development, Black feminist theory, Hip Hop pedagogy, critical consciousness, and the development of critical, culturally sustaining pedagogies. She is the author of Teaching with Hip Hop in the 7-12 Grade Classroom: A Guide to Supporting Students’ Critical Development through Popular Texts, published by Routledge and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy.
2022 keynote researcher, Amy Erdman Farrell Links to an external site., James Hope Caldwell Memorial Chair and a professor of American studies and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Dickinson College, and the 2021–2022 Mary Beth and Chris Gordon Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute. She focuses her work on the history of girls and women in the United States, second wave feminism, representations of gender and feminisms in popular culture, and the history and representation of the body and fatness. She is the author of Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism (University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (NYU Press, 2011).
2021 keynote researcher, Orisanmi Burton Links to an external site., Assistant Professor at American University, a social anthropologist working in the United States, and the 2020-2021 Evelyn Green Davis Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In his research, Burton examines the imbrication of grassroots resistance and state repression. Within this broad area of inquiry, his present work explores the collision of Black-led movements for social, political, and economic transformation with state infrastructures of militarized policing, surveillance, and imprisonment.
2020 keynote researcher, Mireille Miller-Young, PhD Links to an external site., Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, and the 2019–20 Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. She researches and teaches about race, gender, and sexuality in US history, popular and film cultures, and the sex industries.
2019 keynote researcher, Nicole C. Nelson, PhD Links to an external site., Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. As a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, she worked on a study of the reproducibility crisis in biomedicine.