Hamilton student Katherine Murray admits that American history has intrigued her for a long time, and expresses particular interest in life during the era of the antebellum south and the idea of southern honor. As an aspiring college professor, Murray hopes to someday teach southern history at a university in a course highlighting the culture, morals and values, and the traditions of the South.
Instead of taking the same old college lecture, Murray decided to take the opportunity to design a course that will explore her own particular interests and questions; as an Emerson scholar for the 2003 academic year, Murray will complete a project titled "Concept of Honor: Defining Relations in the Old South."
The course will intimately reconstruct and explore the Southern understanding of honor, the means by which southerners disseminated and, in the process, reshaped its meanings, and the extent to which other aspects of southern culture, especially evangelical religions and slavery, conflicted with the culture of honor. She will uncover how concepts of honor evolved in the South and the role ethics played in the region as a result of slavery, the Civil War, and the abolition of slavery. By using secondary texts such as Greenberg's Honor and Slavery, Wyatt-Brown's Southern Honor: Ethics and Behaviors of the Old South, as well as novels and primary sources from the era, Murray hopes to uncover how historians and other scholars explained the initial conception of the southern code of honor, and how distinctive southern honor was compared to other honor cultures.
Through her research, Murray hopes that her course will be taught under the new curriculum of History 342, an upper-level seminar on southern history, with the advisement of Hamilton College Professor of History Douglas Ambrose.
Murray is a history major and a rising senior at Hamilton College.
Created in 1997, the Emerson Foundation Grant program was designed to provide students with significant opportunities to work collaboratively with faculty members, researching an area of interest. The recipients, covering a range of topics, will explore fieldwork, laboratory and library research, and the development of teaching materials. The projects will be initiated this summer, and the students will make public presentations of their research throughout the 2003-2004 academic year.
