Lillia McEnaney ’17 recently returned to campus to guest teach in Sacred Journeys, a 200-level Religious Studies course taught by Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Seth Schermerhorn.
McEnaney is a master's candidate in museum studies at NYU, and will graduate in May 2019. Building off her experiences at Hamilton, she focuses her work and research on museum anthropology in Indigenous context(s) in the American Southwest.
Students in the course read an article co-authored by Schermerhorn and McEnaney, titled “Through Indigenous Eyes: A Comparison of Two Tohono O’odham Photographic Collections Documenting Pilgrimages to Magdalena.” The article was published in the international, peer-reviewed journal Religious Studies and Theology: Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion in 2017, McEnaney’s senior year at Hamilton.
Schermerhorn and McEnaney also co-presented their co-authored paper in the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Unit at the American Academy of Religion (AAR) Annual Meeting in Denver on Nov. 19.
Schermerhorn and McEnaney’s “Through Indigenous Eyes” project is the culmination of almost four years of collaborative student-faculty research. Previously, they presented an earlier version of “Through Indigenous Eyes” in the “Performances and Mediazations of Indigenous Religions” panel at the European Association for the Study of Religions Conference in Helsinki, Finland, in 2016.
This research has been generously funded over the years by the American Philosophical Society’s Phillips Fund for Native American Research, the Jacobs Research Funds, Arizona State University, Hamilton College, and the University of Tromsø, as well as support for travel from Hamilton’s Dean of Faculty Student Travel Grant, the Class of 1979 Student Travel Award, the Religious Studies Department, the Office of the Chaplaincy, and by New York University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ Dean’s Student Travel Grant.
