Elena T. (Class of 2025)

Elena is a second year in the College majoring in history. Her academic interests combine the fields of history and environmental studies through environmental history, with an emphasis in Cold War politics. She is interested in how this time period shaped the natural environment in the United States and around the world. To further her engagement with the area of history and the social sciences in general, Elena joined the 2022 SISRM cohort.

This past summer, Elena chose to enroll in Archival Methods & Historical Thinking to learn more about archival research and the methods employed by historians to interpret and analyze sources. Under the guidance of  Raymond Lodato, Elena worked on a research project that looked at the effects of the Urban Park and Recreation Recovery Act (UPARR) on the city’s responsibility to parks and urban spaces. Her research examined congressional hearings about UPARR’s goals and funding delegation. Additionally, Elena read and analyzed federal court cases to see how courts interpret the program in practice. Elena also helped Professor Lodato with his project on social mobility in Chicago, gathering information on job displacement and Chicago city programs on zoning and privatization in the past 50 years.

One of the main components of SISRM is the workshop series, which allows students to engage and explore various topics and fields throughout the social sciences. When asked about her favorite workshop, Elena said that she “very much enjoyed Ada Palmer’s lecture about using books as a window into the lives of past humans and societies.” She indicated that Professor Palmer’s lecture showed her how individual historical artifacts, such as books, can provide us with an insightful understanding at the singular level, which can then be expanded to reach broader conclusions. Thus, this workshop perfectly aligned with her own interest in exploring historical archival sources to, in her own words, “construct meaningful narratives about the past.”

Moreover, during the field trip to the Argonne National Laboratory, Elena was able to see particle accelerators, which coincidentally, are also artifacts from the Cold War that have had profound impacts on the ways in which humans think about the environment. In reflecting about her time as a SISRM fellow, Elena said that the program taught her about the methods she can use to engage in research.

(Student Spotlight from Summer 2022)