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Emanuel Stults
The senior thesis is emblematic of the kind of intellectual freedom Bard College at Simon’s Rock’s Upper College students are given. It is a year-long, self-designed scholarly project that is the capstone of a student’s work. It’s required of everyone. The thesis is not just an academic requirement for a Simon’s Rock Bachelor of Arts degree, it is work that adds to the world’s storehouse of knowledge.
Below are highlights from just some of this year’s 51 theses. Student Mary Weatherbee spoke with eleven students about their work. Check the Newsroom each week this summer for a new highlight report.
Emanuel Stults
Dr. Martha Ward, research professor in Anthropology and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans gave Emanuel Stults “the best advice he’d ever been given on an academic basis.” “It’s not historical research if you go in knowing the answer,” she told him. And she advised him that one cannot have a pre-meditated idea of what to look for when doing historical research, rather, in Emanuel’s words, “you have to go in yourself and read and find your thesis in the primary text.”
And so he did.
Emanuel dug up all of his own primary source material: 30 years of 19th Century New Orleans newspapers, which included his discovery of the last slave add ever published.
In his thesis, Emanuel argues “that the representations of slaves found in New Orleans newspapers complicate our understanding of the market and the role of commodification in the daily lives of slaves.” Furthermore on the subject, as he lays out in his abstract, “[a]dvertisements for slaves being sold and wanted bulletins for runaways both assign prices to slaves and describe the slaves in a public forum, and so by comparing and contrasting the descriptions and prices in these two forms of description we can gain crucial insights into the relationships between masters and slaves, as well as the forms of power that masters held over their slaves.”
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