A new student research grant that allowed Ellie Westfall ’27 to visit New York City for 10 days this summer and meet with professionals in the art world was more than helpful as she worked on her honors thesis. It was life-altering.
“It completely changed the way that I want to study textiles and what I want to do with my career,” said Westfall, an art history major and Arabic minor from Louisville, Kentucky.
Her interactions with curators and conservators at the Brooklyn Museum — whose collection of Coptic textiles is world-renowned — took place as part of the first Kenyon Keys Student Research Grants. Westfall and Wyatt Strawbridge ’27, who conducted research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., made up the program’s pilot cohort — one that will expand significantly this year.
The grants are part of new strategic initiatives launched this year to help deepen how students connect their academic work and intellectual passions to hands-on experiences on and off campus, allowing them to explore — and be even better prepared for — post-Kenyon careers and graduate opportunities.
The student research grants specifically target student interest in initiating projects that might require them to conduct research in a sustained way at archives, libraries and other institutions, according to Pashmina Murthy, associate professor of English and creative writing and director of the Kenyon Keys program.
To share their work with the Kenyon community, Westfall and Strawbridge presented their research this week.
“I was so impressed by Ellie’s and Wyatt’s thoughtful research presentations,” Murthy said. “The Keys Student Research Grants have helped them expand their interests, deepen their learning, and develop skills for their future. It is lovely that they, like many faculty, now have stories of the delight and frustrations of archival research!”
The travel-based, site-specific research must be related to one or more of the six themes that make up Kenyon Keys: Democracy & Publics; Health & Community; Data & Technology; Sustainability & Society; Global & Local; Making & Knowing. Interested students must also identify and engage a potential faculty mentor.
Available to all students, the grants offering stipends and travel reimbursements will grow to a total of 18 this academic year. The fall deadline, for students who want to conduct research over breaks during the academic year, is Oct. 19. Summer research grants will be awarded to those who meet a March 22 deadline.
Westfall, who has been studying early medieval Egyptian textiles in the Blick-Harris Study Collection at Kenyon, said her experience meeting with scholars in New York and seeing other primary sources up close offered her insights that she couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Ultimately, it led her to rethink her approach to her thesis and her career path.
“It’s given me an entirely new framework from which to study textiles,” Westfall said. “Now I’m proposing a new framework in which to study textiles that hasn’t been done before. It’s also given me the internal knowledge of knowing I don’t want to work in certain spaces and that I’m much more passionate about handling objects and seeing them in person.”
So instead of looking to work in a museum, she’s pivoting to a future in textile conservation or cultural heritage work.
Westfall’s mentor on her project, which covered the Kenyon Keys themes Making & Knowing and Local & Global, was Associate Professor of Art History Brad Hostetler. She said the open-endedness of the opportunity is one of the grant’s top features.
“It’s a true example of Kenyon’s dedication to the liberal arts,” Westfall said. “It’s incredibly creative. You get to use your imagination and figure out exactly what you want to study, and it doesn’t prioritize certain disciplines over the other.”
Strawbridge, a double major in English and Russian language, also had a meaningful experience through the program. He spent seven days in Washington, D.C., this summer conducting research at the National Archives.
His project took a literary approach to comparing rhetoric with reality in the United States’ relationship with Venezuela in the early 2000s. Spanning the Kenyon Keys themes of Democracies & Publics and Making & Knowing, he was assisted by his faculty mentor Jesse Matz, John Crowe Ransom Professor of English and Creative Writing.
Matz said Strawbridge’s project was a perfect example of what Kenyon Keys is all about.
“It was exciting to witness his inspired way of realizing the hope of the Keys initiative to link academic interests to contemporary global forces,” he said. “Wyatt discovered powerful connections between theories of rhetoric and emerging problems in democratic governance, offering substantial early proof of what the Keys will help us achieve.”
Strawbridge hopes his introduction to archival research and the opportunity to manage a project from beginning to end will give him an edge as he looks to pursue a doctorate in English or comparative literature after graduation.
“This is real research — and it’s humanities research as well. That’s a rare opportunity,” he said. “There are plenty of opportunities for STEM people to join a lab. So I hope it will be a kind of experience that stands out.”
