By Philip Montgomery
Head of the McGovern Historical Center
Sophia Hsu, a doctoral candidate at Rice University, is the first Scholar-in-Residence at the McGovern Historical Center.
The Scholar-in-Residence program is designed to allow researchers access to the McGovern Historical Center archives and special collections. The program encourages scholarly research and collaboration, teaching, and the use of social media.
The scholar-in-residence program allows a scholar with an interest in historical healthcare to embed themselves in the archive for one semester. During that time, the scholars can work in the stacks, which are usual off-limits to researchers, consult with archivists, acquire some hands-on archival experience, use the archive for their own classes and teaching, and explore.
Eventually, two to three scholars-in-residence will be able to work each semester at the McGovern Historical Center.
Hsu is a doctoral candidate in English at Rice University. With support from the Public Humanities Initiative Fellowship from Rice’s Humanities Research Center, she is currently finishing her dissertation, “Genres of Population: Biopolitics and the Victorian Novel,” which she will defend in March 2017. While this project examines how nineteenth-century British literature helped to shape ideas about the population and population health, her research and teaching interests expand beyond this focus to include first-year writing, gender and sexuality, literature and medicine, and postcolonial theory. Her work has appeared in English Language Notes and is forthcoming in Victorian Review.
As part of her work at the archive, Hsu will write one scholarly blog about her experience at the archive or a blog using materials in the archive related to her ongoing research.