The English major is researching Edison's films and photographs from around 1900 at the Library of Congress for her upcoming thesis.
Who doesn't love spending a hot summer day at the movies? Emma Lumeij '16 certainly does, though she isn't spending her summer with The Avengers: Age of Ultron or Jurassic World. Instead, she is in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress watching films made around 1900 by Thomas Edison. Though not blockbusters, these films, along with photos taken by Edison, are research for the English major's forthcoming senior thesis. "I am exploring these collections because for me they raise interesting questions regarding the history and reproductive potential of visual media," says Lumeij, whose work is being funded by the John B. Hurford '60 Center for Arts and Humanities (HCAH).
While she is primarily concentrating on Edison's work, Lumeij's research questions the very nature of film and photography. "While my research centers around these archives," she says, "in many ways this summer has been an opportunity to explore the library's many other archives and read up on the works of those similarly marveled and puzzled by the paradoxical offerings of visual media as temporal, material, and affective transports that confound the boundaries of then and now, between one and another."
Last summer, Lumeij was funded by HCAH to work for Assistant Professor Lindsay Reckson on the history of the Ghost Dance religion. Last semester, in order to prepare for working on her own this summer, Lumeij completed an independent study with Reckson called "Excitable Spirits: Speech Acts, Performance, and Ghosts." "We read and discussed works considering the hauntedness of the photographic medium," says Lumeij,
the performative aspects of posing for a photograph, and the paradoxical tension between motion and stasis motivating inquiries into photography's strange relationship to time."
—Jack Hasler '15
"Summer Centered” is a series exploring our students' Center-funded summer work.
