Category: People

Olivia Humphrey is a second-year PhD student in the Department of History at UCI.

Her current research focuses on military death and explores how it was both experienced and represented in popular media. “The ability to cast a critical eye over how a nation constructs patriotic narratives around the bones of its fallen soldiers––without necessarily detracting from the heroism of the deceased––is important across time and space,” she said, when asked about the significance of her research.

As a predoctoral fellow working with the Sawyer Seminar project Documenting War, she is responsible for helping organize the events held on campus and writing for the website.

She hopes that this experience will expand her research on revolutionary Russia (1904–24) allowing her move forward her dissertation project. Humphrey’s goals also include pushing her research in new directions; she looks forward to participating in Documenting War, because the project focuses more on visual material than the written sources that she is accustomed to working with as a history student.

When asked about the influence Documenting War will have on her research, she explained that the project’s ties to the community outside of the university would allow her to expand her audience. Humphrey hopes to reach out to those for whom her own research claims to speak: soldiers, veterans and families who have lost loved ones in military conflicts.

David Michael Woods is a graduate student in the Department of English at UCI. His research explores the relationship between religious meaning and literary expression, particularly honing in on the religious trajectory of romance as a literary genre.

Within the project Documenting War, his role includes assisting the senior scholars, organizing exhibitions, and events, and introducing an early modern and literary studies of war. Woods looks forward to testing the “narrative techniques of soldiers’ letters and personal reflections” against his own line of research in regards to the “narratological features of romance” to find out what kind of resources soldiers have used to reconcile “the disparity between expectation and reality.”

As a graduate fellow, one of his goals is to connect scholars through the diverse opportunities offered by the Sawyer Seminar. He also hopes to explore the kind of narrative reflections of soldiers in a more contemporary frame in order to understand their personal experiences.

When asked how Documenting War would influence his work, he answered that he hoped to gain a sense of how certain narratological structures––from romanticism as a genre to the more contemporary works of soldiers––“were reinvigorated or reconfigured to suit diverse experiences,” cultural views and the expectations of those at war.