Trinity students fill their summers with anything from on-campus research to internships and programs on the other side of the world. Professors, too, throw themselves into a wide range of summer-pursuits. Kathryn Santos, Dania Abreu-Torres and David Ribble tackle projects including archival work, activism and ecology work.
Kathryn Vomero Santos is an associate professor of English, and her summer will be focused on the arts, cultures and languages of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Santos is first and foremost a Shakespeare scholar and studies Shakespeare as a mechanism for understanding, sharing and engaging with often obscured cultures.
“What we have found is that Mexican-American and Indigenous playwrights have been adapting Shakespeare for decades,” Santos said. “But people aren’t necessarily aware of this tradition because these plays were written for community theaters, university theaters and were either not published because there was no desire for publication or there were no resources and opportunities for publication.”
Through publishing her book “Shakespeare in Tongues” and archival work on socio-cultural projects, Santos will be busy this summer. Her work is connected by the throughline of researching and sharing research on the arts, cultures and languages of the American Southwest.
“This is a kind of work of activism, and I see myself as a scholar contributing to that activism by writing about it in my scholarly study of Shakespeare,” Santos said.
Dania Abreu-Torres, professor of modern languages and literature, is dedicating her summer to “Commemorando La Comunidad,” an archival initiative to uncover the narratives of Latinx students at Trinity.
“We are trying to bring those stories to the forefront by doing archival research and also oral histories,” Abreu-Torres said. “We have these questions from the students about how they do not fit — Latino students specifically. They do not feel they belong to Trinity, but they’ve been here all along, so how do we make them aware that they do belong.”
Abreu-Torres will be working with students to digitize and document the Latinx history of Trinity that can be found in old campus media: the Trinitonian, the Mirage, letters, memos and flyers. This archival work will be built upon and tell the story of long standing Latinx contributions to campus.
Since receiving tenure, Abreu-Torres’ summer focus has shifted from personal research to student-centric projects. Her role as a Mellon Academic Leadership Fellow helps her advocate for diversity and inclusion from an administrative vantage point.
“I’ve done my best to be a great educator, so to have students come to my class, feel comfortable in the class, engage with the class,” Abreu-Torres said. “But also, what will I leave for them to continue on? And I think that La Communidad would be that specific thing.”
David Ribble is the dean of the D. R. Semmes School of Science, as well as a professor of biology. This year, for the fifth time since 2017, he will be taking 13 students on a four-week ecology field course in Costa Rica.
“We travel all over the Pacific side of the country and we stay at different field stations, and at those field stations we live trap small mammals,” Ribble said. “We start our trapping at stations along the coast, and then we start to move up into the mountains. Costa Rica is actually very diverse geographically and topographically.”
Ribble and his students will be gathering data in the field on what small mammals can be found at different elevations. This work will be added to a database that Ribble has been growing for years.
“Unfortunately, we’re interested in looking at potential impacts of climate change because as things warm up, those habitats are going to start, you know, moving further up,” Ribble said.
In addition to this Costa Rica ecology trip, Ribble has administrative responsibilities for his role as dean, but he appreciates the break his field research will provide.
“I get to take a little break for four weeks to do this,” Ribble said. “You know, we still have responsibilities during the summer, but it’s a lot less stressful, and that makes it nice. One of the nice things about an academic schedule is you can count on the summer, you know, being different and that’s a real privilege of the job.”
