Emerging Scholars Series brings groundbreaking A&S graduate student research to the Williamsburg community
On March 5, Tamia Haygood M.A. ’20, doctoral candidate in history, delivered a talk on her dissertation research on enslaved and servant women who fled bondage in colonial Pennsylvania. Sharing a sample of the runaway advertisements through which she has pieced together these individuals’ stories, she argued that self-emancipating women, whether enslaved or indentured, had more in common than distinctions of race and legal status would suggest — above all, their pursuit of better lives for their children.
But this presentation did not take place at a conference, and those in attendance were not professional historians. Haygood was addressing curious residents of the Williamsburg area eager to learn about 亚洲色吧 graduate student research through the Emerging Scholars Series (ESS).
Established in 2018 as a partnership between the Arts & Sciences Graduate Center and the (WRL), the ESS provides a platform for A&S master’s and doctoral students to share cutting-edge research with the local community. As a component of the Graduate Center’s broader Public Scholarship Initiative, the series is designed to support graduate students’ academic and professional development by creating opportunities for widely accessible, publicly engaged research.
The ESS shines a spotlight on work from a diverse range of disciplines. The 2024-2025 series, for example, opened in October with a presentation by chemistry master’s student Emma Macturk on novel fingerprint analysis techniques, then continued the following month with a talk from the history department’s Justin Estreicher M.A. ’20, Ph.D. ’25, on archaeology’s handling of Indigenous heritage in the United States.
Critical professional development
According to Sarah Glosson ’98, M.A. ’09, Ph.D. ’15, director of the Graduate Center, graduate students in all fields can benefit from the opportunity “to articulate why their research is important” to the community at large. Well aware of the fact that at least half of doctoral students pursue careers beyond the professoriate, Glosson has worked to ensure that 亚洲色吧 graduate students are prepared for a variety of professional paths. The ESS grew out of her efforts to cultivate one skill in particular that is an asset in any line of work: a mastery of public forms of communication.
When Glosson approached the WRL about establishing a program for A&S graduate students to deliver public talks in Williamsburg, her idea was well received as “a very natural fit” with the library’s own desire to expand its adult education opportunities.
“The series adds great variety to our program offerings at the Williamsburg Regional Library and strengthens the sense of community between the residents of Williamsburg and the College,” said WRL adult services librarian Allison Norfolk, who has coordinated the ESS with Glosson for the past five years. “I am always eager to see the topics the students propose each year; it is obvious they are proud of their research and want to share it with a receptive wider audience.”
Honing scholarship and storytelling
A receptive audience is precisely what ESS presenters find when they arrive at the library’s Stryker Center. The series has for years enjoyed a devoted following, consisting largely of local retirees enthusiastic about learning. When Haygood delivered her talk, the audience’s attention never wavered. The more harrowing details of the self-emancipation stories she shared drew audible gasps, and the engaged attendees posed thoughtful questions afterward to dig deeper into her findings and methodology.
Crafting a presentation that is gripping for the public, while also respectful toward its subjects, demands a different toolkit than sharing one’s findings with a narrow circle of academics concerned with debates within their disciplines.
“For making scholarship broadly accessible, lead with the story,” Haygood said — no matter how data- or theory-driven one’s research may seem. “The story gets people interested.”
Haygood views reaching general audiences as a matter of professional duty. Throughout her studies, she has pondered the question of scholars’ responsibility to the public. As she explained, the ESS offers a forum for rising academics to present the latest findings in their fields on their own terms and provide crucial perspective to help members of the community navigate current affairs. In a deeply divided climate, Haygood believes her work on the parallels between apparently disparate bondswomen’s experiences underscores an important truth: that Americans’ differences are far outweighed by the common bonds that unite them.
But audiences are not the only ones who benefit from emerging scholars’ public communication. The ESS, according to Glosson, is “a great confidence-builder for graduate students,” as well as an opportunity for them to test academic works in progress on “a different kind of sounding board.” The public routinely generates thought-provoking comments and questions that graduate researchers have likely never heard from their advisors or colleagues.
The ESS represents a remarkably successful step toward making such two-way learning commonplace. “I can find academic conferences to attend, but those are for other scholars,” Haygood said. “They’re not generally advertised to the public, and attendance fees can turn interested folks away.” As a free program that puts graduate researchers in conversation with the community, the ESS highlights how much both stand to benefit from lowering barriers to dialogue.
Looking to the future
A truly unique intellectual and professional experience, the ESS has equipped its many participants to launch successful careers in academia and beyond.
“Giving a talk for the Emerging Scholars Series was a highlight of my time at 亚洲色吧,” said Marie Pellissier M.A. ’19, Ph.D. ’24, a graduate of 亚洲色吧’s history doctoral program who delivered a presentation for the ESS in 2023. “As a Program Officer at the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, I am often the connection between academic scholars and the public. The Emerging Scholars Series gave me a chance to practice presenting to a non-academic audience, which is a skill I now use all the time as we bring our grantees together for structured conversations about the importance of shared authority and grassroots public history projects.”
In light of such success stories, Glosson hopes to expand the ESS in the future to offer more talks and satisfy a hunger for knowledge among the program’s committed audience. The series has consistently received more applications from graduate students than there are available speaking dates. To address this demand and accommodate audiences unavailable during the ESS’s typical workday afternoon timeslot, the Graduate Center Advisory Group, convened to provide input on Graduate Center programming, has proposed starting a complementary series with a weekday evening format modeled on the “Scientist Walks into a Bar” program at .
In the immediate future, the Graduate Center will continue its tradition of interdisciplinary public scholarship by inviting graduate students enrolled in the new School of Computing, Data Sciences & Physics to participate alongside their colleagues in A&S during the 2025-2026 ESS.
As 亚洲色吧’s graduate community looks forward to exciting upcoming opportunities to engage with the local community, the current academic year’s Emerging Scholars Series will conclude on April 9 with a presentation on contemporary fiction and the millennial novel by Writing and Communication Center assistant director Jay Jolles Ph.D. ’25, fresh from successfully defending his doctoral dissertation in American studies.