Passionate about storytelling, Samantha Donohue ’18 crafted a summer research project that played to that interest. Her work, funded by Hamilton's Emerson Foundation, looked at the portrayal of Muslim women across several platforms in the U.S. and New Zealand: television, social media and virtual realities.
Donohue spent part of her summer in New Zealand, where she will visited a mosque and spoke with the Muslim Students Association at the Victoria University of Wellington, among other research. She's also spending a semester there her junior year.
Her majors – creative writing and cinema and media studies – reflect her passion for storytelling. “Creative writing allows me to focus in on my love for writing, and cinema and media studies has taught me new ways of communication through research, digital archives and photography,” she says.
A photography course led her to cinema and media studies, and from there Donohue took Introduction to Digital Humanities, which provided her with technical skills. She’s also learned through an internship at Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative.
“As someone interested in writing and the humanities, I didn’t expect to have a lot of research opportunities in college, but between this Emerson and my work in the Digital Humanities Initiative, I have learned that humanities research and conveying that research in an accessible way exists and is important,” she says.
