According to Courtney Carter '17, she will probably spend the rest of her life working in museums. The English major spent last summer at Amazement Square, a children's museum in her hometown of Lynchburg, Va., and this year, with the sponsorship of John. B. Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities, she is interning at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

“Before this summer I was about 85 percent sure I wanted to work in a museum," she says. "I am now 98 percent sure."

At the Smithsonian she is working on a Summer Institute Program called "Teaching the Humanities Through Art," which is a weeklong professional development program that helps teachers from across the country use art in their social studies, language, and English classrooms.

“Art is very powerful,” says Carter. “It can provide a way for kids students to critically engage with a primary source without needing to know how to spell. It can encourage a visual literacy, which can then encourage a linguistic one as well. It can empower kids to explore, challenge, and understand the world around them in creative and individual ways.”

It is work that she began in "Theory and Practice of Exhibitions: Objects, Images, Texts, Events," a recent Haverford class she took with Visiting Assistant Professor of Independent College Programs John Muse, who, along with Writing Center Director Kristin Lindgren, played a huge role in encouraging Carter to pursue her interest in curatorial work.

“[Muse and Lindgren] have done way more for me than I would ever expect from a professor,” she says.“They remember and keep up to date with my interests and my new ideas, and then push me to think more critically with their comments, books, and introductions.”

Carter has also found that the linguistic, communication, and written skills she's developed in her English courses have directly complemented her work in art, exhibits, and art history.

“Museums are just so great!” she exclaims. “They take artists' work, along with all the ideas, issues, and feelings that the artists are wrestling with and [that] are important, interesting, and essential to being human, and then arrange them in a Google-searchable location for anybody to visit.”

—Hina Fathima '15

"Summer Centered" is a series exploring our students' Center-funded summer work.