From Albuquerque, New Mexico, Nina Nevill came to Trinity University knowing that she wanted to conduct undergraduate research. In fact, the opportunities Trinity presents for individual, one-on-one undergraduate research was one of the main reasons Nevill chose Trinity. Having declared a history major as well as two minors her sophomore year, Nevill also took her history capstone class - something that history majors usually take in their junior or senior year as it is a tough, semester long individual research project resulting in a thirty-five page research paper. This summer Nevill got her chance to join her capstone professor Carey Latimore in summer research funded through the Mellon Initiative.
She worked with Latimore for a book about the greater Civil Rights era in San Antonio with a goal to “record the stories of a diverse group of people [and] to achieve a comprehensive understanding of what the Civil Rights era was like in this city for the African American community.” In addition to collecting government documents and newspaper articles from the era, Nevill and Latimore conducted just over a dozen interviews with people that were living in San Antonio in the civil rights era to record these stories. One of the most challenging parts of her summer research, according to Nevill, was compiling a diverse list of persons to interview, “to gain a comprehensive understanding of the time period, without neglecting any angle or side of the story that might exist,” as well as the challenges that come along with the advanced age of their interview subjects.
In tandem with the challenges that organizing these interviews present, some of Nevill’s favorite memories of the summer come from her interactions with the same subjects such as an interview with a ninety-five year-old WWII Veteran with “an incredibly sharp memory” who shared his experience overseas with her and Latimore during the interview. Recalling this interview and others, “I feel privileged and honored to be able to record his story, knowing that future researchers will be able to use it to contribute to their projects the same way that these interviews are contributing to ours,” she said. Along with the long term goal of Latimore’s book, a majority of the interviews conducted will be publically released for use in future research.
Nevill continued her research with Latimore last fall and this spring as an independent study. Together with her history major, she is also working toward minors in both political science and African American studies and was pleased to find herself involved in research that fit so well with her declared academic interests and is hoping to gain “a greater understanding of some of the first hand experiences and struggles [that I study] in my African American studies classes that I wouldn’t get from textbooks.”
“There’s something special about working one-on-one with a professor; how they structure their work, how they efficiently get through the material, the types of questions they ask,” she said of her time with Latimore. In the fall she worked on a project that looked at how African Americans talk about race which she will be presenting at a conference. With a long term goal of a career in academia, or perhaps in the FBI, this research with Latimore has been, and will continue to be, a great source of motivation for Nevill to pursue a graduate degree in history after she earns her bachelor’s. “Working towards a book is like running a marathon whereas regular in-class research projects are like sprinting,” says Nevill of her research experiences so far.
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