The summer of 2020 didn’t entirely go according to plan for anyone. With programs being widely canceled, I was worried that I wouldn’t have any project to work on for the summer. Luckily, I was offered a special summer stipend through the USOAR (Undergraduate Student Opportunities in Academic Research) program and was able to work with the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia project.
With the help of Professor Worthy Martin, I built skills in research and in data. I advanced my knowledge in computer science by learning JavaScript and D3.js, a JavaScript library for representing data visually. I also read academic literature on the colonization movement and Liberia, including Marie Tyler McGraw’s An African Republic, David Kanzanjian’s The Brink of Freedom, and Cooper Helene’s The House at Sugar Beach.
At the end of the project, I wrote an essay about what I had learned about women in the colonization movement. The essay can be accessed below.
To learn more about the Virginia Emigrants to Liberia Project, see their website here. To read more about my project with USOAR the previous year, see The Anne Spencer Project article.
