LEWISBURG — An upcoming speaking event at Bucknell University will focus on students who served in World War I. The speaking event, The Bucknellians of World War I: A Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Project will be Tuesday April 4 at the Union County Public Library in Lewisburg.
Dr. David Del Testa is an associate professor in the Department of History at Bucknell University, “Bucknell University has a long history of involving students in all aspects of research that the professors conduct. My connection with World War I sort of happened accidentally. I was working with our excellent librarians and one of them pointed out this treasure trove of material that we had on World War I, and yet no one had written about it. I thought this is a perfect opportunity to connect students with their Bucknell past and give them an opportunity to research something that no one has really ever written about before.”
Amy Collins is a history and political science double major and a member of the Class of 2018. She was surprised that this topic hasn’t been researched before, “I think that moment came for me when I visited the National Archives in D.C. I had so much trouble finding the documents that I needed about this topic and the comment I kept getting was that no one has ever looked at these archives. It made it really difficult for me to find these things, but once I found them, it opened up so much more to the project and to help me just ask different questions that I never thought about asking before.”
Julia Stevens is a member of the Class of 2020 and is also a member of the research team, “For me it was kind of finding out that they were your average students just like the students we have at Bucknell today. They weren’t very different from us. They were members of clubs. They were members of Greek organizations. They had a lot of the same majors that you will find students having now. They were just your average teenagers and young adults that ended up being dragged into a really unfortunate conflict.”
Collins, Stevens and Dr. Del Testa were guests on WKOK Sunrise talking about their upcoming discussion. You can listen to WKOK Sunrise online at WKOK.com. (Ali Stevens)
