On Studying During Corona and the Historical Parallels between Ukraine & Iraq and Roe v Wade & 19th Century France

About Myself
My name is Hille Verhorst, I’m a third-year Bachelor’s student at Utrecht University, currently rounding off my degree. I joined the Humanities Honours Program after my first year, excited to participate in what promised to be, and ultimately was, a valuable addition to my Bachelor’s. As a History student, the program allowed me to expand my interdisciplinary horizons whilst simultaneously developing a greater understanding of my own subject.

For my Honours projects I created a few societal explorations in the form of a video and short podcast series.

About the Projects
These two projects represent a contribution of mine to the Honours Community, they serve to promote discussion in a holistic sense, as well as deepening my own knowledge. I wanted my projects to be widely accessible through their media type, with the goal to reach as large an audience as possible with some of the ideas I’ve taken from my experiences within the HHP.

My first project was a short video based around interviews with friends of mine on their reflections on the impacts of COVID on their studies, as well as their predictions for the upcoming year. Dating from the summer of 2021, I stylized these interviews along an online meeting format, in a way to conjure the characteristics of an MS Teams or Zoom meeting, of which we have all experienced so many. I consider this first project as a contribution to the honors community through its direction of self-reflection within the student body, through its questions dwelling on judging the experience of a university education through self-reflection.

You can watch the video here: https://youtu.be/t__pBizBmBQ

For my second project and further contribution, I completed a short series of podcasts with two friends, one which seeks parallels between present-day newsworthy events and similar occasions from the past. This project was more in line with my being a history student, it lost the multidisciplinary focus of my first project in favor of an exploration of the ‘usefulness of history,’ something which I consider an essential facet of the modern role of the historian. I believe that history, on top of its inherent academic value, holds one of the keys to understanding the makeup of our current societies, and that contextualizing present-day events within their historical backdrops provides avenues for its real-world application. In these podcasts, we selected recent news items and then each collected a few historical parallels, consisting of similar events. Consisting of two episodes, we started with a look at Russia’s propaganda campaign surrounding its invasion of Ukraine, and compared it to the United States’ foreign and internal propaganda following its invasion of Iraq in 2001. For the second episode we covered the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe VS Wade and compared the abortion debate in the US to the changing perceptions on abortions and women’s rights in nineteenth-century France. The discussions were generally unscripted, with only a few research papers as guidance. Far from attempting to reinforce the moniker of ‘history repeating itself,’ we instead emphasize the importance of the context behind these events. I believe this to be a valuable contribution to the humanities honors community as a whole, even with its more specific orientation, because so much of what I see the HHP providing in addition to general subject courses is in line with asking ourselves why we study what we do. Self-reflection and decoding the purpose of one’s field form pillars for the humanities as a whole.

You can listen to the podcast episodes here: https://soundcloud.com/user-536969127-63753621/sets/historical-parallels-pilot-season?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

– Hille Verhorst