Ecce Ancilla Domini!, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tate Britain
I first started thinking about the senior thesis during the beginning of my junior year, when a friend who was a year older than me told me about the Richmond Williams Travelling Fellowship. This was a fellowship that the English department offered every year that funded research abroad the summer after junior year. This sounded like too good of an opportunity to pass up, so I started thinking about a research project I would be interested in which would benefit from being pursued abroad.
The trouble was that, as an English major, most research usually involved a bunch of books that could be found in any big university library. I had done research the previous summer at Columbia, and everything that I could have possibly needed was at Butler—they had even ordered frayed first editions of nineteenth-century poems from Harvard for me! Even the correspondence of most major writers had been published by university presses. I realized that unless I wanted to pursue some pretty niche historical research (hunting through marginalia in the manuscripts of some forgotten writer, say), I needed to think of a reason to travel that wasn’t mainly archival. After pondering this for a few weeks, I thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, a nineteenth-century group of painters and poets who had wanted to make medieval-style art. I had learned about them in a class I had taken on Victorian Poetry, and I had been fascinated by their paintings and poems. (It also helped that most of their best paintings were in museums in London.) I was especially interested in how the Pre-Raphaelites had navigated their attempts to move the formal conventions art backwards without seeming derivative or irrelevant.
