Meghan O'Neil

Degree

Ph.D. in English

Project Team

Bass Connections played a pivotal role in my educational and professional development at Duke. When I was in the third year of my doctoral program, I realized that despite liking what I was studying, I was feeling increasingly isolated from the larger intellectual life of the university and from the kind of collaborative, project-driven work that I found energizing and intellectually compelling. I was also beginning to realize that there were particular skills that I wanted to learn that weren’t being directly cultivated by my program. I wanted to be a better teacher and communicator; I wanted to learn how to lead and manage projects; and I wanted to learn how to facilitate conversation across disciplines.

So, I began searching for ways to engage in projects where I could meet people outside of my department and do research that was both collaborative – featuring different disciplinary perspectives and learners of all levels – and translatable to contexts outside the university. This led me to two different Bass Connections projects – Exploring the Intersection of Energy and Peace-building through Film (2013-15) and NC Jukebox (2015-17) – and to a project with the newly created Story+ Summer Research Program – Race and Ethnicity in Advertising (2017).

Now, you might look at this seemingly disparate collection of projects and think, “Yikes. She’s all over the place.” And, in the interest of full disclosure, I initially felt this way, too. But upon reflection, I’ve come to realize that, true to its name, Bass Connections – both in terms of the educational ethos of the program and my personal experience being a part of it – has truly been about connections – about engaging in an ongoing process of creating and cultivating academic communities of all kinds; about learning how complex questions link different disciplines; and about thinking deeply about how my own independent projects (such as my dissertation) are complementary to – rather than in competition with – the collaborative work that I find so fulfilling.

My experience as a member of the NC Jukebox team lies at the heart of this realization and is an integral part of the connective tissue that holds the many components of my graduate school experience together.

The NC Jukebox project grew out of Rubenstein Library’s Archives Alive program and was dedicated to exploring a “hidden” collection of early twentieth-century folk music recordings that had been amassed by Frank Clyde Brown, a Duke English professor who spent his summers traveling across the state in search of folk music and traditions. Until our project began in 2015, these recordings remained largely under-explored, partly due to the practical barriers of the recordings still being trapped on old technologies, but also due to ethical considerations, including a desire to open the archive with dual goals of advancing scholarship on the material and cultural history of the state and promoting the repatriation of these recordings to their communities of origin, where folk singing continues to be part of a dynamic, living tradition.

I began my work with the NC Jukebox team as a novice in both archival research and early twentieth-century cultural history. Alongside our undergraduate team members, whose interests ranged from literary and music history to data science to computer engineering, I had the pleasure of scouring Frank Clyde Brown’s notes for clues as to whose voices we were hearing on his recordings, and I remember the collective thrill of searching together to track names through census data and news clippings. I also remember the frustration of attempting to translate nearly unintelligible song lyrics into full ballads that we could then trace through folk encyclopedias and music databases in search of their fascinating origins and routes of migration.

Amidst the ups and downs of this discovery phase, our team leaders were also helping us think collectively about the larger intellectual and logistical questions of our project. Using the recordings as our guide, we read scholarship on and engaged in conversations about media history and material culture. We also discussed how the contextualization and representation of these recordings could take a number of different forms – and that the forms of our research outputs would also inevitably tell an important story about this particular archive. Seemingly small decisions such as the selections of particular singers or songs or the specific ways we chose to track and present metadata could signal to our audiences whose voices and songs it was important to remember and who has been (and continues to be) left out of our shared, archival record.

By the end of my first semester with the NC Jukebox team, I was hooked and knew I wanted to grow with the project. I was eager to keep digging into Frank Clyde Brown’s collection and learn more about North Carolina history, but I also wanted to take on a larger role in guiding the project through its various phases of development, including helping to introduce new students to this material as the project’s focus shifted over time.

Under the mentorship of our team leaders, I spent the next year and a half learning how to co-lead a collaborative, interdisciplinary project. Beginning as a graduate student researcher, I moved into a mentorship role for our undergraduate team members and took a leading role in distilling our initial research findings into a physical exhibit and multimedia kiosk that debuted as part of an exhibition at Rubenstein Library. I also helped think through and execute the details of our collaboration with our community partners in Western North Carolina, including helping to host a contemporary mountain musician for a small concert and discussion, where he sang many of the songs collected by Frank Clyde Brown and discussed folk music history, family and singing traditions with our team.

The next year, I received a Bass Instructional Fellowship to co-design and co-instruct a course that was affiliated with the project. I worked with team leaders to generate the interdisciplinary syllabus, including helping to choose readings, design assignments, develop evaluation methods and plan how to extend our relationships with our collaborators in the mountains. I also served as the primary mentor for two additional undergraduate students conducting independent study projects related to our team’s research as well as a student on our team who received a Bass Connections Follow-on Research Award to continue her exploration of mountain music traditions and music migration patterns over the following summer.

Our second year of NC Jukebox culminated with a trip to The Orchard at Altapass, a working orchard, music venue and cultural heritage center in Altapass, N.C. Three members of our team presented to an overflowing crowd of community members, who had gathered to hear snippets of recorded music from Frank Clyde Brown’s collection and listen to the stories of the singers whose voices had been hidden in Duke’s archives for almost a century. They also came to dance – perhaps my favorite outcome from two incredible years spent with the NC Jukebox team.