This summer, USC College students eschewed sea and sand to embark on rigorous research projects — in topics ranging from nanoscience to how babies acquire language to Marilyn Monroe as a cultural icon.
By Pamela J. Johnson October 2007
A slideshow featuring Sam Shaw's photos of Marilyn Monroe on the set of "The Seven Year Itch," with narration by Lois Banner, professor of history and gender studies. Undergraduates Lilly Insalata and Christine Greer have assisted Banner with her research as part of the Summer Undergraduate Research program.
Responsibility weighed heavily on 19-year-old Lilly Insalata as she boarded the bus to the L.A. Central Library this past summer.
Just finishing her freshman year, the USC College student had been asked to do serious research with a seasoned scholar about a daunting subject: 20th century icon Marilyn Monroe.
History and gender studies professor Lois Banner would be relying on Insalata to shape the project, part of Banner’s next book. Insalata wondered: Is there really anything new to say about this tragic, larger-than-life figure? How in the world can I contribute something original?
“Does anyone have a quarter?” asked Banner, digging into her purse, and interrupting the student’s angst.
Insalata gladly offered her professor the bus fare. She was nervous, but excited and grateful to be among 30 students participating with nearly two dozen professors in the College’s Summer Undergraduate Research (SUR) pilot program.
“This student summer research is very valuable,” said Banner, as the bus rolled bumpily north on Figueroa. “The students are getting intensive mentoring. We’re not only discussing the research in my office; I’m taking them to libraries and physically showing them how scholarly work is done.”
Other summer research topics in the program range from DNA cloning to climate change to how infants acquire language skills. If successful, the pilot will be expanded as part of the College’s new model for undergraduate education, one that begins exposing students to research methodology early on. The idea is to create a four-year path where students pursue their research projects throughout their academic careers — thereby challenging the semester-at-a-time model of undergraduate learning.
Last fall, the College launched its Team Research Communities courses, which involve small teams of undergraduates working with professors on yearlong projects. The SUR program takes the concept a step further, giving undergrads a stipend and the opportunity to work one-on-one with a professor throughout the summer months.
“We can only rethink undergraduate education within a research university by thinking intelligently about research from the moment a student enters USC,” said Peter Starr, the former College dean who developed the model with Hilary Schor, former dean of undergraduate programs, and Michael Quick, now the executive vice dean for academic affairs.
In supporting the program, Dean Howard Gillman agreed that a liberal arts college must expose students “to the great questions of the ages” and give them opportunities “to see firsthand what it is like to engage a question with curiosity and a respect for evidence-based reasoning.
Professor Lois Banner introduced her summer undergraduate researchers, Lilly Insalata (center) and Christine Greer (right), to the joys and hard work of archival research at the downtown public library in June.
Photo credit: Roger Snider
“One goal of the College is to make it possible for undergraduate students to do independent research,” Gillman said. “Moving in this direction will make ours a distinctive institution, blending the intimacy of a liberal arts college with the creative excitement of a research university.”
In the pilot, 22 professors from four disciplines — history, marine biology, physics and psychology — are working with one or two students on a research project. During the summerlong work, they also met periodically as a group to share their discoveries.
“Research isn’t just a solitary activity between a student and a mentor,” said Schor, professor of English and expert on Victorian literature. “It’s a community of people asking questions. They’re learning collective skills for problem solving. They’re learning the discipline of research, which is very different from the discipline of sitting in a classroom.”
This fall, the students are continuing their projects in four-credit courses, often with the same professor, and will attend seminars focusing on the larger questions of how to approach research in their field.
“This is the moment when they shape the specific work they did over the summer into its larger relationship to their discipline,” Schor said. “And for many of them, when they begin to think about going on to do more independent research of their own.”
The students’ polished work will be presented during a symposium in November.
Schor compared it to learning how to swim: a student has to conduct research to learn the process. But she doesn’t believe a student should be thrown into the pool and expected to do the butterfly stroke.
“You have to teach them,” she said, recalling instructing a senior writing his thesis how to use online library catalogs.
“I’ve been shown this many times and it’s never made sense to me until now,” the senior told Schor.
“I told him, ‘That’s because you never had your own research project, where you needed information to craft something of your own,’ ” she said. “It’s that kind of independence, that kind of motivation that I think is the most important thing we can give our undergraduate students.”
Back at the Central Library on 5th Street, Banner had Insalata and classmate Christine Greer rolling up their sleeves. They were learning that some material — magazine archives and microfiche included — is not available online and there is more to scholarship than Googling a list of topics.
To read Lois Banner’s essay about the image of Marilyn Monroe from “The Seven Year Itch,” click here.
Photo copyright Sam Shaw/courtesy Shaw Family Archives.
“These archives have not been digitized, so the only way to study them is to go to a library and look them up,” Banner said.
Banner’s research focuses on the history of gender, sexuality and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her book American Beauty (Alfred Knopf, 1983) was the first to examine fashion during the past two centuries in the context of evolving patterns in politics, class and gender roles.
In another pathbreaking work, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power and Sexuality (Knopf, 1992), Banner pored over history, myth, literature and film to examine how Western civilization has celebrated and demeaned the older woman. She’s written books about women trailblazers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.
Now Banner, a trailblazer herself, is writing the first scholarly work chronicling how Marilyn Monroe, as a symbol of the 1950s, reflected and defined the culture of that era. The research with Greer and Insalata will be incorporated into the work, and Banner is challenging them to question her assumptions.
For example, in one completed section of her manuscript, Banner dissects the famous image from the film “The Seven Year Itch” in which Monroe’s character stands over a subway grate while a blast of air blows up her skirt. The character is cooling off from the summer heat, after watching the movie “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” with a lustful neighbor whose wife has left him.
The “creature” symbolized public fears of the time: the Cold War, communism, the budding civil rights movement, homosexuality, organized crime, juvenile delinquency and nuclear destruction, Banner wrote. Monroe’s skirt flying up, Banner argues, may have been meant to distract from those fears by presenting the protagonist as an American “girl” — sexual, playful and oblivious to political and social concerns.
There was also an attempt at a sexual allusion, Banner contends: “Like the creature from the Black Lagoon, the subway lives in subterranean depths. It is not farfetched to see a phallic resonance here.”
