[Meet the Author!]
Hallo! My name is Loghan Hawkes (they/them/any), I am a rising senior of multiple disciplines, and I am excited to be participating in the Berlin division of the International Internship Program this summer. I am currently completing a major in Museum Studies, and, as of this past semester, I will be able to graduate with a minor in Neuroscience as well as a minor in Studio Art. I have always had many academic interests—from humanities to arts to sciences—and it has been a fun challenge to figure out how to combine them all, one which I anticipate will carry over in my search for a career after I finish school. Put simply, I love to learn; if I could be a professional student, I would be. While that may not be a realistic goal, I feel that a career in the museum and library science sector gets me as close as possible to that dream. More specifically, I hope to one day work in the archival field; however, it is yet unclear whether that hope lies in the vein of managing collections, working in conservation and restoration, or participating in the public-facing museum world. Archiving is all about the accumulation and preservation of knowledge, in whatever form it may be kept, and it is the work of archivists, conservators, curators, and museum educators to navigate and disseminate that most valuable of assets. Please excuse any positive bias I have let slip into my words, for this is a subject which I find endlessly fascinating and will defend ardently.
That being said, I am quite pleased with the internship placement I have received for these next few months. I will be working in the archive of Ernst Busch University, a school for the dramatic arts in central Berlin. When I initially applied to the International Internship Program, I took interest in Berlin because I studied German in high school. Unfortunately, my college schedule was too busy to continue with a German minor as I had originally planned, but I wanted to immerse myself in the language before I forgot too much of it. Beyond the language-learning opportunity the IIP presented, I had not truly considered the other advantages of the program; that is, until I thought about what exactly it would mean to take an archival internship in Berlin, a place with a history as rich as it is complicated. In my academic experience with archives, I usually find myself most interested in the forgotten or ignored. Last fall, I took a studio arts class in which we were meant to use archival research to inform printmaking and digital-fabrication art projects. I was working with mostly Native American and Queer/LGBTQ+ archives, and it became clear to me just how much can be lost when we do not go looking for it. Considering the amount of history that was obscured or destroyed during the Holocaust, followed by the rise and fall of the German Democratic Republic and the Berlin Wall, any archive in Berlin that goes back even 100 years is sure to uncover histories that have never been given a space to be remembered. Once I’d realized this, the prospect of working in Berlin excited me even more. My hope is that working at Ernst Busch University, the archive of which dates back to 1905, will allow me to pursue my academic interest in missing histories while expanding my professional abilities in an actual archival space. I look forward to getting hands-on experience with conservation and storage in particular, since I haven’t really been able to do that through my university classes. I also look forward to making their digital archive more available to the English-speaking world, as this is something that my boss said would be quite valuable to their team.
Outside of school and work, I consider myself an active and creative person. I am on the Pitt Club Quadball team; for those who don’t know, Quadball is a real-life sport inspired by the fictional game of Quidditch. It is a full-contact (tackle), all-gender sport that I can best describe as some combination of rugby, dodgeball, and handball. I have made some of my closest friends on that team, and it has been a huge positive influence in my life for the past three years. I am also part of the Pitt Symphony Orchestra and a few chamber music ensembles, in which I am a proud violist (shout-out to any fellow viola players). In my free time, I enjoy drawing, reading, listening to music—all the better if done outside—and watching movies or shows. My favorite movie is The Lighthouse (2019), my favorite book is Mason & Dixon (Thomas Pynchon), and I will gladly talk about either for hours on end.
