Rebecca Janzen, a professor of Spanish and comparative literature whose current research focuses on Catholic religious practices in mining regions, has been awarded the prestigious German fellowship to work with Professor Tina Asmussen, a historian of science and technology with an appointment at Germany’s national mining museum and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

The fellowship program allows experienced faculty researchers to collaborate with peers at host institutions in Germany and to join a network that includes 61 Nobel Prize winners.

Thanks to previous work in South America through the Excel funding program for liberal arts, humanities and social sciences, Janzen had conducted significant primary research and was able to frame her narrative.

Janzen arrived in Düsseldorf in early March to begin the fellowship with a two-month intensive German language course. The city is known for celebrations of Carnival, a pre-Lenten festival mirroring Mardi Gras that is also found in Brazil and Bolivia. The festivities coincided with Janzen’s arrival, offering a unique opportunity to immediately begin exploring connections between Catholic practices across both South America and Europe.

After completing the language course, she will move on to work at the national mining museum in Bochum. There, Janzen will work with a group of scholars and practitioners who are experts on all aspects of mining from prehistory to the present, giving her the opportunity to have a well-rounded interdisciplinary perspective for her project. She will also have access to the museum’s collection of artifacts documenting patron saints of mining while working in close quarters with local professors knowledgeable about social and religious practices in mining communities.

“I can use all my notes and photographs from archives and museums that I was able to visit thanks to the grants from the University of South Carolina during my sabbatical and begin the process of writing articles and a cohesive monograph about it,” says Janzen. “Being in a new place surrounded by people who are knowledgeable about my research topic will be helpful."

Thanks to her fieldwork in South and Central America as well as archival research in the United States, Spain and Portugal, Janzen has an abundance of information to sort through. She’s eager to have dedicated time to narrow in on specifics.

The German Mining Museum has a lot to offer in terms of research directions. As part of the German network of research museums, and located in a heavily Catholic part of Germany, it will give Janzen a religious panorama in which she can explore questions of Catholic religious and social practices. Her location is ideal for return trips to Spanish and Portuguese colonial archives, which she anticipates being of even greater use as she further refines her main research argument.

 Working alongside Asmussen, the German national mining museum’s historian of science, Janzen is in an ideal position to learn more about the development of mining and its environmental impacts. And, since Germany is home to the Grimm brothers, she’s also well-positioned to investigate folklore around creatures inhabiting mines—a feature that spans cultures she’s studied, from spirits in Latin America to goblin-like mine dwellers in Ireland.  

The possibilities are rich for scholarly study, offering Janzen several time periods, countries, focus areas, and geographical areas to consider for her forthcoming book on mining. She’s quick to point back to the internal funding as a pivotal factor in laying the groundwork for the work she will be doing in Germany.

“It’s really because I could go to all these places [in Central and South America] that I could be successful with the grant. I have a lot of notes and information and books that I bought at book fairs, so I can write about it—I need time to sit down and do that. I’m excited that I will have more time to dedicate to research.”