Every year the Department of History awards the Bridget Phillips Scholarship to undergraduate students traveling abroad for study or research toward an honors thesis. Bridget Phillips finished her undergraduate degree in the history department at UF before entering graduate school at Johns Hopkins University in 1988. Tragically, Bridget was murdered in her apartment in 1989 in an unsolved case. To honor her memory, her parents established the scholarship in her name. In 2021 one of Bridget’s friends from graduate school, Tim Dean, now James M. Benson Professor of English at the University of Illinois, made a generous contribution to increase the fund.
This year’s Phillips awardees were Emily Canamella and Harper Self, who both traveled to Spain on study abroad programs.
Emily’s journey took her to Seville, in southern Spain, for UF’s five-week language immersion program. From the start, her trip was a “whirlwind of incredible experiences.” The first weekend they went across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier, Morocco. In Granada, she befriended a group of German students who were also staying in Seville and learned about their culture through their lingua franca of Spanish. Living with a host family helped her learn not only Spanish language for her minor, but also allowed her to ask them about Spain’s past and how history is taught in schools in the country. Emily explained, “I wanted to know how they approached topics like the so-called ‘discovery of the Americas,’ the Spanish Civil War, and the Franco dictatorship.” Besides language classes, Emily engaged with Spanish culture through flamenco. She was fascinated to learn about the origins of the dance. “Flamenco came together as a cultural melting-pot from all different groups that ended up in Southern Spain over the years,” Emily said.
Harper went on a twelve-week program in Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast. She took Spanish-language courses and a class on photography, but her favorite was a class on the history of the Spanish Civil War. Extracurricular trips like her visit to Picasso’s Guernica at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía brought this history to life. A major goal of the trip for Harper was to conduct research for her History Senior Honors Thesis. She spent time at Alcalá de Henares, near Madrid, where state archives hold documents about Sebastián Romero Radigales, a diplomat whose efforts in 1943-44 helped save Jews from Thessaloniki, Greece from the Holocaust. Harper’s work on her thesis and previous coursework at UF helped her decode Spanish life. While visiting Cartagena, she noticed the preponderance of enclosed balconies in the old town. She realized that it was an example of “modest architecture,” something she had learned about in Assistant Professor Max Deardorff’s course Golden Age Spain. These constructions were meant to provide privacy to women from wealthy households while allowing them to look at the street below. Harper reports, “Finding the architecture I learned about years before in a textbook applied in person was so exciting to me.”
For Emily and Harper, the study abroad experience facilitated by the Phillips award will play an important role in their UF education. Emily found that by the end of her time in Seville, she was much more confident in real-life conversation and ready to complete a minor in Spanish. Harper gathered all the materials she needed for her honors thesis–and perhaps more as she decides between graduate work in History and law school. Most importantly, their travels highlighted how much there was to learn about the world and made them eager to discover more!
Emily and Harper’s study abroad experiences were made possible by the generosity of the Phillips family and Tim Dean. If you would like to support student study abroad opportunities, please visit the Department’s giving page to learn how you can make a secure, tax-deductible gift.
