Senior Spotlight

Annie Chang Spotlights Marc Ridgell

Tell us a bit about what personally motivated your project.

I’m from Chicago and moved between the city and the suburbs, … I’ve always been involved in social justice work, but I was trying to find a lens into how specifically the very weird things I was seeing about urban inequality as well as the contradictions around homophobia, racism, transphobia, and classism. The summer after I graduated high school, I went to Chicago Pride with my friends, and I saw a lot of very weird things there, from police marching in the parade to racial self-segregation throughout the parade itself. This question came with me when I entered Washington University. It became my research question. I began to take classes and read… and the more I got to read stuff in queer theory, queer of color critique, and critical geography, I was really able to understand contextually what I was witnessing. I originally applied to Mellon with a project that was based solely in Chicago, interviewing Black LGBTQ people in Chicago about their experiences accessing Boystown, which is the gay neighborhood in Chicago and the home of the Pride Festival. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I was still invested in those same experiences. I also knew that I had to switch my methods because I wasn’t 21 yet. I just turned 21 and even to access those events there, you need to be of age. I’m glad that I was able to do an archivally-based project about how Black LGBTQ people organized in Chicago. The more I began to read, I began to understand how cities and gay neighborhoods and other neighborhoods are the same entity, so I can’t study gay neighborhoods without studying how the city functions itself. I did a research fellowship in New York City with the Schomburg Center and had a chapter on New York in my thesis about the same thing.

What advice would you give to juniors (or future Mellons) about conducting independent research?

First and foremost, I want to say: understand and think big picture and professionally, what you want out of Mellon. Mellon is intended for undergrads to get PhDs, and this is a great time to figure out if that life truly is for you. If you know at the end of it, you want to go into academia, you want to get a Ph.D. even if it’s not straight through, knowing the name and power in Mellon Mays will give you the motivation and discipline to pursue your project. The fact that I’m in Mellon Mays has opened doors in terms of scholarships I’ve applied to and Ph.D. programs I’ve applied to, especially because of the type of training I’ve received through Mellon Mays. Thinking big picture will give you the motivation to do the research you want to do.

Second, I would say keep reading. Keep reading outside of class: just read research articles and books, either related to your project or not. If there’s a scholar’s reading in a class that you find interesting, look up more of their work because that will give you a bigger picture of the type of scholarship that’s already out there. Someone has made an argument similar to yours, but it is about your unique lens to a project. Equally, it is about the methods and sources you use to craft your narrative. So, keep reading and re-reading, ask for help when you need it, and think about a clear outline for your thesis in your junior year so you are not scrambling between junior and senior summer.

As of this current moment, what kind of scholar do you see yourself becoming?

I see myself as a scholar who first takes care of myself. I believe in really investing your time in your wellness. I know that school and the pressures of late capitalism tell us not to but instead to prioritize our work (and research is work). However, especially if you’re studying marginalized communities, you cannot be caught up in the capitalist measures of it. You need to be humancentered and being human-centered is centering yourself and your own needs. I would say that is the type of scholar I want to become, and I’m still working on the “centering myself” part. I want to study Black, queer, and trans people because it’s been around the academy for around 30 years with some foundational texts but there’s still work to be done and scholarship to be produced on Black, queer, and trans history, and about the culture of oppression that Black LGBTQ people live under. I see myself contributing to the field of Black queer studies and queer of color critique. So, I want to become a critical Black queer studies scholar who is human-centered and takes care of themself as well as the people they interact with within their community.

What’s one of the most memorable experiences from your time in Mellon Mays at Washington University?

One of my most memorable experiences - I feel like people are already going to say this - but at the end of my junior year, a few Mellons and I went to this escape room in downtown St. Louis. That was so funny because I can’t solve a puzzle for anything. I was struggling so much but being around my friends outside an academic setting was just so powerful because it was like, wow, we are real people and we are great young thinkers, but we can’t solve how to get to the next part. Or maybe it was just me; I probably couldn’t have done the escape room by myself, but it was a very fun thing to do and hopefully, we get to do that at the end of this year because that was so fun.

What is your greatest takeaway from being a part of the Mellon Mays program?

My greatest takeaway—this is both being a part of Mellon Mays and being a part of WashU in general and just being involved with a lot on campus – is that I have learned how to advocate for myself as well as being prepared for the pressures of the academy. Without Mellon, I wouldn’t have known what to do. I think being in coursework already and also preparing to write a thesis for two years was a very challenging experience, but on top of that, I was the producer for Black Anthology, I am also an RA, a Deneb Star mentor for first years, and CDI employee. I was just doing so much that I realized how much the academy or universities can exploit people and take from people, especially younger students. In Mellon, whether it be through class discussions or individual conversations with other students and faculty who are either my thesis advisors or people involved with the program, they really taught me that academia is hard and yes, you’re going to work a lot, but you might as well get as much money outside the academy as you can to be able to get compensated for the labor you’re doing.

Mellon also taught me the importance of community and just being a person. I am about prioritizing myself because research can be a lot (writing for hours, reading articles, and receiving critical feedback); it’s a very individual process and if you don’t remove yourself from that and experience the real world and real people, it can be very isolating. Mellon taught me to put fellowship and community first, and also put myself, my cohort, and other people in my life at WashU and beyond first. Then see research as a passion and job that I’m doing vs having research taking my full self, if that makes sense.