A Cross-Country Cornhole Trip Digs into American Identity

The Grand Trans-American Cornhole Quest began as a bucket list dream. It was 2017 and Emilie Kelly ’25, then a high school sophomore, was attempting to make sense of the prevailing national narrative of America as hopelessly divided. It was a terrifying notion, she says, but more than that, she found herself questioning its accuracy.

“The majority of the information I was getting about walks of life other than my own was coming from secondhand sources,” says Emilie, who grew up outside New York City in suburban Westchester County. “I was like, it can’t be like what I’m hearing from the news.”

Emilie imagined traveling the country, meeting strangers, and engaging them in conversation about what it means to be an American—all while playing a classic lawn game. Last summer, with support from the President’s Summer Fellowship (sponsored by Dan Greenberg ’62 and Susan Steinhauser), that vision became reality in the form of a seven-week-long voyage that spanned 32 states, 15,000 miles, and 106 (completed) rounds of cornhole. With a borrowed camcorder and friends-turned-film crew—including Lane Devers ’25 and Joseph Tally ’25—Emilie collected more than 24 hours of footage, which last semester she cut into a thoughtful 85-minute documentary available on YouTube.

Goofy? That was kind of the point. Emilie, an anthropology major, had always wanted a game to be part of the project, and she suspected cornhole would disarm strangers and help break the ice. Her instinct was shored up while in class with Prof. Paul Silverstein [anthropology], who introduced her to the work of Charles Briggs, an anthropologist who has encouraged researchers to consider the “local metacommunicative repertoire”— in other words, to pay attention to which social situations are appropriate for interviewing. Not only would flinging bean bags give people’s hands something to do, playing a familiar game would set them at ease as they answered questions about community, home, and identity.

Over the course of the interviews—152 of them, with 215 people—themes emerged. Many people felt proud or privileged to be an American. But just as many felt shame or embarrassment, didn’t feel like an American, or found the question too knotted in paradox to answer. Emilie says she got along with everyone she met, but at times still felt like she “was doing foreign exchange.” How could she square such disparate perspectives? Late in the journey, driving through the Southwest and “listening to NPR and TED Talks and trying to understand the entirety of American history,” she found herself exhausted and overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge.

And then beauty intervened. Emilie pulled into Arches National Park as the sun was sinking. Rain had just rinsed the sky clean, and a double rainbow formed over the desert landscape. Maybe, Emilie thought, there is no reconciling of the contradictions of American identity, and maybe that’s OK. “I came away with this sort of poetic take on it, where the shadow is only as dark as the light that shines on it,” Emilie says. “We have to hold juxtaposing, contrasting things. We have to respect both of them, and we have to keep them both with us.”

—REBECCA JACOBSON

Congrats to two Reed professors who received notable awards in late 2022.

Mark Burford, R.P. Wollenberg Professor of Music, was awarded the Royal Musical Association’s Dent Medal for 2022 for his outstanding contribution to musicology. Burford, who’s been at Reed since 2007, began his career with a focus on Brahms and Austro-German concert music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but in the last 10 years has turned his attention to Black popular music studies, from Sam Cooke to Mahalia Jackson.

The Dent Medal committee noted that Burford “has opened up a new field, offering Black objects of study as a legitimate and productive focus for musicological enquiry.”

Meanwhile, Kelly Chacón , Arthur F. Scott Associate Professor of Chemistry, was named a Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar.The award, given by the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation and based on institutional nominations, “honors young faculty in the chemical sciences who have created an outstanding independent body of scholarship and are deeply committed to education with undergraduates.” Each Teacher-Scholar receives an unrestricted research grant of $75,000.

Chacón, who arrived at Reed in 2015, has been a fast-rising figure in the chemical sciences. They plan to use much of the grant to fund travel for themself as well as for their students to conferences both domestically and internationally. The grant will also help cover costs for students to travel to the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, where they will do X-ray absorption spectroscopy with Chacón.

“My work in technology is professionally rewarding but also intellectually one-dimensional. I was hungry for deeper engagement with the broader world of ideas and a guiding structure within which to do so. Participating in the MALS program has given me the opportunity to engage in the free exchange of ideas in a supportive, structured community of like-minded individuals. In my time at Reed I have experienced personal growth and significant scholarly development, and this is due in no small part to the academic excellence and attentiveness of the teaching staff, the dynamic dialectic of the class conference, and the diversity of coursework.”