About
About This Project
For 150 years, students at Loyola University Chicago have found ways to engage with the changing world around them.
During the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 school years, the Sesquicentennial Scholars collaborated with the archivists at the Loyola University Archives & Special Collections and the Women and Leadership Archives to create this digital student life timeline. To complement the Loyola Timeline and the Loyola Traditions exhibit, the archivists and scholars envisioned a project exploring how student life has changed over the years.
The resulting timeline organizes student life chronologically, divided into decades with themes summing up how students’ activities in each decade were connected to what was going on in the world around them. The scholars aimed to show both the ways that external events impacted students and how students became involved and tried to make a difference. Because Mundelein College bordered on Loyola’s Lake Shore Campus campus and the two student bodies frequently interacted and responded to the same world events, the scholars included Mundelein student experiences in the story as well.
In addition, the scholars found that certain topics, such as Religion and Performance, were integral to both student bodies. The Scholars expanded these topics into exhibits, which provided an opportunity to share the dramatic, interesting, and unusual aspects of student life that were more difficult to include as a single timeline entry.
The scholars hope that the Loyola at 150: Student Life Timeline will demonstrate some of the many reasons to celebrate Loyola’s history on its anniversary and will continue to interest alumni, students, and anyone curious about the history of collegiate life over the past 150 years.
Watch our trailer video and a Q&A with the Sesquicentennial Scholars for a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this project!
Sesquicentennial Scholars
Ericka was a graduate fellow in Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago, where her research interests included digital pedagogy, the rhetoric of protest in digital spaces, techno-sociology, and digital ethics. She was also the site manager for the Gerard Manley Hopkins official website.
Jennifer is a Master’s student in Public History at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests include the lasting impact of the Cold War Era, cultural heritage, and the expanded uses of oral histories in cultural studies.
Regina is a Master’s student in Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests include migration history and urban history; she enjoys reading, cooking, and learning about college cats in her spare time.
Scarlett is a Master's student in Public History at Loyola. Her research focuses on food history, and, in her free time, she can usually be found writing, singing, photographing nature, or baking something history-related.