SHREVEPORT – Take a stroll around the University Center for LSUS’s Regional Student Scholars Forum, and posters featuring complex molecules, long names of chemical elements or medical terminology, and the unmistakable impact of artificial intelligence will surely stick out.
But a closer look at the variety of student research will reveal something else – a wealth of topics rooted in the humanities.
Eight students in LSUS’s Master of Liberal Arts and seven students in psychology presented either posters or oral presentations on topics ranging from history and education to psychology and cultural movements.
Noah Moser’s oral presentation on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre won among a field of 36 graduate student presentations at the April forum.
Dr. Evan Reibsome, director of the Master of Liberal Arts program, said conducting and presenting research has become a key piece of experiential education.
“Presenting research at something like the Regional Student Scholars Forum has been a great experience, and the administration has also been incredibly supportive of funding students to travel and present at research conferences across the country,” Reibsome said. “There’s a culture that’s been created – somewhat organically from the bottom up but also from administrative leadership as well.
“There’s absolutely been more student interest in research in recent years. One of the more pleasurable aspects of the program recently is helping students appreciate that what we do in the classroom has little to do with the classroom itself. That’s where we practice doing stuff that actually involves the world outside of the walls of academia.”
Moser’s project explored how individual members of the Catholic and Protestant faiths, of which non-violence is a tenet, were embroiled in a decades-long religious war in 16th century France.
He particularly focused on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572 in which Catholics killed anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 Huguenots in the course of one week throughout all of France.
Moser speculated as to how and why individuals practicing faiths that profess to be nonviolent became involved in these types of activities.
Reibsome said one strength of the MLA program is its focus on effective communication, which paired with Moser’s experience as a mass communication undergraduate at LSUS.
“Noah is one of those students who’s able to embody the human aspect of something and is a very engaging speaker,” Reibsome said. “We work really hard as a department in helping students assess the rhetorical situation that they are in and producing content for that situation.
“Sometimes in academics, the genre and rhetoric of the writing is kind of exclusionary as it can be overinflated and esoteric. We’re trying to fight against some of that not just because we want to celebrate what the humanities do but not to forget the ‘human’ part of humanities. Things can get so elevated and divorced from humanity that it becomes more abstract or theoretical.”
The MLA prides itself on academic flexibility that allows students to chart their own educational journey into topics of interest.
The interdisciplinary degree permits a student to choose 15 hours of electives from a range of subjects as part of the larger program (33 hours).
Moser married history and literature so far in his degree path.
History is a common theme with students like Mikal Barnes doing deep dives into Shreveport’s underappreciated role in the Civil Rights Movement and Abigail Boykin investigating the collapse of Louisiana’s Isleno community.
“The MLA is designed to be adaptable to an individual’s particular interests and skillsets,” Reibsome said. “Students are able to bring a sophisticated academic lens to those topics, and that creates space for a flourishing of diverse viewpoints.”
These combinations of scholarships have led to recent conference presentations in Philadelphia, Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York to name a few.
LSUS’s psychology students delved into education and child behavior.
Psychology is a field considered to blend principles of humanities and science.
Two members of LSUS’s Specialist in School Psychology program, Maddison Benge and Emily DeGruise, placed second in the graduate student poster category with their project about reading fluency.
Beyond a regional scholars’ forum where the primary audience is fellow student scholars and judges, Reibsome aims to share student work with a broader audience by platforms that go beyond the typical written word or oral presentation.
“We have students doing YouTube video essays, creating websites or doing podcasts,” Reibsome said. “These platforms can be more personable and I think inclusive in that you can receive more viewpoints from the community on a topic.
“We want those viewpoints to be communicated in a way that’s accessible and will resonate with broad audiences and community members.”
