NYU Dean Inspires 8th Grade Researchers
Dr. Liz McHenry has a gift for making research feel less like an assignment and more like a mystery, with one clue leading to the next. New York University Dean for the Humanities and Harlem Academy trustee, Dr. McHenry, visited our eighth graders last week to launch their capstone research projects with a seminar on working with primary sources. Students will craft narrative essays that advance a thesis using documents such as a 1910 newspaper article on Jack Johnson’s boxing match, coverage of Duke Ellington’s touring band, or minutes from the Committee on Urban Conditions among Negros’ first meeting.
FOLLOWING THE THREAD
Dr. McHenry begins with artifacts: a fragment of text, a design choice, or a document that raises more questions than it resolves. She showed students how following one small thread, sometimes for years, can uncover histories that might otherwise remain invisible or lost. Her research on W. E. B. Du Bois’ experiments with print revealed how form, layout, and circulation matter as much as the words themselves.
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FOLLOWING THE THREAD
Dr. McHenry begins with artifacts: a fragment of text, a design choice, or a document that raises more questions than it resolves. She showed students how following one small thread, sometimes for years, can uncover histories that might otherwise remain invisible or lost. Her research on W. E. B. Du Bois’ experiments with print revealed how form, layout, and circulation matter as much as the words themselves.
WHEN THE TRAIL GOES COLD
Dr. McHenry shared her own years-long search for a printed document Du Bois created to circulate among rural Black communities in the early 1900s. Though she has not yet found it, that absence opens new ways of thinking. She modeled how historians responsibly grapple with uncertainty, make careful claims, and even speculate (without inventing facts) when the trail goes cold. “With the humanities, there’s no right answer. You’re learning to grapple with uncertainty,” she explained. “What you don’t know can’t be your stopping place.”
Dr. McHenry shared her own years-long search for a printed document Du Bois created to circulate among rural Black communities in the early 1900s. Though she has not yet found it, that absence opens new ways of thinking. She modeled how historians responsibly grapple with uncertainty, make careful claims, and even speculate (without inventing facts) when the trail goes cold. “With the humanities, there’s no right answer. You’re learning to grapple with uncertainty,” she explained. “What you don’t know can’t be your stopping place.”
Her visit inspired students to view research as an intellectual quest driven by curiosity, evidence, and persistence. Our eighth graders will carry those lessons with them as they begin their own journeys into the archives.
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655 St. Nicholas Avenue
New York, NY, 10030
P (212) 348-2600
F (212) 348-3500
info@harlemacademy.org
Make a Tuition Payment
Financial and Privacy Information
Site Map
Harlem Academy is an independent school (grades K-8) that drives equity of opportunity for promising students, guiding them to thrive at the highest academic levels and one day make a mark on the world.