Through the Summer Humanities Internship Program, rising third-year Sierra Williams is gaining experience in her chosen field.
5 min. read
Rising third-year Sierra Williams is a cultural and linguistic anthropology major who is working on a research study at the Penn Museum’s Penn Cultural Heritage Center.
Surrounded by many cultures and languages growing up in a multi-ethnic family in New York City, rising third-year Sierra Williams decided to major in cultural and linguistic anthropology, aiming for a career in the museum field.
That keen interest led her to the Penn Museum, where she is now an intern with the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, working on a research study about collecting practices and policies.
“This opportunity is a great learning experience, to get hands-on professional experience in a museum, especially because that’s something I really want to pursue,” Williams says. “But I think it also will help my studies at Penn, understanding the language that is used in museum work and in anthropology and learning about processes and communications.”
Williams is also studying linguistics, cognitive science, and East Asian languages and civilizations with a concentration in Japanese East Asian studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Sierra Williams (front row, right) is one of 15 interns at the Penn Museum this summer.
(Image: Courtesy of the Penn Museum)
Kayla Kane, research coordinator at the Cultural Heritage Center, is her internship supervisor. “This is an interdisciplinary research project that requires a type of student researcher who understands how cultural institutions operate but who also can handle tabular data in a detailed and granular way,” Kane says. “Sierra’s background in both anthropology and social sciences makes her the perfect person to be helping us with our data collection activities.”
The project studies the policies and practices guiding collecting activities—from acquiring new objects to returning them to countries of origin—at museums in the United States, Kane says, “because many museum professionals want to understand how peer institutions are navigating their legal, ethical, and professional obligations as stewards of cultural heritage. We are obtaining qualitative data through a variety of methods to share with the museum field and its supporters. Sierra’s interdisciplinary perspective and her attention to detail in navigating a variety of data points have been really valuable.”
Williams and 14 other interns at the Museum this summer have been visiting other museums in Philadelphia. “That’s been really cool to talk with people who actually work in museums and learn the ins-and-outs behind the scenes,” says Williams.
During the first year of the M2A Project, Penn researchers gathered about 40 data points each from the websites of about 500 U.S. museums related to policies on the acquisition and deaccession of objects. Williams has been reviewing the research undertaken to date, making sure the data is recorded in a consistent way that can be analyzed. “My main job is to clean up that data and make sure it’s all formatted correctly,” she says. “And if there’s any more research that needs to be done, I’ll find what’s been missing.”
The data will inform the questions that are asked in a field-wide survey in the project’s next stage, Kane says. “I expected this to take her the whole summer, but she’s accomplished it in about a month.”
Now Williams is starting a second assignment with the Center as the first person to work on developing a new data set of objects repatriated from American museums to other countries, using news articles. “It’s a novel data set for anyone, and I think it’s a particularly exciting one to work on as an undergraduate in the field,” Kane says.
The M2A Project’s research Williams is conducting this summer is “a good training opportunity for a number of different museum careers,” Kane says. “Understanding how to legally and ethically acquire and manage cultural property in museums will be necessary for all museum leaders and collections professionals in the future.”
Interest in international cultures
Williams says she’s been able to apply some of what she’s studied in her Penn classes, such as ethnography, to the internship. She says she is inspired “to learn more about the cultures that I’m from and learn more about the Black diaspora” and how to implement that research into museum work and museum studies.
Sierra Williams spends a lot of time in the Penn Museum library, which has a significant anthropology collection.
“I come from a family with a rich cultural history,” she says, with parents and grandparents who have roots in Black America, Puerto Rico, Guyana, and Portugal. “Through learning about other cultures, I learn more about myself,” Williams says.
Williams has just been named a Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a two-year program funded by the Mellon Foundation for students interested in the arts and humanities and in pursuing a graduate education.
As part of the program, Williams says she is starting research about Americans from Guyana and West India and their struggle with identity, being from the Black, African, and Caribbean diaspora and “coming to terms with migration and living in a racially stratified society with an ambiguous racial identity.” She also plans to curate an exhibit based on her research.
It was her mother, an elementary school teacher, who took Williams to museums and libraries while growing up in Staten Island.
Williams joined the Clio Society, a club for students in anthropology and museum studies. Most of her classes have been in the Penn Museum. “I became really comfortable there,” she says.
She is one of four Penn undergraduates who will be curating a Museum exhibition on the Indigenous peoples of Mexico this academic year. “That’s another way that I’m trying to be really engaged and active at the Museum,” she says.
Important to her studies at Penn is research on Japanese culture, specifically indigenous Japanese dialects that are becoming endangered.
Her interest in Japan started because her older sister listened to Japanese music and took Japanese language classes in high school, and the family would watch Japanese movies, especially anime. “My love for Japanese culture grew from there,” Williams says.
She took intensive Japanese language courses at Penn, cramming four semesters of classes in two semesters to meet the language requirement because she wants to study at the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies in the spring semester.
The summer internship experience is giving her an enhanced perspective as she looks to the future, she says. “I have a lot of new language and vocabulary to express the importance of cultural heritage and how we can ethically display indigenous peoples’ culture.”
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