French professor Olga Duhl co-directs the program, which was founded in 2009.
Tucked away in Lafayette College’s course catalog lies one of the college’s most unexpected programs: the Medieval, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies minor. For most students, the name alone may seem intimidating, but for a small group of learners, it’s become a distinctive way to bring history into today’s world.
The minor, founded in 2009, invites students to take an interdisciplinary journey through the premodern world. It combines history, philosophy, politics, religion, languages, art and culture.
French professor Olga Duhl, who co-directs the program, described it as a space for curiosity and connection. She said the program promotes “a grasp of the chronological and global interrelatedness” of human history.
While the program has existed for over a decade, its community remains small but devoted. Currently, only two students, Vanessa Manning ‘26 and Reese Dawson ‘27, are completing the minor, and only 10 students have graduated with the minor.
Manning, an English and French double major, said she discovered the minor through her close work with professors Duhl and Walter Wadiak, the other co-director of the minor and the head of the English department.
“Looking at history and studying religion through art and literature like I’m doing here at Lafayette has really helped me gain a full understanding of a lot of the questions I had in high school and middle school, that were like, why is this the way it is?” Manning said. “I never got to learn the other perspective.”
Dawson, a Government & Law and international affairs double major with a French minor, said she unintentionally completed many of the requirements for the minor and first heard about the program from Duhl in her French course “High and Popular Culture in Medieval and Renaissance France.”
“I’m a lot further in this than I realized,” she said about the minor. “I might be able to finish it. It’s niche, it’s cool, it’s something that I found interesting.”
Students in Duhl’s class recently created a research poster titled “Lafayette and His Ancestors.” The project brought students into the college archives to research members of the Marquis de Lafayette’s family.
“I didn’t realize how prominent his whole family was,” Dawson said. “It really connected what we were learning to real history.”
Despite its rich scope, the minor remains small.
Wadiak recently took on the co-director role following the retirement of religious studies professor Eric Ziolkowski.
“It’s not been easy because we still have a budget of only $500,” said Wadiak. “That hasn’t changed for decades.”
“Part of it is publicizing in our own classes,” he continued. “Just remembering to mention, especially to students who might remind us of ourselves, and be super into this and who really fall into a love of that material.”
This year, the minor includes a course about China taught by religious studies professor Xu Ma. In the future, Duhl said she wants to expand the minor to cover more regions, such as Africa and South America.
“This era is like the pillar of where we are now,” Dawson said. “It’s far enough back to feel different, but close enough to show how our world, our literature, our culture, our politics came to be.”