Tingxuan Lu
Debra Reid, the curator of agriculture and environment at The Henry Ford Museum, and professor emeritus in the Department of History and Historical Administration Graduate Program at Eastern lllinois University, talks through her lecture “STEM or the Humanities When Interpreting Agriculture. Why Does it Matter?” last Thursday in the Blue Key Room. She is the author of “Interpreting Agriculture of Museums and Historic Sites.”
Historian and professor Debra Reid visited last Thursday to lecture students about the importance of developing an agriculturally intelligent mindset in educative settings.
“It is important to think historically and creatively (when studying) farming evidence of the past,” Reid said.
During the lecture, Reid asked the audience to think agriculturally when observing photographs of historical towns and scenes.
“One would not think to remember the farmer in the image, but if we think about the farmer, we can establish how much knowledge that the farmer had to have had in order to act as a weatherman, an engineer and a horticulturist,” Reid said as she discussed a photograph of a farmer digging an old-fashioned irrigation system.
She emphasized the importance of interpreting agriculture with more than one mindset, with both structure and abstractness.
Reid informed the audience of the benefits of becoming agriculturally literate and aware of what farmers have historically overcome over centuries of maintaining the world that exists today.
“You will strengthen your (academic) arsenal if you think about (agriculture) in a humanities perspective,” Reid said.
James Howerton, sophomore accounting major, said he was pleased that he attended Reid’s discussion.
“It was interesting to hear how Reid’s perspective of agriculture reflects on so many different majors,” Howerton said.
Reid was invited to speak at Emporia State by Michael Smith, professor of political science.
“After reading the summary of Reid’s newest book, as well as the about-the-author text, we have these two endowed lecture series, and it sounded like she would be a very good speaker,” Smith said. “Emporia is an agricultural town and (we knew) there would be interest in her being a professor as well.”
The John J. Zimmerman and the C. Stewart & Mary Louise Boertman Lecture Series’ are two historically funded lectures specifically for ESU. Both families chose to sponsor the annual lectures for ESU students with an interest in social sciences.