CURO Symposium

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston used to have an ad campaign that hinted, "There's more to life than just Monet."

In a similar vein, this article in Red & Black on the CURO symposium reminded me that, while they are heavily engaged in everything from genetics to particle physics, UGA students conduct research in much more than just the hard sciences.

Brendan Boyle, a junior mass media arts and film studies major, presented his paper, “The New Western: Classical Genre Cinema in the 21^st Century,” which won the Best Paper award in the Arts category.

He had never conducted research through CURO before, and this was his first CURO Symposium. But he wanted the chance to study what his classes didn’t offer.

“I wanted to study westerns, basically, and I didn’t want to wait for an elective on it,” he said. “I wanted to do a lot of reading about it, and I wanted to produce something that would be worth reading and publishing. And I got to do that, which is great.”

Boyle defies the common misconception that CURO is only for hard science majors.

Matt Jordan, CURO program coordinator, said only about half of the 193 abstracts presented at the symposium were related to hard science.

“There’s a real range, a real diversity of research,” Jordan said. “It gives the students the opportunity to see that research is not about the sciences alone. It’s about the social sciences, it’s about humanities, and it’s also about arts.”

Of course, both Monet and the hard sciences remain absolutely essential in every respect.

Image: "Regatta at Argenteuil", Claude Monet 1874, oil on canvas 60 x 100 cm, Musée d Orsay, Paris.