Episode 6 - Dr. Howard Keeley and Dr. Steve Engel

On this episode of Roots of Research, Dr. Howard Keeley and Dr. Steve Engel explain how a simple question, "How is Savannah Irish?" sparked a transatlantic research effort that connected Savannah, Georgia, to County Wexford, Ireland.

Through archival discoveries on both sides of the Atlantic, Georgia Southern students uncovered a powerful story of Irish migration during the mid-19th century—work that has since grown into the Wexford-Savannah Axis and an international campus.

This episode highlights how undergraduate research can do more than uncover history—it can bring it to life, strengthening communities and connections across generations and oceans.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to the Roots of Research, where we go behind the publications and dig deeper with the mover, shakers, and rainmakers that make Georgia Southern University so very special. I'm your host, Dr. David Weindorf, and today we're exploring a project that has quite literally bridged an ocean, turning archival data into a permanent international home for Georgia Southern University. We're joined by two folks who have been the primary architects of the Wexford Savannah Access. First, we have Dr. Howard Keeley. Now, Howard is an associate professor of English and the director of our Center for Irish Research and Teaching, or CIRT, as well as the director of our Wexford Campus Initiative. A native of Dublin who earned his PhD from Princeton, Howard's research in modern Irish literature and the Irish diaspora provided the historical route for the entire initiative. Working with the talented Honors College student researchers, he learned that over 56% of Savannah's direct Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century came from County Wexford, a discovery that transformed a research project into a physical campus. Howard was even recently recognized by the Irish government with the Presidential Distinguished Service Award. Now, that's the highest honor Ireland can give to someone residing outside the country. Joining him today is Dr. Steve Engel, Dean of the Honors College and a professor of political science. Steve joined Georgia Southern in 1999 and holds a PhD from Loyola University, Chicago. His research interests in political philosophy, nationalism, and the politics of Northern Ireland have made him the ideal leader to turn our Wexford presence into a living laboratory. Under his leadership, the Honors College has integrated this international footprint into a high-impact opportunity that challenges our students to conduct original research at the global stage. Gentlemen, welcome to the show today.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Thank you, Dr. Weindorf. Great to be with you.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

It's great to be here, yeah. So great to have you all. Now, listen, I'm thrilled that you've both come here to discuss the Center for Irish Research and Teaching, the Honors College, and the Wexford Campus work hand in hand, how all that works in hand in hand. If my facts are right, everything started around 2014, I believe, with the creation of the Wexford Savannah Access Research Partnership. A collaboration involving both of you, the Waterford Institute of Technology, which of course is now known as Southeastern Technological University in Southeastern Ireland, the Georgia Historical Society, and the John F. Kennedy Trust in County Wexford, which is also in the southeastern part of the country. So can you both talk a little bit about what inspired this partnership, how it came to be, and how it has evolved over time?

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Well, from my perspective, uh we were trying to evolve Irish studies at Georgia Southern, and an imperative was put out there by the then president, Dr. Keel, and he said, I need more research, and I need better research, and I need undergraduate research. So I went to Steve and said, okay, we better do something. And so he wanted to kind of get a little bit ahead of that imperative. Um, Steve has always been phenomenally committed to plussing it for our undergraduates, and we were both of the opinion that giving undergraduates from freshmen all the way through uh seniors an opportunity not to just do research, but to have a research project that would um have real collateral moving uh forward, um, using primary sources, involving and serving the community, uh, that was the way to go. Um so we're looking at Savannah. Um I'm from Ireland, Steve's wife is Irish, and uh so we had that kind of Irish tribal thing in common. And um so in our interaction with folks in Savannah and that amazing Irish parade and all of the events that surround it, that great constellation of happenings in February and March each year, what we realized is that nobody was really able to come up with a straightforward answer to a very simple research question, which is how is Savannah Irish? So there are bits and pieces of history out there. So we made a determination to take on that challenge. And I don't need to tell you that the best research is trying to answer a vital, simple question. If you can't boil it down to a basic uh proposition, then you're probably going the wrong direction. So, how is Savannah Irish? There's a thousand answers to that question. So we determined that we would look at prime time for Irish migration to Savannah, which not surprisingly was around the period of the Great Hunger in Ireland, the potato famine. So we saw that between 1848 and about 1853, 1854, the Irish-born population in Savannah, Georgia doubled. So that was where we wanted to focus. And as we kind of drilled down, we kept on finding at archives and in other venues the word Wexford, which is a county in Ireland. And so it's just disproportionately present in our in our discoveries. And uh so we decided to build on that clue, that big clue of Wexford, and involve the uh students from there.

SPEAKER_02 5:37

Yeah, and we we had a bit of luck, right? Finding the evidence of that Wexford connection uh was lucky in this way, at least, because Georgia Southern had already been the lead partner in a study abroad program that we were taking students every summer to Waterford, Ireland, to what is now the Waterford campus of SETU. And so Waterford is right next door to Wexford. Right next door. So we had this advantage where we already had partners in the region and and and we knew about a lot of locations. And so that first year we we were still trying to find out is there a there there in terms of the story. We knew there was a connection. We're finding evidence of Wexford connections, but uh is there something deeper? And uh that first year we we really struck gold. Um it was uh it was great. We we visited archives in Savannah, the Savannah City Archives, the diocesan archives in Savannah, um, Savannah's Bull Street Library, which is a great archival resource. Um and then we went to Wexford and we went to the Wexford County Archives, and then we had a connection that led us to the chief economics archivist in uh the National Archives in Dublin, Ireland, who said, We've got these records from one of the shipping companies that was operating on this route from Savannah uh from Wexford to Savannah. Uh 10 boxes of old records from that period, never been catalogued, never been really gone through at all. They were just bundled up when that company liquidated. Uh, would your students like to go through those? Was the question?

SPEAKER_00 7:10

It was extraordinary, and I I think I still have the most vivid memories of the few days that we were in the archives, and um I think we make no apology, but we made those students work. Like we were there before it opened, we were the last people out the door. We gave them about 15 minutes for lunch because we had those boxes. How many students? About 12, 14, something in that zone. And we'd done some training around how to handle archives, especially go slow because it's in those little details that the magic happens. Um, so we knew a little bit about the ecosystem in Savannah in the period, the 1840s, 1850s. We knew that Andrew Lowe, Scotsman, uh, was the sort of big economic development agent. He was a factor, he dealt with cotton and rice, but what the Irish companies were looking for is timber. So we just told the students um, look out for certain key individuals, key words. And uh one of our students, James Devlin, uh, he came across a piece of correspondence from Andrew Lowe to uh a company called Graves and Sun in a port city in Waterford. Sorry, sort of that again, a uh port town in Wexford um called New Ross. Um and uh so that was that was the big discovery that there was uh, as Steve says, there was a there there. So we now knew the company, we knew the relationship and kind of built on it from there. But I think it was an extraordinary find insofar as it was a tip-off that these uh archives had been gifted to the National Archives. They the archive had never catalogued them, they were actually had never been in the archive headquarters, they were in storage um on the west side of Dublin, and the documents were bundled in little, I don't know, about a two-inch pile, right? And tied with a string, and apparently that string had not been umdone for something like a hundred years. So incredible. Our students were the first to handle it.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

That is amazing. You know, for our for our listeners across the country and around the world, actually listening to this podcast, who have never been to County Wexford, the three of us have all been there. Tell us a little bit about what it's like. I mean, it's two hours roughly south of Dublin, right along the coast, but how would you describe County Wexford for our listeners?

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Um, for me, Wexford is a very maritime county. It has uh an east coast and a south coast. It's kind of where Ireland turns the corner from east to south. Um historically a very prosperous county, very, very good agricultural land. Um, its nickname in the 19th century, because of its progressive approach to agriculture, was, and they still maintain this name, the model county. So uh if you like a little Guinness or a little Irish whiskey, and who doesn't, um, you're probably putting some Wexford in your system because Wexford is the prime county for quality barley growth in Wexford. There's towns in Wexford that just are full of um malting houses, and uh yeah, it's it's so very proud agricultural tradition. Um, Ireland missed the Industrial Revolution to a large degree, but Wexford did have a huge ironworks in the town of Wexford, the county town. And what we see is that people who came to Savannah in the middle of the 19th century, Wexford people, they tended to be a little bit more prosperous uh because they had a diversified economy, they were not reliant on potatoes, they were land hungry because in Ireland you could not own your own land. Um, and uh they some of them had some of these kind of mechanical skills. So I think that history is very proudly in the consciousness of Wexford people. They're also sports crazy. Um, and the the main game there is a really fast uh stick and ball game called hurling, or there's a female version called Camogey, and uh that's something that our students they they become basically um hurling fanatics by the time uh by the time they come back here. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:30

Well, I have to say, uh, you know, you mentioned Guinness and Jameson, guilty as charged. I've certainly enjoyed a little bit of that when I was over there. When in uh Ireland, right? That's right. So uh Steve, let me turn to you with this question. In your work on imagined communities, you explore how uh different groups use shared symbols and narratives, right? Um how has the Wexford initiative changed that theory for you? Um how are we using research and immersion to construct a shared community between South Georgia and Southeast Ireland, especially as related around those symbols and that that narrative imagery?

SPEAKER_02 12:04

Yeah, I would say it hasn't changed uh my thinking on that at all. It's affirmed it, right? The the idea of imagined communities comes from a scholar named Benedict Anderson, and he was investigating the origins of nationalism, really as the modern nation state is growing. How does how does nationalism really work? How does that become possible? And it's really rooted in the idea of uh this rooted in this question, how does identity work, right? How do we form identity communities, um, you know, see ourselves as fellow Americans or fellow Irishmen or whatever the identity source is? And his argument is to boil it down, simplified it a bit, is that we imagine these connections, right? But they're not figments of our imagination. They're very real. Uh, they matter to us deeply. Um and that's one of the things, and and using the example of a man, you know, how do we in a nation of 300 plus million uh still feel the same heart palpitations when the U.S. Olympic hockey team say wins a game or something like that? It's this imagined connection. I don't know those people on the on the team. I don't know anybody. I I've never even played hockey myself, you know, right? But I can feel that connection. So that's the idea of imagined communities. And this work, um, you know, especially on St. Patrick's Day in Savannah, everybody is Irish, of course, um, even if they're not. Um, but uh, you know, the United States is home to 35 plus million um Irish Americans, people whose ancestry goes back to Ireland, and they keep that connection sometimes very real if it's a recent immigration uh pathway that people have come on. But even if it's three or four or five generations back, they still feel that spark, that connection, uh, especially on St. Patrick's Day. What this research has done has made that connection for Savannians more specific, right? They're not just Irish, they're Wexford Irish, right? Uh it's it and it makes it more real for them. It's not shamrocks and and the like. It's it's my people came from a place, and this place is has meaning and it's important. And what they brought was, for instance, the ability to work in iron, uh, iron um iron factories and so on. They brought skills, right? They brought agricultural practices to to this region, right? And so the that that um and that imagined community has to be built on something, right? It's not it, like I said, it's not just made up. And and I think we've made this, you know, it was there. We didn't make it, right? That's right. We brought it to help bring it to light, us and our students, right?

SPEAKER_00 14:28

It was hidden in plain sight. I think one of the coolest things about this research, and and um it's a very real outcome, is that universities are they exist to serve their communities, and particularly regional state universities like us with a research focus. And we have been able to give a story that belongs to Savannah back to Savannah, a story that had been to a large degree lost. I think in this age where so much is kind of canned and kind of pre-digested, it's uh it's really an awesome thing to be able to say to people here is the granular nuance of where you came from. This is actually when you're marching in St. Patrick's Day in Savannah, these are some of the foundational stories. And the receptivity that we have had in the Savannah community, and indeed the Wexford community, um, it just shows that you know, a university like George Southern that is committed to the communities in which it exists, that we are a university without walls, and that that's such a great service. And there's been all sorts of wonderful cultural but also economic gains that have come out of that. And uh, just going back to Whiskey and Guinness, you know, we have now this wonderful Wexford pubna. Savannah, right. But you know, that was a story that Savannah people they knew they were Irish, we like to say it this way, they didn't really know how they're Irish. And we want to emphasize Wexford is not 100% of the story, but it is a leading story, and we want to work in sort of digestible chunks, and we also want to make sure that what we as the university are providing is quality research properly curated. So there's a whole lot of loose sense of you know, to be Irish or to be whatever. Um and I think people are over that. I think people want something authentic, they want something that is locates them in place and gives them that sort of sense of community. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

You know, I think about the alignment of Georgia Southern University with some of the things that are uh resonating at Wexford. I mean, it's transportation and infrastructure, it is farming communities, it's coastal communities, those kinds of things. So on a smaller scale, how do both of you view that sort of cultural give and take that we've talked about? And how do you think that is specifically shaping our students and helping them grow both academically as well as personally?

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Well, I'm gonna praise this man who's right beside me, uh, because you know he's he's got quiet vision and he makes things happen. Um so something very practical is that Steve, as he's developing our honors college and next leveling it, uh, created a cohort of students uh we call Honors College Global Scholars. And that is designed as a first-year experience to really give a lot of support, but also place a lot of rigor and pressure on these very talented students and to give them this opportunity to do research, but as we said earlier, research that matters, research that actually resonates in communities. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Yeah, when we started that program, we said really what we want to do is create an opportunity for students who are interested in developing global competencies. And um, we sat down, we got a team of faculty, Dr. Keeley was one of those faculty members, and we said, uh, what are the themes that we think someone who who develops global competencies would really need to explore? And themes like migration of peoples, obviously, the global economy, a whole range of themes. I think there are six or seven that are finally and the capstone for that, those courses, and there are several bundled together, uh taught by several faculty, the capstone for that is six weeks in Wexford. And two themes we explore when they're in Wexford. So one is nationalism and national identity, and one is sustainability. And and the our our faculty fellow who leads that program, Dr. Amy Potter, who's just amazing at this work of working with students, but also as an outstanding researcher, as you know, David. Um, she said, well, if we're gonna do sustainability, let's think about sustainability in a very broad sense, right? Not just sort of environmental sustainability, that's part of it, but let's think about sustainability of culture, let's think about sustainability of people. Uh and so one of the really great veins of research that she led uh that group down is is looking at the sustainability of the family farm and working with the Irish Farmers Association, some really wonderful uh farmers in in Wexford who've uh invited us in their homes and who have come here as well. And who've come here and then we've now developed connections with farmers in this region here in South Georgia as well. And so it's really, really and many of the same themes that farmers are struggling with here in Georgia, they're struggling with there. And so when you talk about bridging, it's it's about as Howard said, you know, getting beyond the walls of the university and and those barriers. And for our students, it really opens their minds, right? Uh, you know, it's really taking the global, right? That's where we start. It's global scholars, global themes, but it makes it local. Yeah, absolutely. Right. And because everything global is local, right? And that therefore it makes it, it's not learning out of a book anymore. It's not just learning concepts or theories, it's it's learning about how this affects real people.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Yeah, as folks who are really engaged internationally, I know all three of us are. I think about the logistics of operating internationally, and it's different. You know, if you need some batteries, you can't always just go right down the street. Sometimes you got to plan ahead for those kinds of things, depending on where you're operating. I'm hearing that student engagement is large enough. Do I hear the idea of a hurling club coming to Georgia Southern?

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Well, there is a hurling club in Savannah, Georgia. So um I I feel like we have maybe two or three of the students who uh are living down there and they they they show up for practice. So yeah. Right, yeah. That's great. Really great to hear.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

For each of you, what's your favorite spot in Wexford?

SPEAKER_00 20:26

You want to go first there, Steve, on that one? Um, there are several. There are several.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Um I'm gonna I I've got can I say two. Absolutely. I'll say I'll elaborate on one. I'll just mention the other one first. The Kennedy Homestead really is a wonderful place. Uh the ancestors of the Kennedy family, John F. Kennedy's great-grandfather, uh Patrick Kennedy emigrated from New Ross, County, Wexford. And so there's a lot of Kennedy uh type things, and the Kennedy Homestead is just outside of New Ross that's worth visiting. Um, but my favorite real uh second maybe or or one A to that Kennedy Homestead is uh, you know, there's four main towns in Wexford, New Ross, which we mentioned, the town of Wexford we mentioned, and then Enniscorthy and Gory, but there's a you know dozens and dozens of other villages and and uh you know small places, crossroads, and that all have their own stories. And my favorite memory of Wexford is being in uh town called or a village called Monta Melin. Uh and it's really just a pub and a church and a couple churches and some graveyards, and and we were there on the side of the road. Um, uh we had explored the graveyard with one of our um great friends we made in Wexford, uh at the time he was a retired priest, now unfortunately passed away, Monsignor Lori Keogh. And uh Monsignor Keogh was sitting on the on a bench outside this church with our students, looking through this uh uh document from the 18th century or from the 19th century called Griffiths Valuations, which uh was a record of all the plots of land in the county. County or it across Ireland indeed. And they're looking for places that maybe some of these Savannah people might have left from. And we're trying to near zero in on that place. Wow. And there we are in this village doing research on the side of the road with this man who had, you know, he was in his 70s or maybe early 80s at that point and had ministered to this uh across Wexford for many years and had you know connection. People, as we're sitting there, people come up, oh good morning, Father. Right, right, right. That memory of doing research on the side of the road is my favorite memory.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

That's really where it jumps out of the textbook and it becomes reality, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Well, you know, there's a what we we call archive of place, right? So you can, you know, you can and you should be in a formal archive and looking through documents, but um, there's tremendous knowledge in the uh the folk, right? And uh we made some really uh they turned out to be uh very accurate, um, very credible um discoveries. I mean, we did a bit of crowdsourcing if you remember. We we I did a one night in a pub in Monomo Inn and we had people pouring rain, but people still came and talked to us about you know their memories of families living in in different locations. For me, it's um because I'm in Wexford a good deal. I'm trying to sort of like encapsulate for me what what that county is and and that connectivity with us. Um so the the symbol of County Wexford is the Hook Lighthouse, which is 800 years old. It is the oldest continually operating lighthouse on the planet. But it was what the folks who were leaving, in that case, the town of New Ross, going to Savannah. And we found a letter in that uh set of documents that Steve referenced in the National Archives, written by a ship captain. And um, he wrote it, he was actually at Tybee, waiting for passage up into Savannah. Um, and so he's writing it back for another vessel to take to Ireland. He's giving a kind of progress report, but he says that we went uh past the Azores and then Bermuda and then dropped down into Savannah. But that vessel would have passed the Hook Lighthouse, but then you're thinking this is a non-stop voyage, 40 days. Like we complain about uh you know getting getting to Europe in 12 hours or something, but 40 days, difficult conditions, and uh but just that vision of that lighthouse um and then seeing the lighthouse uh at Tybee. So it's more what that lighthouse sparks. It means a lot to everybody in Wexford, it's a medieval building, but for me it connects me somehow to those uh emigrants. And something that we have said is that you know research there is a luck, for sure, that was the word that Steve used at the start. Um and we've had some frustrations, but we've had on balance more gains than frustrations. Sometimes I feel that the the folks who came to Savannah a hundred and almost coming up 180 years ago now, you know, I feel like they want their story. This might sound a little bit funky, but I kind of feel they want their story to be told. Um, and certainly there is a sort of sense of honoring the past here in coastal Georgia. There's a very strong sense of honoring the past in Wexford, and I think a lot of the reason that people have got on board with this and being such it's a team effort. I mean, it's just up the population of Savannah, the population of uh of County Wexford, we're we're together in this work. Um, but I think there is that sort of sense of cousinhood, you know, that um we in coastal Georgia we welcomed their people, and now we're bringing our students there, and they're being welcomed. And there's something kind of poetic about that, but it's grounded in that shared history. What to me is on reflection, the the beautiful thing about this is that it was 18 and 19-year-old honor students at Georgia Southern who got into archives and did this, and you know, when you think about what has been achieved, and we still got a long way to go, but it demonstrates the power of empowering young people and building out a culture for them at the university where we challenge them, but we also support them, and we tell them that doing research is the the core, making knowledge is the core. Like this knowledge was lost, and now it's it's being made.

SPEAKER_02 26:58

And I would add to that the the connections we made in Wexford primarily were built upon the research they did, but even more importantly, the presentations of the research they did. Which we know as researchers, you you share your research, you publish it, you present at conferences and other meetings and whatnot. But the students don't know that, right? They don't they don't know what they don't know, and they think you know you write something up and so on. But when we were doing presentations in Savannah and Wexford of of our findings, they stepped up their game and so they did more quality, uh that their work was of higher quality. Um and they improved their abilities, right? They they strengthened their skill sets, and they then brought in other people into that research, right? By sharing one one of the students I remember uh Elena Rentz saying, and she was 18, 19 at the time, saying, What is happening here? I'm I'm just a kid and I'm presenting about Irish research to these Irish people. Um and they're I'm telling their story, and it's like, but they they've lost this story, and so we have to help share it.

SPEAKER_01 28:00

Yeah, you're here to tell it today, that's right. You know, my memory from from being over at Wexford is obviously there, you drive on the left-hand side of the road, but you drive on the right hand side of the car, and I took the challenge and actually rented a stick shift. So I'm having to shift with my left hand and work it all out. But what that enabled me to do was to get out into the countryside. Sure. And I really remember going through those little towns and villages that are not the tourist stops, they're not the major, it's just the little quaint villages driving through. It's amazing to see those kinds of villages.

SPEAKER_02 28:28

Yes, when we bring students, we make sure they see Dublin, we make sure they see some of the you know the Instagram-worthy sites that everybody goes to in Ireland, but then we take them to the really Instagram-worthy sites that are all around Wexford and that most people aren't going to, that's that are really the authentic Ireland, right? And we can really they can engage with people who are interested to learn more, right? About about about Georgia and uh and about America.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

Yeah, we had uh the Irish Consul General on campus here in Statesboro yesterday, and uh we just put out an open invitation to students to come to what we call our Wexford hub in the library, and it was just drop-in, and tons of them came. And uh it we had just sent out a message, um, but we had not obliged anybody to come, but to hear from the students how meaningful this experience, this opportunity was. But lots of them talked about feeling very at home in the green, in the villages. Um, and you know, in lecture in the summer, it's a little more pleasant than South Georgia. Um, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:31

Yeah, absolutely. No, that is phenomenal. Excellent. Well, uh, as we sort of wrap up today, um tell me one thing about each of you all that our listeners would not know about you just by reading your research. Something kind of unique.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

Um well, I have this is my second life, um in the sense that I uh I when I I'm the first in my family to go to college. Um and so I was an emigrant myself to the United States. I got a green card way back, and I had trained as a chef in Ireland, and so I came to work in uh kitchens in, first of all, Palm Beach County in Florida, and then moved to North Metro Atlanta, and I sort of fell into higher education. Um so I my boss in Florida said you should get some American chef qualifications. Uh so in Palm Beach County, they were done through the community college. So I feel like that's a whole identity that I had. Um, and it's not completely gone away because my wife always tells me that I'm the bottom of the fridge cook. In other words, um, she can look and she'll say this herself. Like she looks in the fridge and what are we gonna eat? And then I look in the fridge, and then you know, half an hour later we got something, and it's it's presentable and pretty taken.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

Right.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

So that's yeah, so I think that's something that sometimes people uh you know, because I I think often students in particular, they kind of assume you you came out of the womb as an academic, you know.

SPEAKER_01 31:03

So right, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Steve, what about for you? Um I'm not sure I have anything as interesting as of course, but um I guess I'd say this that um when I think of honors education, and I think quality education doesn't have to be just in an honors program in our honors college, but quality education is um attentive to our students, right? It it is um authentic to the faculty member who's teaching them, uh and it's it's special in that way, right? We're not we're not producing like in a factory, right? Although I think you can learn things in that way in in sort of um on YouTube, right? You can learn loads of things on YouTube these days, right? And but but I think when we're talking about higher education that inspires and really moves people to the next level, um it's it's really that special connection that faculty and and student has, and group and teams of students, right? You know, in a seminar or in a class, right, uh that are working together. And so I think there's a parallel with a lot of other things we talk about in the world today. Um, you know, the farm to table movement, right? To use the cooking uh example from Howard's experience, or um the craft cocktail movement, the craft furniture, right? And so I I do some woodworking, so this is the thing you would know from doing my uh from reading my research. Um and so the to me, the woodworking, you know, self-made furniture that's not based on a factory template and um not a IKEA, you know, flat pack or anything, but really taking uh the wood and planing it down and and crafting it into some uh some operational functional piece of furniture is beautiful because is just like doing quality education.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

And then there's a story behind it as well.

SPEAKER_02 32:47

There's a story as well, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

I would say, just sort of apropos of that a little bit, is for me, one of the the real wins in this whole enterprise is with honor students, they're they come in on you know day one as freshman students, and they're very intelligent, they're very resourceful, um but one of the reasons they've succeeded in high school is they're very good at following rules and templates. And so we as a faculty um we we make it a little and we be very transparent about this. We tell them like not everything is going to be template-driven here. You know, you're gonna have to start thinking creatively, taking responsibility, suggesting things. Um, and that is that when you have them on day one, and then you know, one year later, when they're they're finished up in Ireland, they are very different people because they have been able to see that not everything is already known.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

You you force them out of the box a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Absolutely, absolutely be creative.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

Or work them without a net. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:56

There's no rubric. Yeah, yeah. That's liberating. I love it. I love it. That is fantastic. Well, gentlemen, thanks to both of you for joining us on the Roots of Research podcast. This has been fantastic. To find out more information about the Center for Irish Research and Teaching and our Wexford campus, visit georgiasuthern.edu backslash research, backslash centers, backslash Irish. And until next time, I'm David Weindorf. May your curiosity always run as deep as the roots of research. And hail, Southern