MA Humanities External Degree Students Awarded
Masters Thesis and Project of the Year
Two MA Humanities External Degree students have been awarded the Masters
Thesis and Masters Project of the Year. Both have interesting stories to tell.
Mike Kimmel won for his project entitled “In Lincoln’s Footsteps.” The project is a
creative drama about the assassination of President Garfield. The project is
meticulously researched and placed in historical and dramatic context. The
admirable attention to detail builds a confident critical relationship between the
reader or playgoer and the author.
Kimmel is a longtime actor in television, film and stage. His credits include the
just-completed Haunted High, In Plain Sight, The Tonight Show, and Mind of
Mencia. He became interested in the Humanities program while teaching English
as a Second Language and U.S. Citizenship in night school while auditioning for
TV and film roles during the day. During the process of teacher accreditation, he
was required to take graduate school classes every couple of years. This piqued
his interest in taking his education one step further. He felt that with an M.A. in
the HUX program with a concentration in English, he could also then teach
English and a variety of other subjects in the Humanities at the college and
community college level. The flexibility offered in the HUX program allowed him
to work on his degree while auditioning and continuing to teach.
Kimmel discovered the tragic story of President Garfield while teaching
citizenship, and was surprised at how few people knew anything about him. The
second president to be assassinated, Garfield was an incredibly accomplished
person. He had been a college president at 26, a Civil War hero, and an
outstanding Member of Congress from Ohio. He remains the only person to
ascend to the White House directly from the House of Representatives. He was
shot in the back in 1881 -- 14 years before the X-Ray machine was invented -and lingered painfully for 3 months before finally dying. He had only been in
office 4 months when he was shot.
With his background in show business, Kimmel recognized that Garfield's story
was particularly well suited to the theatrical stage, with the first act showing the
new president in the White House at the height of his powers, and ending with
his shooting. The second act would contrast strongly, showing Garfield's
downward spiral, the frantic efforts by top doctors and scientists of the day to
save him, and his eventual death from his injuries. Garfield is one of our more
obscure presidents, and Kimmel felt that he deserved better treatment from
history than to be forgotten and overlooked. He served the second shortest term
in office of any president, but he might have become one of our greatest national
leaders if he had lived. Garfield once said, "Nothing turns up in this world until
somebody turns it up." Kimmel tried to follow his advice, and felt that sharing his
story in a stage play might help to raise awareness of his life. “That's the true
value of popular media and the entertainment industry,” says Kimmel, “The
incredible opportunity to reach people and tell a compelling story. There are
plenty of great scholarly books about Garfield, but people won't look them up if
they never hear about him.”
While writing the play, Kimmel would frequently share Garfield's story with people
he met who were experiencing medical challenges. He enjoyed encouraging
people by telling them about the many advances in medicine we now enjoy and
contrasting this with Garfield’s experience, where a simple X-ray photograph
could have saved his life if it had been available. Delving deeper into Garfield's
story continually reminded Kimmel of all the wonderful things we have to be
grateful for.
Kimmel would like to bring the play to a full-scale stage production, and possibly
a film. He is currently teaching at a college in New Orleans, and has a role in the
movie Haunted High airing on the SyFy Channel in August. Kimmel feels the film
is a terrific opportunity, hoping that both he and Garfield will be discovered!
Jeremiah Shelton’s story is much different, and even more compelling. Shelton
was the co-winner of the Thesis of the Year competition with his thesis entitled A
Comparative Reader-Response Analysis between the Stranger and Crime and
Punishment. Shelton is currently in prison serving a sentence for attempted
murder. His thesis investigates Dostoyevsky’s and Camus’ protagonists’
motivations for crime while discovering and revealing his own act’s motivations in
relation to those. The negotiation of rigorous academic exposition and Shelton’s
own introspection while incarcerated produces an innovative study that offers
new dimensions to the scholarship regarding these canonical texts.
Because of Shelton’s incarceration, there were limited options for Master’s
degrees, and the M.A. Humanities External Degree was the only one offered
from a reputable university that could be completed through correspondence.
The theme of his thesis obviously resonated with Shelton in his current situation.
Shelton had always agreed with the reader’s response theory to literature, where
the meaning of a given piece comes from the interaction of the reader and author.
He thought that, being in his situation, he had a unique perspective on crime and
subsequent punishment.
Even in his situation, however, Shelton learned that the things he did and felt
were not as unique as he thought they were. Even authors who had never been
in that situation before understood the stress of life and where it could lead you.
Building on his success, Shelton next plans to get his doctoral degree in
Psychology and become a counselor when he is released.
Eva Gulyash, Shelton’s mother, is happy that Jeremiah’s thesis stood out among
so many, but what pleases her most about his thesis is not the recognition he’s
receiving for it, but the healing that occurred through the long, arduous process
of writing it. “When Jeremiah opened the door to his story, says Gulyash, “He
was incomplete. By putting it down on paper, word by painful word, he worked
through all the emotion, came to grips with his mistakes, and not only did he find
himself; he came out on the other side of it a better man.”