History Professor and Black Studies Program Director William Hart announced the creation of the Twilight Project, a collaborative research initiative that will delve into Middlebury’s fraught history of inclusion and marginalization, during opening statements to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ talk on Tuesday evening.
The project follows the lead of several universities — including Princeton, Harvard and Columbia — that have launched initiatives exploring the connections of their institutions to the transatlantic slave trade. But the Twilight Project will extend beyond race to include issues related to gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion and ethnicity, among others. The project will also focus on the town of Middlebury, not just the college, in its investigations.
“We are asking Middlebury students, faculty, and staff to peer at some uncomfortable moments in Middlebury’s past so that we can better heal and move forward in the future,” Hart told The Campus.
Hart and other organizers expect to begin hearing research proposals for the project in late March, with the hope that projects will be completed in the 2020–21 academic year. Proposals can take the form of traditional research projects or other formats such as films, podcasts, walking tours, plays and public art. Hart assumes that research will lean heavily on archived resources from the Middlebury Library Special Collections and the Henry Sheldon Museum.
The project is named after Alexander Twilight, who became the first African American to receive a degree from a four-year American college after he graduated from Middlebury in 1823.
“We chose Twilight for that kind of ambiguity and this metaphor between the darkness and the light,” Hart said. “We are using this metaphor to shine a light on past moments that have been partially obscured by the receding light of history.”
President Laurie Patton approached Hart, Rebeka Irwin and Miguel Fernández with the idea for the Twilight Project a few years ago, and the idea began to formally materialize in 2018. Irwin is the Director and Curator of Special Collections, and Fernández is the college’s Chief Diversity Officer.
Irwin and Hart will serve as the project’s co-directors. They received financial support for the project from an anonymous donor, according to Hart.
“History can only be told by what was left behind and what was saved. All of those are in many ways deliberate choices,” Irwin said, noting how very little information remained about African American alumni. “All history has silences and absences, and this archive is the same. I think that creative projects might be best positioned to help answer the questions that are left behind and help fill those silences.”
The project is set to culminate in a conference in 2023, the bicentennial of Twilight’s graduation, which will feature the work done for the Twilight Project up until that point. Irwin hopes that the conference will not mark the end, but rather a jumping-off point for further iterations of the project.
“The more stories that we expose, the better off we may all be as a campus together,” Irwin said. “Many of the struggles we are experiencing now in the United States have been experienced on this campus before.”
Hart has done his own research on histories of racial tension at the Henry Sheldon Museum in town. He chronicled Frederick Douglass’s April 1843 visit to Middlebury, the first stop on a 100-city convention to spread the message of abolition throughout the Northeast. Douglass described his reception at the college as “intensely bitter and violent” and said that few people “professed any sympathy in opinion and feeling” with the abolitionist speakers. College students actively opposed his visit, hanging posters calling Douglass “an escaped convict from the state prison,” according to Hart’s essay “I Am a Man: Martin Henry Freeman (Middlebury College 1849) and the Problems of Race, Manhood, and Colonization.”
Irwin is also eager for students, faculty and staff to uncover the stories of the many LGBTQ+ individuals who inhabited Middlebury and feared coming out during their time here.
“The Twilight Project stands as an invitation to members of the Middlebury College to examine stories from our past — some hard, others gracious — that will enable us to create new stories that will sustain Middlebury College as a fully inclusive, all-embracing institution for generations to come” said Hart, who is set to retire at the end of this academic year.
Sophia McDermott-Hughes ’23.5 (they/them) is an editor at large.
They previously served as a news editor and senior news writer.
McDermott-Hughes is a joint Arabic and anthropology and Arabic major.
Over the summer, they worked as a general assignment reporter at Morocco World News, the main English-language paper in Morocco.
In the summer of 2021 they reported for statewide digital newspaper VTDigger, focusing on issues relating to migrant workers and immigration.
In 2018 and 2019, McDermott-Hughes worked as a reporter on the Since Parkland Project, a partnership with the Trace and the Miami Herald, which chronicled the lives of the more than 1,200 children killed by gun violence in the United States in the year since the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida.
