Isabella Ferrante\u2019s interest in history started early. As a child, one of her favorite shows was PBS\u2019s Liberty\u2019s Kids, an animated series following the adventures of a group of young Americans during and after the Revolutionary War.<\/p>\n
This interest was solidified in middle school at Ridgefield Academy thanks to Mrs. Dolan, a teacher who reanimated history for her students.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did battle reenactments and wrote letters to historical figures,\u201d says Ferrante, of Norwalk, Connecticut. \u201cShe made it all so incredibly interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now an honors student at UConn Stamford, Ferrante, a history major with minors in psychology and English, has launched a promising research career. She spent the summer in the United Kingdom studying shell shock before, during, and after World War I.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always had this morbid interest in war and questioning why people continue to do it when it causes so much pain,\u201d Ferrante says.<\/p>\n
Through a Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF<\/a>) grant from UConn’s Office of Undergraduate Research, Ferrante was able to travel to the home base of her research and use the British National Archives.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was incredible from an academic standpoint and also encouraged a lot of personal growth and pushed me out of my comfort zone in a good way,\u201d Ferrante says. \u201cI was able to create a place of familiarity in an unfamiliar place.\u201d<\/p>\n World War I represented a definitive turning point in the sociological history of war, especially how people regarded the mental health of soldiers and veterans, Ferrante says. The term \u201cshell shock\u201d was coined in 1915 by an English Medical Officer, Charles Myers, to describe the psychological trauma of veterans, though the term had been used in the trenches among soldiers since the outbreak of war.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the first war where we saw a huge social backlash because of how actively traumatic it was for people,\u201d Ferrante says.<\/p>\n Ferrante is also putting her psychology and English minors to work for this project by looking at biographies and memoirs of veterans, along with contemporary publications in the psychology field.<\/p>\n \u201cA whole chunk of my paper will be looking at personal changes within soldiers,\u201d Ferrante says. \u201cI\u2019m going to be reading war biographies and memoirs which tie into understanding the human perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n Ferrante says one of the most important takeaways from her experience is the topic she is researching still has repercussions for modern Britain.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though the war was 100 years ago, you can still feel the effects in British culture today,\u201d Ferrante says. \u201cIt’s stuff you can\u2019t read in primary or secondary sources. It\u2019s something you only get to experience by being immersed in that culture.\u201d<\/p>\n After graduation, Ferrante plans to take a break before returning to school to earn her master\u2019s degree. She hopes to go on to be a high school history teacher and work in a museum to help spread her love of history to others as the teachers and archivists she has worked with did for her.<\/p>\n Ferrante recommends that students who want to get into research get started early and know what they want to find before diving into the available sources.<\/p>\n \u201cDo as much as you can to get a grasp of what you want to see beforehand,\u201d Ferrante says. \u201cAnd definitely make friends with the archivists, it\u2019s so incredibly useful.\u201d<\/p>\n Students interested in seeing more of the research UConn\u2019s talented undergraduates like Ferrante are doing can check out the Fall Frontiers<\/a> in Undergraduate Research on Oct. 30 from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Wilbur Cross North Reading Room,<\/em> as well as the other Month of Discovery<\/a> events happening this October.<\/em><\/p>\n Follow UConn Research on <\/em>Twitter<\/em><\/a> & <\/u><\/em>LinkedIn<\/em><\/a>.<\/u><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A UConn student turned her childhood love of history into a research project that took her from Stamford to the British National Archives to study World War I. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":127,"featured_media":155126,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,2192,2076,174],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2140],"class_list":["post-155125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-fairfield-county","category-research","category-uconn-stamford","series-meet-the-researcher"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 11:17:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/127"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155125"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":155469,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155125\/revisions\/155469"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/155126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155125"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=155125"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=155125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}