This year, as the College celebrates its 150th year, the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program is celebrating its 50th by hosting events to showcase the multidisciplinary nature of the major. The most recent was an October 3 career panel with program alums.
Focusing on the period from 300 to 1700 BC, Med/Ren, as it is known, covers the fall of the Roman Empire up to the Enlightenment in an interdisciplinary manner, giving students the opportunity to explore language, history, art, and more. “It’s a study of what it means to be human,” says Sarah Wall-Randell, professor of English and director of the program.
The Med/Ren Program was founded by a group of Wellesley humanities faculty led by Eugene L. Cox, now Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of History Emeritus, who realized there were overlaps in their curricula and came together to explore these interrelated disciplines.
Wall-Randell says the interdisciplinary nature of the program is what makes it unique, and what makes it attractive to students who come to Wellesley with a diversity of interests. It enables students to “bring their whole selves to studying across the departmental boundaries, across geographical boundaries,” she says. “It is the ability to understand a really compelling narrative of what happened between the end of one of the greatest [empires] to Descartes.”
The medieval and Renaissance eras span centuries, cultures, and languages, so students in the major are required to choose a concentration, which they do with the guidance of their advisors.
“So it could be women across, you know, all of these civilizations and time periods,” Wall-Randell says. “It could be music. It could be literature. They can take a discipline or an angle, looking at the whole period.”
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Clare Urion McCully ’81, Gabrielle Linnell ’13, LaShaune Johnson ’99, and Erica Hirshler ’79 participated in an event celebrating the Med/Ren studies program and talked about how they’ve used the degree in their work. Photo by Lucia Garcia Martinez ’29. -
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Med/Ren studies program, Katherine Ruffin, director of the book studies program and senior lecturer in art, created a print using an Italian Old Style wood typeface that is part of the Book Arts Lab’s collection of type. Ava Chapman ’26 carved the woodcut (top of page) that would be printed in the empty space of the poster. Photo by Shannon O'Brien
Megan Ries ’27 is concentrating her Med/Ren major in history, in addition to majoring in Italian. Ries stumbled across the program while exploring topics that interested her, which happened to coincide with Med/Ren.
“I didn’t know Wellesley had a Med/Ren major,” Ries says. “I only clocked it when I realized that all the classes I wanted to take all counted toward a specific major. I was like, ‘Hey, fair enough. Why not?’”
Ries appreciates that with Med/Ren’s interdisciplinary approach, she’s not confined to one area of study.
“I don’t have to just stick with writing history papers,” she says. “Even though I am concentrating in history, it’s not always fun. With art history courses, I can do more material observations.”
Med/Ren majors often continue their studies in graduate school, work in museums, or follow career paths that, though they may seem unrelated to Med/Ren, are connected to what they learned in the program, according to many alums. To highlight the versatility of this degree, and as a part of the 50th anniversary celebrations, on October 3 the program hosted a panel in the newly renovated Margaret Clapp Library featuring Med/Ren alumnae from a range of class years: Clare Urion McCully ’81, Gabrielle Linnell ’13, LaShaune Johnson ’99, and Erica Hirshler ’79. Cox, the program’s co-founder, was also in attendance.
The panel aimed to answer a burning question: What can you do with a Med/Ren degree?
Hirshler arrived at Wellesley in 1975, the first year the major was available. Now a senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she recalled taking art history and literature classes for her Med/Ren major, and even making sure that her physical education requirements aligned with MedRen by taking archery and fencing.
“I didn’t stray too far away from the humanities in my career—I’m an art historian—but I think the ability to look at something that was made at a certain time from a variety of points of view is helpful no matter what you’re doing,” Hirshler said in an interview after the panel.
Johnson, on the other hand, diverged from the expected path: She is a clinical professor in the Department of Health Systems and Population Health Sciences at the University of Houston. “I came to the panel to be sort of the face of, ‘I feel like I use my degree every day,’” Johnson said in an interview ahead of the event. “It shows slightly differently, maybe, than other folks who work in a museum or something like that. That critical thinking, that ability to be able to shape shift into thinking about history or thinking about policy or thinking about poetry or thinking about gender, has applied to all of the work that I’ve done in the health care field.”
Johnson also said she felt it was important to be on the panel because she has not found a lot of people who look like her in the world of Med/Ren studies: “It’s not always the most friendly place for people with dreadlocks … but I felt like I had something to say.”
All panelists said they brought unique mentalities and invaluable experience to their occupations thanks to their interdisciplinary backgrounds.
“What I love about the interdisciplinary major is that I often now look at situations from many different angles,” McCully said during the panel discussion. “I have colleagues that will say, ‘This is the only solution we have,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, but there could be this solution, or there could be this solution,’ and so I think that’s what it does.”
In addition to reminiscing about their Med/Ren days, panelists addressed the elephant in the room: jobs. “We were in a recession in 1981, and a lot of us [humanities majors] didn’t really know what we wanted to do, what we could do,” McCully said, a fear many humanities majors can relate to in 2025. But, she added, “your first job is not your last job, your first job is not your career,” and she and her classmates are “living proof that you can get through it.” This was a sentiment echoed by the rest of the panel.
So, what can you do with a Med/Ren degree?
“Anything you want,” said McCully.
Additional research provided by Sanya Afsar ’28