MARIE CULPEPPER
Other Projects
Humanities for the Public Good Obermann Public Scholar
June-July 2019
In 2019, I participated in the Humanities for the Public Good Internship Program at the University of Iowa's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. As an intern with the Iowa Valley Resource Conservation & Development,I worked on creating a publication about rolle bolle in order to celebrate and promote the game that was brought to the United States by Belgian immigrants in the late nineteenth century and is still so beloved by their descendants today. Over the course of eight weeks, I conducted interviews with local rolle bolle players of all ages, attended games—including the World Tournament in Annawan, Illinois—and even learned to play a little rolle bolle. In addition to obtaining information about the history of the game via interviews, I gathered documentation of the history of the game from digital newspaper archives and personal archives maintained by the players. I also visited the Center for Belgian Culture in Moline, Illinois, where I was allowed to borrow photographs of players and documents dating back to the 1920s.
My research culminated with writing a short booklet about the game, which the Iowa Valley RC & D designed and printed with funding from the grant as a way of preserving this cultural pastime. The booklet contains information about the history of the game, how and where to play, and interviews with rolle bolle players.
I found this project this project extremely rewarding to work on. It enabled me to make use of some of the research and writing skills I had acquired in graduate school in a completely different context, as well as to gain new skills. It also aligned well with my research interests, which involve the intersection between personal and collective memory. This internship also involved a lot of public engagement with the local community, and I was grateful to get to spend my summer getting to know such kind, gracious, and welcoming people.