Over the past four years, Merrill’s love of language has led her to create her own interdisciplinary major on translation and translatability, to take an incredibly diverse set of classes and even to work in a sandwich shop outside of Amsterdam.
Yet, her contributions to Amherst go above and beyond the study of linguistics. Whether as an Academic Peer Mentor, writer or artist, Merrill’s contributions to the community have taken on a variety of forms and languages.
Ambition and Creativity
“Cory Merrill is one of the more intellectually daring students I have known in recent years,” said Political Science Professor Thomas Dumm, Merrill’s academic advisor since her first year as well as her primary thesis advisor. “She is curious about everything. A fine writer and a fine student.”
Merrill’s academic work and writing skills have made a significant mark on the College. Dumm mentioned how much he valued Merrill’s opinion when it comes to academics. “I’ve trusted her with my own work; she has helped copy edit my forthcoming book, and she took a special topics course with me on the subject that became The Politics of Moral Reasoning, which is right now my favorite course to teach,” said Dumm. “It is students like Cory that make teaching at Amherst a pleasure.”
Merrill has been an Academic Peer Mentor since the program began her junior year. She enjoys being able to help underclassmen improve their academic skills, balance their workloads and have a positive college experience. Merrill also enjoys talking with these students on a regular basis. “Working as an academic peer mentor keeps me connected and engaged with underclassmen,” said Merrill.
Besides Peer Mentoring, Merrill has done a variety of other extracurricular activities and has gained valuable experiences along the way. During her sophomore year, Merrill was an intern for the College’s Office of Public Affairs where among her various jobs, she wrote press releases, helped out with the Amherst Magazine, and updated the College’s Web site. “I had an opportunity to practice and improve my writing and was able to know what was happening on campus more often because public affairs would write about it,” said Merrill. “It was another way to keep myself informed of affairs on campus.”
Merrill also helped found the College’s Political Union called Rethink, whose goal was to increase on-campus student engagement with political issues through events such as discussions and lectures. She helped bring Stanley Fish, a literary theorist and legal scholar who writes for The New York Times to the College. According to Merrill, one of Fish’s conditions for coming to speak was that he had to play basketball with some students, so she ended up playing in a game with him, a very memorable and enjoyable experience for Merrill.
In addition to her writing ability, Merrill also has an artistic side. She had taken a number of drawing and art classes since she was three years old and took Painting II in the spring of her sophomore year. She was also the art editor of The Indicator that year. Much of her art during her four years at the College has been on request from her friends. She made a painting of her roommate freshman year and painted “Starry Night” on a friend’s dress last fall. Merrill’s friends spoke very highly of her works.
Abroad in Amsterdam
During the spring of her junior year, Merrill studied abroad in Amsterdam. She was interested in international law and the International Court of Justice was nearby in The Hague. Merrill also had family in Amsterdam and wanted very much to learn the language. She remarked on how skilled the Dutch are with languages. “The Dutch are polyglots by necessity, given their tiny country surrounded by larger European linguistic powerhouses such as Germany, France and England,” explained Merrill. They were great English-speakers, which was frustrating for Merrill, who wanted to learn Dutch.
To overcome this barrier, Merrill got a job at a sandwich shop outside of center-city Amsterdam, where almost only Dutch was spoken. “I made plenty of blunders in the beginning, but working there had a catalytic effect on my Dutch,” remarked Merrill. “Occasionally, wayward English tourists would speak to me in very slow, carefully-enunciated English so that I—whom they assumed was Dutch after hearing me interact with other customers—could understand them.”
Translation and
Translatability
When Merrill first arrived at Amherst, she was unsure of what major she wanted to pursue, but her high school’s focus on math and science had turned her away from those subject areas. “I came to Amherst very much wanting to study the humanities,” said Merrill. In her first year, she took her first Russian and English classes, but because of illness, she was unable to get much of her coursework done, and the experience hurt her image of the two departments.
Still, Merrill continued to explore many departments, taking Political Science, LJST and Mathematics classes. “I’ve always had a very strong interest in languages, so that’s where I started out,” explained Merrill. “I wasn’t exactly sure where I was going to end up.”
Merrill got an early look at the mysteries of language during her first year, when she took American Political Thought with Dumm. For the class, Merrill had to read a lot of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she had hated reading in high school. Since then, however, Merrill has developed a fondness of Emerson. “He uses a lot of word-play in his essays, choosing terms with multiple, often contradictory connotations,” said Merrill. “Because there are multiple meanings at play, there are many, many different ways to get a reading on Emerson. A lot of the theoretical groundwork in my thesis is based on works by Emerson.”
It was in the fall of junior year when Merrill began to form the idea for her interdisciplinary major. “A funny thing happened that semester. I was taking pretty seemingly disparate classes and finding bizarre parallels between my mathematical logic class and literary theory class,” said Merrill. She explained that in Mathematical Logic, arguments were written in first-order logic, which consisted of variables with assigned quantifiers such as “for all” and “there exists.” According to Merrill, such syntactical sentences technically “mean” nothing in the real world until they are translated into a semantic language, whereby the variables are substituted with constants, statements, or elements from a defined set. “Some semantic languages we used in my mathematics class included Number Theory, Set Theory etc.—not how you’d typically expect to define a language.”
Merrill’s literary theory class, called the Linguistic Turn, discussed the history of literary theory and began with linguistics, tracing different modes of language conceptualization and utilization and exploring questions such as “what is a language?” and “how do we use language?” “These questions are particularly cool when considered in the context of translation,” said Merrill. “I thought about the kinds of necessary presumptions about language a translator must make in order to assume her task.”
Merrill also saw similar themes come up in her Political Science seminar Norms, Rights, and Social Justice. She explained that the seminar discussed how marginalized groups represented themselves before the law. In this way, according to Merrill, the class seemed to spend a lot of time talking about translation. “Marginalized group X would have to describe their situation in court in legal terms understandable to someone who wasn’t part of that group.
Merrill had taken German in middle school and high school, and she took her first German class at Amherst the fall of her junior year, a language class that clearly involved translation between languages and learning how words and phrases in English and German were translated back and forth between each language.
The parallel Merrill found in all these classes was the issue of translation and translatability. “I just thought it was kind of odd and really exciting that I was seeing this parallel, and I wanted to follow it and see where else translation was cropping up.” Merrill’s ideas and ambition led her to create the Interdisciplinary Major called Translation and Translatability. “It’s an amalgam of political philosophy and literary theory,” said Merrill.
In her senior year, Merrill wrote a thesis titled “A Perfectionist Translation” in which she analyzed how an area of moral philosophy relates to different translation theories, noting similarities, differences, and what happens when one talks about each one in terms of the other.
Professor Dumm further explained the numerous complexities of her thesis. “In the thesis, she examines several strands of what is coming to be called moral perfectionist philosophy,” said Dumm. “She compares that strain of philosophy to several different theories of language and translation. In the final chapter, she applies this theory to the German vernacular translation by Martin Luther of the Bible. She does a marvelous job of it.”
Off to Russia
An illness freshman year hurt Merrill’s ability to pick up the Russian language in her class. But the experience has not deterred her from achieving her goals. “This year I decided that I was going to commit to becoming fluent in Russian,” remarked Merrill. Merrill was selected to receive a critical language scholarship by the State Department and will be studying Russian this summer in Nizhny Novgorod, the third largest city in Russia. The intensive program will focus on language acquisition.
In addition, Merrill received a Title VIII Scholarship to study in St. Petersburg, Russia starting in the fall for the next year. “The program is a language and area studies program which means basically all things Russian,” explained Merrill. Through these studies, Merrill hopes to drastically improve her Russian language skills as well as study the literature, history, and politics of the region in Russian. “It’s a ‘trial-by-fire’ approach to language acquisition, which means I’m bound to make a fool out of myself… probably for months,” Merrill joked. “But I’m prepared for embarrassment in Russia, excited for it, even. I don’t want to need English as a safety net, ever.”
Beyond this next year, Merrill is unsure of her future plans, but this uncertainty does not bother her in the slightest. “This next year is also an opportunity to think about next steps. Unforeseeable opportunities may present themselves I am while in Russia.”
Dumm has no doubt no matter what opportunities arise after graduation, Merrill is prepared to take full advantage of them. “The fact that she is fluent in multiple languages has enabled her to see the world as the complex place that it is. She is someone who is ready to leave Amherst, and that makes me happy.”