For Loyola’s Ricci Scholars, research is a global pursuit

Some say the best way to learn is by getting your hands dirty. For students in Loyola University Chicago’s Ricci Scholars Program, the world becomes their classroom as they pursue a hands-on, multicultural research project in both Rome and a country in East Asia. The research proposals are student-designed and often deal with how different cultures handle similar problems or experiences.  

Ricci Scholars learn about these questions by digging through archives, attending ceremonies and interviewing people in foreign languages. But they also learn about themselves as they face the challenges of living and studying abroad. Anne Wingenter, Ricci Rome seminar director and assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the John Felice Rome Center, witnesses how students change as a result. “You see their confidence grow in leaps and bounds,” she says. The program “gives them a sense of what they’re capable of doing.”

Launched in fall 2007, the competitive scholarship and mentorship program supports students who have been selected based on a cross-cultural research proposal. Scholars spend their junior year abroad and the work culminates in a paper, portfolio, or another project that relates to their undergraduate thesis, but the effects of the experience extend beyond graduation day. Loyola magazine spoke with three “Riccis”—one current Loyola student who was about to embark on her Ricci year, one who had recently finished the program, and one who had completed it several years back—to learn about their hopes and the way the experience had impacted them. The conversation has been edited for length. 

Can you tell me a little about yourself and your time at Loyola?

Amara Grajewski (BA ’26, studying in Rome and Hirakata, Japan): I’m from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was raised atheist. But then I ended up falling in love with religious studies. I had never opened myself up to understanding religion before and, when I did, I found that I could understand people in a way that I had never had access to before, and that was really important to me. So that’s what I do at Loyola, and what I’m doing for Ricci, too.  

Rebekah Jin (BA ’24, studied in Rome and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam): I’m from Chicago. I’ve been at Loyola since the first semester of my sophomore year. Ricci was actually a motivation for transferring to Loyola to begin with, because I knew I wanted to have more of an extensive time studying abroad. Ricci really fit that criteria for me, and I also had an interest in research and I wanted to do something that was specifically in the space of global health. And so what I study at Loyola is global studies with a minor in political science. 

Zac Davis (BA ’15, studied in Rome and Beijing, China): I’m from a small town outside of Columbus called Delaware, Ohio, and I just knew I wanted to go to a big city. As soon as I set foot on Lake Shore Campus, I was like, this is home. I studied theology and philosophy and it actually served me well. That’s where I met the Jesuits, and today I work for the Jesuits at America magazine here in New York. 

Will you tell us about your Ricci project and what you studied?

Davis: I was looking at Catholic funeral culture and comparing how the practice of 

death rituals—specifically within Catholicism between Rome and Beijing—might tell a broader story about the people living there. In Rome, there’s 900 churches for three million people. But in Beijing there were five Catholic churches, for millions and millions of people. Certainly different experiences for Catholics on the ground there. So, I spent a year funeral crashing. I learned a lot, and felt like I was able to become more deeply embedded in the people and the culture of both places. 

Jin: My project is on the barriers to accessing essential maternal health care services. My project has two sections—one about Italy and one about Vietnam. For the section on Italy, I conducted a qualitative analysis of mothers’ experiences giving birth in Italy and accessing maternal health care and I had Italian-born women and migrant women explain and share their stories with me. My Vietnam portion was about the more general barriers to accessing maternal health care in an urban context. I was really driven to do a project like this because I am very passionate about women’s health and women’s rights and I believe that health is the most fundamental human right. For women to be still struggling to access maternal health care in the 21st century is not acceptable

For you Amara, I’d like to know what your plans are for your Ricci scholarship.

Grajewski: I’m looking at gendered religious symbolism in Catholicism in Rome and then in Shinto and Buddhism in Japan. My interest was piqued when I started studying Hinduism in my fall semester this year, and I saw this really interesting dichotomy where in India, goddess traditions are a really big part of people’s lives but a lot of times the goddess figures end up working counterintuitively to women’s empowerment. I thought that phenomena was really interesting and I wanted to see if that functioned elsewhere. So I started reading and in Italy a lot of the cities now, which began as little villages, were started off with their own patron Madonna, so their own kind of Mary figure. And, similar to Hinduism, the patron Madonna was oftentimes either benevolent or malevolent, and that shaped how the divine feminine was conceptualized. The same thing, I noticed, was happening with feminine deities in Buddhism and Shinto so I wanted to see how feminine deities are depicted, and then also how women interact with those deities or use them in their practices, and perhaps draw upon them to find a sense of fulfillment in their lives

Amara, since you have yet to begin your time as a Ricci scholar, is there anything you’d like to ask the other two?

Grajewski: Yeah! So, stepping away from it now, what are you most proud of for yourself? What’s something that you feel like you’ll be able to take away and say ‘I did that.’

Jin: There is so much that’s good about this program. One thing I’m proud of was learning how to speak Italian. I moved to Italy not knowing any Italian and by the end I was able to hold conversations with women about their pregnancy experiences. And then I also was really lucky, because I applied to a funding opportunity through the State Department for my research and got it so I had a bit of a budget to work with. I’m in London right now, and I just presented at a conference here at the London School of Economics, so I was able to do a lot of cool things with this. And I know that, moving into my masters, there will be more opportunities to come with this topic, so it definitely can plant a seed.

Davis: I think it definitely got me my dream job, which was super cool. I was able to walk in and say I did a cross-cultural study of Catholicism and looked in depth at the funeral liturgies. I was able to observe people in a very intimate moment of their life and talk about it in a way that made some sense of it. That was huge. Those are skills that any employer would like to hear about. I also ended up making a short documentary on the Catholic Church in China. I got asked to go as a very junior employee because I had this experience that Ricci gave me. 

After this conversation, the Loyola University Chicago community lost Mine E. Cinar, director of the Ricci Scholars Program and professor of economics at the Quinlan School of Business. “Her enthusiasm and support of the students in the Ricci program made her a pleasure to work with. She is missed,” wrote Wingenter. We send our condolences to all those mourning this loss.