SRyou presenter spotlight: Autumn Houghton

Editor’s note: The ninth annual SRyou Student Exposition, an all-day event featuring the work of Salve students, will be held Wednesday, March 21. In the weeks leading up to the exposition, SALVEtoday and the SRyou planning committee are featuring a series of presenter spotlights.

Autumn Houghton ’18, a history and sociology and anthropology major with a minor in cultural and historic preservation, will present three projects during SRyou.

The first is a documentary that the Protect Our Wildlife Club made on its field trip to the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Center. “The purpose of it is to spread awareness on the importance of recycling while also discussing how recycled items are sorted and processed,” Houghton said.

Houghton will also present her European history thesis, “Popes and the Defenses Against Dechristianization: The Archaeological Excavations of the Vatican’s City of the Dead and Shrine of the Apostle, 1939-1957.” The thesis outlines the excavations of the necropolis and the shrine of St. Peter under the Vatican and its effects on the political and cultural climate of the time, which Houghton has defined as a form of counter-dechristianization.

Her final presentation, “Parla Bene, Ma Parla Poco: Dialectal Differences and Stereotypes in Italy,” will discuss her linguistic research using six participants who sectioned off maps of Italy and described the stereotypes and dialects associated with the area.