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Delaney Wallace inspects ceramic artifacts in the Hull-House Museum archive.

The University of Chicago Divinity School Summer Internships for the Public Understanding of Religion Program is supported by the Marty Center and the John C. and Jane Colman Program in the Craft of Teaching, Leadership, and Service. The program gives students opportunities to apply the training and expertise they developed in Swift Hall while building new skills, experience, and connections needed for careers both inside and outside the academy. 

Interfaith America, Chicago History Museum, and the American Writers Museum were among many sites where students worked on specific projects, extending their Divinity School education into curatorial, editorial, and archival work.

Throughout the summer, the Div School checked in with four student interns working at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, The Christian Century, and the Newberry Library. They shared how their academic training informed their approach to their internships, and what takeaways they’ll carry with them, whether back into the 2026–27 school year or forward into their careers. 

Delaney Wallace, MDiv’26, MSW’26, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum

This summer, Wallace helped prepare an exhibit on the world’s first juvenile justice court, researching the women of Hull-House who helped establish the settlement. Her attention kept returning to one of them, Ellen Gates Starr, who co-founded Hull-House with Jane Addams and is often left out of its history. 

“She converted to Catholicism in the last twenty years of her life and spent her final five years as an oblate in a convent in New York,” Wallace said. “She had worked so hard, so long, for social justice, felt like a lot of it hadn’t come to fruition, and found solace in a more spiritual life.” 

Wallace credited the Div School’s interdisciplinary classrooms with sharpening a skill she used frequently at the museum. 

“It has prepared me to communicate better with my teammates, and with the public,” she said.

Chase Viscuse, Master’s Student, Newberry Library

At the Newberry Library, Viscuse worked on Beyond Belief, an initiative studying religion’s role in social change in Chicago during the 1960s. He focused on the first Rainbow Coalition formed among the Young Patriots, the Black Panthers, and the Young Lords. It is a long way from where his research started. 

“I came into the school with a pretty clear vision. I wanted to work with snake handling,” he said. “It really interested me in undergrad, and the discourse profoundly shaped the way I think and question my topic.” 

The two projects share a method more than a subject. 

“The Young Patriots are led by a guy named Preacher Man,” Viscuse said. “The first organizations they turned to, to fund food pantries, were local churches. Connecting religion to groups that are displaced, or tied tightly to one place, is what makes it interesting to me.”

Allison Nash, MDiv Student, The Christian Century

Nash spent the summer as an editorial intern in The Christian Century’s book review section, working with editor Elizabeth Palmer to recruit reviewers and interview authors. The internship gave her a public outlet for a question she has been chasing since she came to Swift Hall. 

“David Foster Wallace talks about how everyone worships something, whether that’s money or a religious tradition,” Nash said. “I’m curious what that means, and whether caring as deeply about your political ideas as you do about your faith says something about the future of faith.” 

Reading and literacy have been a throughline in Nash's pursuit of understanding. 

“Books have always been a big part of my life,” she said. “I remember my dad reading me Where the Wild Things Are before bed. I love books because they help me understand people I might otherwise never meet.”

Kristen Kitch, AM’26, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures

At ISAC, Kitch designed activities to prepare K–12 field trip groups for tours of artifacts from West Asia and North Africa, some more than ten thousand years old. Coursework with faculty including Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Mythologies; and Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible, reshaped how she saw the material she shared with school-age visitors. 

“Instead of focusing on Greece, or Rome, or Babylon, as sites with religions of their own, I broadened my idea of what the ancient world was,” Kitch said. “Now I see it as an interconnected web of cultures and religions that were never isolated, which was a myth many believed for centuries.” 

That shift became the internship’s real assignment. 

“It’s made me think about how the ancient world can become more accessible to people, especially children,” she said, “and it would be great to have academics be the people to do this kind of work, since they really are the experts.”

Each of these conversations will return later this year as a longer Field Notes video feature, with more from each student’s summer in the field.