Noah Sveiven | Honors Research - Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (New York, NY) and Arizona State University Jane Goodall Institute Gombe Chimpanzee Archive and Database (Tempe, AZ)

Noah at the Jane Goodall Institute Gombe Chimpanzee Archive and Database, housed at the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University — March 2024

Thanks to funding from the History Department, I traveled to the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (RBML) at Columbia University for two weeks in December 2023 and the Jane Goodall Institute Gombe Chimpanzee Archive and Database for a week in March 2024. These research trips were essential for my senior thesis: Model Humans: Interpreting Apes, Creating Data, 1960-1979, advised by professors Caroline Winterer and Jessica Riskin.

At Columbia, I primarily consulted the David Hamburg papers, including administrative documents, memoranda, and correspondence, in addition to many pages of handwritten notes. Hamburg turned out to be one of the main characters in my thesis. He was the founder of the Stanford psychiatry department and, along with the Jane Goodall, a co-founder of the Stanford Outdoor Primate Facility.

At Arizona State University, I consulted letters, notes, and other materials related to the several-year research exchange between Stanford University and Jane Goodall’s field site. I was fortunate to work with Professor Ian Gilby, who helped me understand more of the history of the Gombe field site, dazzled me with stories from the field, and even walked me through his own data from his doctoral work. He also invited me to a talk from a visiting primatologist — which was a thrill.

My entire experience with my honors thesis research — the guidance of my advisors on campus, the archival research I conducted at Stanford Special Collections, Columbia’s RBML, and the Jane Goodall Data Archive at ASU, not to mention the sheer joy and challenge of the writing and revising process — has convinced me to pursue further academic work in the discipline of history.
 

A photograph of the Jane Goodall Institute Gombe Chimpanzee Archive and Database (Tempe, AZ) — March 2024