UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa — As a student, Penn State alumna Julia Welp took advantage of the many impactful, real-world research opportunities offered to students in the College of the Liberal Arts. Those experiences helped to prepare the former Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar for her summer position as the inaugural John W. Kluge Center intern at the Library of Congress.

As a spring 2024 graduate with degrees in history, political science and Middle East studies along with a minor in global security, Welp's academic journey captures her desire to better understand the world’s complexities through history and archival studies — a journey that continued through her Kluge Center internship.

“This internship came to me because my honors adviser actually is very involved in the Richards Civil War Era Center, and they were talking about this new internship,” Welp noted about how she discovered the internship, which is geared toward rising fourth-year students and recent graduates who are interested in graduate school and research opportunities.

The Kluge Center internship is actually the Allentown, Pennsylvania, native’s second internship coordinated through the Richards Center. Her first was a museum services internship at Gettysburg National Military Park, where she handled various projects in museum services and curation.

Welp collaborated with two Kluge Center Scholars with similar research interests during her eight-week Kluge Center internship. Working alongside Mahasen Nasser-Eldin, a doctoral candidate at De Montfort University in the United Kingdom, Welp contributed to research examining the Palestinian women's movement during the 1930s and 1940s; working alongside Ainissa Ramirez, an independent scholar and a material scientist, Welp constructed a detailed timeline of the life of Dorothy Darby, a Black parachutist and aviator from the 1930s.

Now that the Kluge Center internship has ended, Welp has started a doctoral program at George Washington University focusing on modern Middle Eastern cultural and political history.

“I'm really looking forward to being able to delve into more specific research and have a chance to build my language skills — as scary as that may feel trying to become fluent in another language,” Welp said. “I think it'll be a good experience and definitely helpful in terms of research and what I want to do in the future.”

Welp is confident that the academic foundation she built as a Penn State Liberal Arts student will bolster her doctoral program experience, especially in terms of reading and writing. Upper-level history and political science courses, in particular, taught her how to analyze arguments critically and gather information from online databases and other sources effectively — skills that benefited Welp while preparing her honors thesis, “From Ur to Masada: Antiquities Policy and State Building in Palestine/Israel and Iraq, 1919–1950,” for which she received the Best Schreyer Senior Honors Thesis Award from the Department of History last spring.

Welp also represented her fellow Middle East studies classmates as the program’s major marshal at Penn State’s spring 2024 commencement ceremony. Beyond the classroom, she was a member of Oriana Singers and Glee Club Benefitting THON, for whom she served as the organization’s family relations chair.

Richards Civil War Era Center

The George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State advances research on the history of slavery, race and democracy in the United States. It hosts the premiere journal in Civil War Era studies, organizes events, and provides support for faculty, students and postdoctoral fellows.