Jordan Villegas ’20 succumbs to ‘archive fever’ as Radcliffe researcher
This is one in a series of profiles showcasing some of Harvard’s stellar graduates. For Jordan Villegas ’20, a hunch turned into an obsession. At the beginning of his first year, Villegas told his proctor that he’d like to do research, “not really having any idea what that meant, but just because it seemed interesting, and I knew it involved libraries generally,” he remembers. (He had done archival processing for a local genealogical society as a high school student.) That proctor pointed him to the Radcliffe Research Program, which pairs undergraduates with visiting fellows for paid work at the Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study. Four years and many research projects later, Villegas — a joint concentrator in studies of women, gender, and sexuality and social anthropology with a secondary in Latinx studies — is hooked on the past. “I call it archive fever: I find this historical nugget and think, ‘Wait, there’s a...