For a group of University of Delaware graduate students in the humanities, a full day of practice media interviews included plenty of expert advice:

Stand still and don’t fidget. Focus on three important points you want to make. Be concise. Use language that non-academics can understand. Convey your enthusiasm. Don’t let your voice trail off at the end of a sentence.

Oh, and have fun.

“My goal is for people to enjoy public speaking rather than feeling anxiety,” said Lisa Hatcher, who provides communications consulting and presentation training services through her company, Now You’re Talking. “These students are doing a wonderful job with their interviews, conveying such interesting information on a variety of subjects.

“I tell them: Use your passion and excitement for your topic. You can develop your own style to communicate that.”

Hatcher spent a day at UD last week, offering students in the two-week Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DelPHI) advice and feedback as they took part in two different types of mock interviews, which were recorded on video for later review. Hatcher was joined in the TV studio of University Media Services by Erickson Blakney, a filmmaker and former journalist who conducted the interviews and offered advice of his own.

DelPHI, then named the Public Engagement in Material Culture Institute, began as an annual summer program in 2008, funded by a $500,000 challenge grant to the College of Arts and Sciences from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The institute’s goal is to encourage and train graduate students to share their research with the public by strengthening their digital and public communications skills.

Directed by Arwen Mohun, professor and chair of the Department of History, and Erik P. Rau, director of library services at Hagley Museum and Library, DelPHI 2016 offered its 14 participants practical and hands-on workshops. Topics included marketing, applying for grants, writing press releases and creating videos, in addition to the public speaking and media training sessions.

In the months following the institute, the DelPHI students will extend their public outreach by developing presentations about their research and delivering them to non-academic audiences.

The graduate students attending this year’s institute represent a variety of departments and areas of study at UD, and they come to graduate studies from a range of professional and personal backgrounds.

Here is a brief sampling:

• Maribel Beas, a doctoral student in preservation studies, worked as an architect in Peru before studying historic preservation and conservation. With a focus on the preservation of earthen architecture, she has worked with historic adobe buildings in the U.S. Southwest and with indigenous structures in the Amazon region of Peru.
• Josh Summer, a master’s degree student in the Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation, has worked at a frame shop, as an art handler and in conservation internships. He will work this summer treating 18th century frescoes in Spain, employing a novel technique in which live bacteria are used to clean murals.
• Caitlin Hutchison, a doctoral candidate in art history, specializes in the early medieval art of northwestern Europe. She is focusing her research on Ireland’s “High Cross” sculptures, distinctively carved decorative crosses that stand from 10 to 23 feet tall and date to the seventh through the 12th centuries.
• Kristen Semento, a master’s degree student in UD’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, was researching a 19th century copper food canister when she happened across a series of photographs documenting the decay of 5,000 copper urns that held the ashes of patients from the State Hospital of Oregon. Semento now is conducting interdisciplinary research on the history, public policy and legal concerns related to the issue of unclaimed cremated remains across the United States.