Duncan Knox: ASU Envoy
November 17, 2014
For the past three years, ASU senior Duncan Knox has spent almost as much time as an emissary for the university as he has just being a student.
A history major from Ozona and member of the ASU Honors Program, Knox first represented ASU at the 2012 Great Plains Honors Council (GPHC) Conference in Kansas. Since then, he has been all over the country, most recently making a presentation at the National Collegiate Honors Council (NCHC) Conference Nov. 5–9 in Denver. Just prior to that, he was in Washington, D.C., as a presidential fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress Fall Leadership Conference.
Duncan Knox photos
“The major component of the fellowship is a research paper,” Knox said. “We write a 16-30-page paper on a specific topic dealing with the U.S. presidency and congress. There are also two conferences, one in the fall and one in the spring. I attended the first one in October.”
“There were several speakers from institutions like Gallup and Politico, and the deputy secretary of labor was there,” he added. “We also broke into roundtable discussions on our research paper topics to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our research and how we should move forward. At the second conference in the spring, they will hand out awards for the best papers.”
“I’m a history major, so I’m not as interested in the political aspects of the Supreme Court as I am about the history behind it and the history that has been made there,” Know said. “The Office of the Curator is the department that is responsible for chronicling the court’s history, archiving court artifacts and visitor programming.”
“My internship was targeted at two major components, the first being visitor programming,” he added. “So I gave courtroom lectures and tours of the building. The second component was working with the court photographer. I catalogued photographs, attended events where new photos were taken and also helped with making several videos.”
“The theme was ‘Slavery and the Atlantic Heritage,’” Knox said. “We were there for a month and stayed in the Bristol University dorms. We also got to take side trips to Plymouth and other places associated with slavery, but also with our own Atlantic heritage of people who went directly from England to America. We also talked a lot about different industries as Bristol used to be the largest port in England and was built totally on slavery.”
“It was also very interesting in that we studied slavery and Atlantic heritage through history, English and archeology professors,” he added. “We had a different professor for every class, but we had one academic advisor who helped us shape all the diverse lectures into one narrative.”
At each one of the conferences, internships and institutes he has attended, Knox has been part of a select group of students chosen from colleges and universities throughout the U.S. While fulfilling his personal goals and padding his résumé with some very impressive accomplishments, he has also extended ASU’s academic reputation at each stop along the way.
After he graduates in May of 2015, Knox plans to pursue a Ph.D. in history with the ultimate goal of a career as a university professor and researcher.