Deep in the archives, Zak Sadak, AB’25, carefully unpacked nine boxes holding sketches of Chinese Buddhist caves, vintage art history slides and historic administrative correspondence.
He was immersed in the scholarly archives of Harrie A. Vanderstappen, a former University of Chicago professor and Catholic missionary with remarkably diverse interests in East Asian art.
Sadak’s project is just one example of undergraduate archival work rediscovering gems at UChicago—others include cataloging 19th-century almanacs and collecting dictionaries of ancient Chinese. At the University’s Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, students such as Sadak are honing their skills in the Library by sorting, digitizing and researching a vast range of materials.
They’re not only fueling their own research, but making complex texts available to future scholars through digital databases and tools.
Learn more about some gems from the archives below:
A champion of Chinese art
Sadak, who graduated earlier this month with a double major in art history and East Asian languages and civilizations, was uncovering Vanderstappen’s work and legacy as part of a retrospective series of research projects to celebrate the Smart Museum’s 50th anniversary.
His project explored how Vanderstappen shaped the museum’s collections.
“While other figures were building out the classical, modern and contemporary collection at the Smart, he established the Asian—and especially Chinese—collection,” said Sadak.
Vanderstappen championed understudied paintings from late imperial China for their varied styles, helping acquire everything from intricate bamboo studies to monumental landscapes. But for him, these weren't mere academic acquisitions. They were essential teaching tools that embodied his distinctive educational philosophy.
"He would deeply involve the scroll paintings in his classes," said Sadak. "He was known for his visual, connoisseurly pedagogical style, one that necessitated these art objects for teaching."
His emphasis on context and direct visual observation also bore fruit in a challenging research endeavor—reconstructing damaged Buddhist cave sculptures in China that were heavily looted in the early 20th century.
In fact, Vanderstappen's research paved the way for an ambitious digital reconstruction project at the University’s Center for the Art of East Asia, enabling viewers to experience the Tianlongshan and Xiangtangshan cave temples as they would have appeared before looting occurred. A stunning group of worship halls and shrines carved from cliffs, the mountain caves were patronized and constructed over centuries since the 6th century A.D.
"His research used photographs to compare the various fragments of sculptures—thousands of them across various museums and private collections—and connect them to their original cave site at Tianlongshan," Sadak said.
Literary treasures in pocketbooks
Special Collections proved just as illuminating for rising fourth-year Arjan Batth.
His archival work explores a different, but equally eclectic intellectual treasure: literary miscellanies packed with poetry, music, aphorisms, astrological calendars, biographies and even instructions for cooking and dancing.
Produced from the late-18th to mid-19th centuries in German-speaking regions such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland, pocketbooks called Taschenücher were wide-ranging and popular texts. They were often wrapped in unique bindings, fashioned into wallets or embellished with beautifully marbled papers.
“These texts are unparalleled in Europe,” said Batth. “There isn’t anywhere else in the continent that had a similar literary culture.”
Batth helped catalogue Taschenbücher across regions and eras. Rare books curator Elizabeth Frengel provided guidance and taught him essential research skills.
"She helped us understand how to catalog and really evaluate a rare book, look at its provenance or to understand where it came from and how we evaluate its physicality," said Batth.
As he explored the vast and wide-ranging collection, Batth began to focus his research on a series of Swiss travelogues called the Alpenrosen. He was particularly captivated by the pocketbooks’ sublime descriptions of wandering through the Swiss Alps, which he noted were seen at that time as “very brutal” landscapes.
However, these travelogues cut against this prevailing idea—capturing mountain landscapes with remarkable detail and helping forge the Alpine identity now central to Swiss culture. Such expressions of cultural individuality proved invaluable at a period when France exerted a great deal of political control over the area.
“There was a lot of political and social upheaval in Switzerland at the time,” said Batth. “You see the Taschenbücher used as a project for the Swiss to cement a coherent identity in response.”
Batth intends to use his research experience in future Ph.D. work. He hopes to continue exploring concepts of traveling, space and time in literature and philosophy.
Ancient words, modern technology
While Batth explores Swiss cultural narratives, rising third-year William Turner is applying his majors in computer science and linguistics to help build an online database of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese dictionaries.
By making Chinese dictionaries easily searchable, this work could help scholars quickly unlock time- and location-specific meanings of words or reconstruct pronunciation patterns from different historical periods. It could even be used to digitally recreate period-authentic speech.
“Essentially, you can use this data to synthesize a voice that sounds like it would have at a specific time period, which I think is a very cool application,” said Turner.
Working closely with UChicago’s Forum for Digital Culture, the project involves cleaning and digitizing entries from the dictionaries and uploading them into OCHRE, a UChicago database for digital projects in the humanities and social sciences.
Turner has transformed ancient texts into searchable digital resources through a meticulous process of cleaning, scanning and standardizing Chinese characters. He even drew techniques from computational biology, analyzing patterns across multiple text conversions—much like comparing genetic sequences—to create a more accurate system for converting characters into a searchable format.
"This project really is one of the very few things that actually combines all of my interests, which is why I'm really glad I found it," said Turner.
His enthusiasm for the project is also informed by his study of classical literature. As a Latin reader, he's experienced how tools like this database can reveal textual patterns in literary works that would otherwise require years of specialized study.
"There are in-jokes and hidden meanings that can only be revealed if you studied the whole corpus of Latin for 10 years, or if you search it through a computer," said Turner, who hopes to make the nuances of Chinese texts similarly accessible.
This sense of discovery—digging to find connections and patterns that might otherwise be hidden—lies at the heart of much of these students’ research. As they continue unlocking treasures in UChicago's archives, they find the process of searching and cataloguing offers its own unexpected rewards. For Batth, this is what makes archival work so meaningful.
“When you’re browsing the collections, you don’t always know what you’ll find,” he reflected. “So, it’s important to be open to the possibility of finding the wonders that are in each book.”
Every day, UChicago undergraduates engage in diverse research activities and intellectual production opportunities across campus—this story is part of a College series designed to highlight these experiences.
