Student research grant
Library Student Research Grant
Since 2003, Friends has awarded more than $23,000 to fund selected proposals by Messiah students for research projects.
Please join us in congratulating Henry Zercher, the 2026 Friends of Murray Library Student Research Grant awardee! Henry will graduate in 2027 with a bachelor's degree in History with a minor in Politics.
Henry's research project is entitled "Reconsidering Competition: Shifting Brethren in Christ Attitudes on Athletic Participation, 1909-1983." The objective of Henry's research is to determine how the Brethren in Christ Church, a denomination characterized by nonconformity, nonviolence, and simplicity, responded to the growing popularity of sport in mainstream culture. His research will determine how the denomination and its associated educational institutions negotiated the ethics of competitive sport in light of distinctive church teachings, and how the denomination brought sport into alignment with its doctrines.
Collections found in the Brethren in Christ and Messiah University Archives will be used as well as Murray Library resources and materials from other institutions such as the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society, the Hess Archives and Special Collections at Elizabethtown College, and other archival collections at Christian and Anabaptist colleges.
Henry will present an overview of his research journey at the annual Friends dinner in the fall of 2026. Dr. Bernardo Michael is his faculty advisor.
Congratulations Henry!
Awardees
2024-2025: Olivia Reardon, The Great Books and Me: Ethical Formation in the Classroom
2023-2024: Michael Azar, Effects of Proglumide on Expression of Fibrosis in Pancreatic Cells
2022-2023: Micaiah Saldana, My Last Military ID and Other Stories From Growing Up Army
2021-2022: Hye Lim Jung, Tracing My Identity through Korean Myths and Folklore
2020-2021: Anya Benninger, Social Stories: Bookmaking in the Life of an Autistic Artist
2017-2018:
Lauren Faircloth, Social Performances of Play Manifested in Children's Drawings
2016-2017:
Emily La Bianca, Cultural Identity and Ledger Art in American Indian Boarding Schools
2015-2016:
Kathryn Kaslow, Anti-Sabbatarianism in Antebellum America: The Christian Quarrel Over the Sanctity of Sunday
2014-2015:
Christa Cohen, A Cumulative Design of Effective Science Curriculum Strategies and Resources for Students in Sofia, Bulgaria
Jonathan Fuller, Going Home: A History of American Christian Zionism
2012-2013:
Christina Thomas, The Biographies of Rachel Flowers and Vincent Flowers: The First African-American Students to Attend Messiah College
2011-2012:
Natalie Burack, Poppy Cannon: An Examination of Food and Culture in the Fifties and Sixties
Katherine Garland, The World of Robert Crawford
Kate Miller, The Broken and Healing Body: 17th-Century Depictions of Saint Irene Healing Saint Sebastian
2010-2011:
Christine Kelly, Rethinking the American Paradigm: The Culture Wars and the Rise of Moral Conservatism
Alexander Lovelace, Patton and the Press: An Examination of the Interaction between George S. Patton Jr. and the American Media
Jessica Quail, Adoption and Self-labeling: A Pathway to Delinquency
2009-2010:
Caitlin Babcock, A Woman's Place: Feminism and the Assemblies of God in the 1970s
Melissa Hogan, Puzzling Over History, focusing on mosaic art found in Cyprus that was created during the period of late Antiquity
2008-2009:
Aimee Kocher, Book Flood: Providing Professional Development in a Burkinabe School Library
Francis Eanes; Daniel Webster; Ryan Witmer, Sustainable Urban Agriculture as a Viable Necessity in the Developed World
2007-2008:
Mackenzie Martin, Elizabeth Bishop: Patience and Revision
Brittany Williams, Library Assessment in Burkina Faso, West Africa
Elena Yamamoto, Japanese Textiles in Edo Period Japan
2006-2007:
Elizabeth Ball, Handmade Paper Project in Choma, Zambia
Tiffany DeRewal, The Foundation of an Alternative Shadean Hypothesis of Psychosis within the Latent Realities of Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire
Diane Pierce, The Relationship of Vessel and Worship
2005-2006:
Hierald Osorto, The Irony of Revolution: A Comparative Study of El Salvador and Nepal 1980-2005
Benjamin Lamb, John Howard Yoder and Anabaptist Social Ethics
Danielle Forney, Investigating the Investigators: The News Media's Portrayal of the Homeless
2004-2005:
Sonya Berg, The Medieval and Renaissance Book of Hours and the Equivalent in Contemporary Art
Jeff Erbig Jr., Land Surveys and Cartographic Imagination: Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Mapmaking and the Valley of Tumbaco
2002-2003:
Andrew Tucker, Comparative Morphology and Phylogeography of Anuran Amphibians of the Genus Atelopus from Panama and Costa Rica
Melissa Bell, Diversity in Democracy: Multiculturalism in British Politics