The room is quiet, save for the soft turn of fragile pages.
Dust lingers in the air. Ink stretches across centuries-old documents. Marriage contracts, wills, court records, and property disputes. Each written in hurried script, margins crowded with annotations, sentences bending and breaking. Some words are smudged. Others trail off entirely. What remains is incomplete, inconsistent and, at first glance, almost indecipherable to the untrained eye.
At the center sits Dr. Stephanie Fink, carefully piecing together the past.
This was long before she became a program chair, a published author, and a professor at the University of Arizona Global Campus (UAGC) with more than 20 years of experience. At the time, Dr. Fink was an archival detective, reconstructing stories from records never imagined to be read centuries later.
In those archives, she was uncovering history.
“You are sifting through what appear to be mundane documents,” Dr. Fink says. “But within them, you find the details of daily lives long forgotten.”
Revealing them demanded more than curiosity, however. It required skill.
"I encourage students to travel the route carved by their own curiosity. Staying true to seeking answers to questions important to you will help you discover your personal connection to humanity."
The documents were written for clarity in their content. But like all documents of that era, they were written by hand in scripts that shifted from writer to writer and era to era.
“You have to rely on how words are pronounced, not how they are spelled,” Dr. Fink explains. "It takes a bit of time to accept the flow of the language.”
This tenacity that Dr. Fink had developed proved useful in the face of her archival adventures. And it can be traced all the way back to her relationship with writing during her early education.
A Drive Formed Early
Due to her father’s work as a government subcontractor, Dr. Fink grew up alternately on a remote island in the Pacific and in Southern New Jersey near Philadelphia. There, she developed independence early, along with a relentless drive to understand what was in front of her. By second grade, she was already tearing through third- and fourth-grade material.
“I was a weird kid,” she says, laughing. “My superpowers were outrunning everyone on the playground and outthinking everyone in the classroom. I didn’t just want a 100, I wanted a 104. But I kept it to myself.”
That intensity showed while advancing through the curriculum, self-paced, when she encountered content in cursive handwriting, which second-graders had never learned. Her frustration at not being able to read it became so visible that her teacher called her parents in for a meeting, assuming the pressure was coming from home.
It wasn’t.
“What is your place in the human story? Why is it important?”
Her parents were caught off guard. The daughter they knew never exhibited any stressors related to school.
“The only pressure was what I put on myself,” Dr. Fink explains.
What once felt like a massive roadblock on the path to knowledge — learning to decipher looping, unfamiliar script — would later mirror the work she would do in archives, reading handwriting that resisted easy decoding.
The Sheep That Changed Everything
Dr. Fink once considered a career in the U.S. Foreign Service. She even progressed through the stages of the testing process until the final step of the two-day oral interview.
“When I was asked to sign a document saying I’d uphold U.S. policy," she says, "even if it conflicted with my personal values and morals, I slid it back, thanked the interviewers, and walked out.”
After graduating from Georgetown University, she found herself at a crossroads. Ultimately, she took a job in a used bookstore. Amid an endless flow of books, her academic interests came into focus.
“A friend of mine was a history major,” Dr. Fink says. “I remember her railing about an assignment, complaining ‘I hate this book. It’s the most boring, pointless thing I’ve ever read.’”
One afternoon at the store, this very same book came across the counter.
“Obviously, I had to read it,” she says.
The book was Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. Unlike traditional histories centered on major events or powerful figures, it reconstructed the daily lives of ordinary people through Inquisition records.
“They were sheep herders in the Pyrenees, not exactly major historical characters,” Dr. Fink says. “Their routines, such as picking lice from each other’s hair, what they ate, their interpersonal relationships, and of course many arguments. All the minutiae my friend so stridently despised was captured in these documents. And I couldn’t get enough of it.”
It changed how she saw history.
“I wanted to read Inquisition documents myself,” she realizes.
The book revealed a side of history rooted in the experiences of everyday people she hadn’t read about before. It sparked a deeper curiosity, one that would shape the direction of her studies. Because such records were written in Latin, she didn’t hesitate to enroll in an intensive summer Latin program, entailing “Latin from 8 a.m. to noon, work from 12 to 8, then homework. Repeat.” Soon after, she received a full scholarship to the Catholic University of America for medieval studies.
Upon finishing her master’s degree, Dr. Fink paused to reconsider her next move after insistently being told “don’t go into academia — there are no jobs.” She ignored what she now says, “was actually very good advice.” Casting aside reason ultimately led her West to study early modern Spanish history at the University of Arizona under the mentorship of a giant in the field, Dr. Helen Nader.
A Day in the Life of an Archival Researcher
Curiosity to uncover the daily lives of those who typically go unheard, particularly women, eventually took her to Spain.
Living in Madrid for over two years, Dr. Fink structured her days around the rhythm of archival access. She woke particularly early in a city known for its late nights and made her way to catch an hour-long train ride to Toledo. From there, the work began before the research even started.
After traversing the bridge over the Tagus River, she climbed winding staircases carved into the city walls, dressed professionally as expected in archival settings, lugging an early-model laptop that felt, in her words, “like a cinder block.”
Time in the archives was limited. Most operated on split schedules, closing midday for siesta before reopening in the late afternoon. Every hour mattered.
Before the doors opened, Dr. Fink stopped at the same café each morning. Within days, the staff recognized her.
“They wouldn’t even ask what I wanted,” she says. “You walk in, and your coffee is already there.”
Fueled by caffeine and routine, she would wind her way through Toledo’s labyrinthine streets to the day’s destination. Long hours were spent reading, note-taking, assessing, and assembling often disparate clues from records scattered in nearly a dozen archival sites. One of her greatest achievements was gaining the trust of cloistered nuns to access documents in the private archive of the convent where El Greco painted his first major commission in Spain.
"Adult learners come with purpose. They’re not here to play around. They’ve chosen to be here, and they’re driven. That's what I love."
Dr. Fink found that focusing on widows and the experience of widowhood enabled her to chip away at assumptions that did not match what she was seeing in historical documents.
"History often paints early modern Spanish women as victims of patriarchal control,” Dr. Fink explains, “but the archival record reveals a much more complex story. Despite patriarchal norms, women, and widows in particular, adeptly navigated through interwoven layers of legal, social, and cultural systems to achieve their objectives.”
The intricacy and deliberateness of their strategies increasingly emerged as she reconstructed how they negotiated identity and power within the context of family and community.
These stories were not readily visible. Not one of the women she encountered had left memoirs, diaries, or other narrative accounts. Fragments of their lives had to be discovered, then stitched together one document at a time.
“For example,” Dr. Fink says, “you come to know people through something as seemingly mundane as a will. But wills have a power to speak across centuries, beckoning us to remember their authors’ lives, including the past and an envisioned future.”
Bringing the Past Into the Present
While her days spent in Spanish archives are now fond memories, the mindset of an archival researcher remains central to her work.
In the classroom, she encourages students to think like historians by asking questions, challenging assumptions, and looking beyond surface-level narratives.
Her impact extends beyond coursework.
One former student credited her with inspiring them to pursue a career in education, describing her teaching as encouraging, engaging, and transformative. For Dr. Fink, those moments matter.
"I’m not in a lab coming up with medical cures that save lives, but in the archives, you discover realities about life that deserve contemplation,” Dr. Fink says. “I encourage students to travel the route carved by their own curiosity. Staying true to seeking answers to questions important to you will help you discover your personal connection to humanity. And this link can ground your experience of yourself and the world around you."
She asks students, “what is your place in the human story? Why is it important?”
She no longer climbs the hills of Toledo with a laptop in tow, but the curiosity that once led her into the archives now shapes how she teaches, mentors, and leads. Each question, each discussion, each moment of discovery brings her students closer to something larger: “Their own path, their own purpose,” she says.
For Dr. Fink, history asks us to question what we think we know in a search for meaning that connects us to the human experience across place and time.
And if every question brings us closer to understanding, what might we discover if we asked more of them?
Q & A: Speed Round with Dr. Stephanie Fink
UAGC: Coffee or tea while researching?
Dr. Fink: Coffee, definitely.
UAGC: Early bird or night owl?
Dr. Fink: Early bird.
UAGC: One thing you appreciate about teaching adult learners?
Dr. Fink: They come with purpose. They’re not here to play around. They’ve chosen to be here, and they’re driven.
UAGC: If you could have dinner with anyone from history, who would it be?
Dr. Fink: That’s tough, but I’d say a group of 17th-century Sicilian nuns I once studied. Their stories would make an incredible HBO series.
UAGC: What are you currently reading or exploring for fun?
Dr. Fink: I’ve been reading about Leonora Carrington. She carved out her own space in a male-dominated surrealist movement and lived entirely on her own terms. I find that fascinating.
UAGC: Tea or coffee with an historical figure—who’s joining you?
Dr. Fink: Tea with Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo in Mexico City. The conversation would be unforgettable.
UAGC: One thing people might not expect about you?
Dr. Fink: If you ask my kids who my favorite is, they’ll tell you it’s the dog.