Seth Blum, Class of 2019
Majors: Mathematics, International and Area Studies Minor: Arabic
Mentor(s): Nancy Reynolds
Project Title: Changing Scales of Jordanian Water
Project Description: My project studies government and civil society discourses of transboundary water resources in Jordan, particularly the Jordan River, and how the scale of Jordanian water has evolved since two seminar negotiations in the 1950s and 1994. I hope to examine how the changing nature of Jordanian transboundary water is reflected in Jordanian government, basin planning authority, and foreign donor documentation in the last 25 years.
Patrick Goff, Class of 2018
Major: Germanic Languages and Literatures Minor: Economics
Mentor(s): Caroline Kita
Project Title: The Papier-mâché Elephant in the Room: Bertolt Brecht’s Critical Audience and the Radio Adaptation of Mann ist Mann
Project Description: My project examines the influence of critical reception on Bertolt Brecht’s radio production of his 1926 stage play Mann ist Mann. I argue that both positive and negative reception to the stage version of the play shaped the radio adaptation, showing the ways in which Brecht used the new medium of radio to both react against and connect with his critical audience. I hope to show the importance of Mann ist Mann for Brecht’s theory of radio, and the importance of radio drama (Hörspiele) for the study of Brecht’s epic theater.
Hilah Kohen, Class of 2018
Major: Comparative Literature
Minor: Russian Language and Literature
Mentors: Vincent Sherry and Nicole Svobodny
Project Title: Beyond Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: Contemporary Russian Literature in English, 1900-1930
Project Description: The canon of Russian literature that is widely read in English only began to form in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This project asks how and why renowned Russian writers contemporary to that period such as Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) and Maxim Gorky (1868-1936) were excluded from that canon, which instead came to promote older writers like Lev Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Contemporary writers, unlike their predecessors, could actively establish social networks that included figures like Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) or H.G. Wells (1886-1946) who had the ability to introduce Russian literature to a sustained Anglophone readership. I reconstruct these networks both to analyze their missed connections and to trace deeper aesthetic and thematic relations between early twentieth-century Russophone and Anglophone literary texts. This method of network analysis is a tool that present-day readers and scholars can use to expand the English-language canon of Russian literature.
Helen Li, Class of 2019
Majors: International and Area Studies
Minor: Psychological and Brain Sciences
Mentor(s): Geoff Childs
Project Title: Old Age in the New Age: Examining Urban-Rural Inequalities in China through the Lens of Elder Care
Project Description: My project explores the dynamics of late-life inequality through the lens of elder care in contemporary China. Through ethnographic interviews with members of one elderly home in rural Sichuan in addition to governmental policy analysis, I hope to put people’s lived experiences in conversation with the goals and adjustments within the policy-making arena.
Allie Liss, Class of 2018
Major: Anthropology: Global Health & Environment
Minor: Fine Art
Certificate: Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
Mentor: Shanti Parikh
Project Title: Disrupting Agency through Transportation: Place and Space in East St. Louis, Illinois
Project Description: This project examines how the mid-century interstate development and early 21st century MetroLink development in East St. Louis, Illinois, affect both empirical realities and qualitative understandings of place and space, using GIS analysis and qualitative ethnographic observations and interviews. I argue that the decision-making scale and exhibition of agency significantly impacted the ways in which development affected the community.
Sophie Lombardo, Class of 2018
Major: History
Minor: Writing
Mentor: Anika Walke
Project Title: The Politics of Postwar Justice
Project Description: Robert M.W. Kempner played a significant role in the Nuremberg Tribunals, first as a member of Justice Jackson’s prosecutorial team and later as Deputy Chief of Counsel for the Subsequent Trials. By analyzing Kempner’s conduct in the prosecution of war crimes after World War II, my Kling project considers how individuals negotiated oftentimes conflicting agendas in their efforts to legitimize the war crimes project.
Sarah Martin, Class of 2019
Majors: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African and African American Studies
Mentor(s): Amber Musser
Project Title: Black Women’s Re-tooling of Memes as a Digital Resistance Strategy
Project Description: Through the intersections of queer of color critique, theorizations of surveillance and surveillance studies, and black cultural production, my research maps the ways black women use the mutability of memes to resist surveillance apparatuses online and offline in order to exercise control over their precarious subject positions within the nation state. Ultimately, my research provides a new lens to examine intersections of visuality and power.
Byron Otis, Class of 2019
Majors: Art History and Painting
Mentor(s): William Wallace
Project Title: The Beaten Husband: Visions of “Manly” Women in the Dutch Golden Age
Project Description: In the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, images of women taking on the clothes and qualities of men, part of a misogynistic visual tradition expressing male fears of feminine power, flourished in the Netherlands. My project is to identify trends and changes in these images, analyzing them and connecting them to the social history of the Netherlands.
Abigail Rochman, Class of 2019
Major: International and Area Studies
Minor: Writing
Mentor(s): Alexandre Dubé
Project Title: Symbolism, Trauma, and Terror: Political Violence and the Memory of the French Revolution
Project Description: Although the French Revolution ended two centuries ago, politicians, historians, and theorists alike have not finished debating its implications. My project seeks to track and distill the changes of ethical judgement on the type and use of violence in the French Revolution, specifically during the period of the Terror— to investigate if there are instances when political violence is allowed or excused, and why.
Lexi Slome, Class of 2019
Majors: Linguistics, Psychology
Mentor(s): Kristen Greer
Project Title: Excavating Figurative Language: The Influence of Historical Origins of the Comprehension of Idioms
Project Description: How do we understand the meaning of idiomatic phrases like "kick the bucket" or "shoot the breeze" whose meanings are not intelligible from the sum of their parts? There are many factors that influence how people comprehend these phrases. My project focuses on one of these factors, specifically how the historical origins of idiomatic expressions in English affect how people interpret them.
Noah Weber, Class of 2018
Majors: Chinese, English Literature
Mentor: Letty Chen
Project Title: Mandarin Teacher as Author: Language Politics and Ethnicity in Lao She’s Little Po’s Birthday
Project Description: I am working on the first English translation to Chinese author Lao She’s Singapore-based novel, Little Po’s Birthday. The novel's second chapter, entitled “The Race Question,” depicts the young protagonist’s confusion toward adult ideas like “race” and “nationality.” Additionally, the narrator mentions that the characters speak languages other than Mandarin, making it is as though Lao She has effectively “translated” his novel into Mandarin from a multilingual original that does not exist. These contexts inform the critical analysis that supplements my translation.
Nathaniel Young, Class of 2018
Majors: Latin American Studies, Spanish
Mentor: Ignacio Sánchez Prado
Project Title: Performing Latin America: Violeta Parra and Cultural Identity in Popular Music
Project Description: My Kling project will focus on the late Chilean folkloric singer and artist Violeta Parra. Parra was a revolutionary cultural icon, that, throughout the mid 20th century, shaped longstanding discourse about political, social, and economic inequalities in both her home country and the Latin American region at large. Through archival research, testimonial analysis, and existing scholarship on Parra’s figure, this project seeks to identify how Parra performed her “Latin American" identity to both regional and international audiences, through trailblazing cultural production and outspoken political discourse.