Hanna Holborn Gray Research Fellowship

To those of you in the Class of ’26 and Class of ’27 who are planning to apply for the Hanna Holborn Gray research program, please remember that the application deadline is Mon., Feb. 5, 2025, at 12 noon. Faculty letters of recommendation should be submitted by the Feb. 5 deadline as well.

At this time, the College has not made a decision regarding whether in-person work or travel for student research will be permitted in Summer 2025. Applicants should keep this in mind when designing their projects. If a proposal involves in-person research and/or travel, applicants must provide a back-up plan in case health and safety restrictions remain in place.

Deadline: Monday, February 5, 2025, by noon.

Fellowships supporting undergraduate research in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given Bryn Mawr College a grant in honor of Bryn Mawr alumna Hanna Holborn Gray ’50 who served as Chair of the foundation's Board of Trustees. These funds are used to support undergraduate research in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences.​

Awards

Up to 12 students are selected each summer and have the opportunity to spend the summer conducting independent research. Students receive fellowships of $4,500 while they do research that can either be the beginning of the senior thesis or a project that stands alone, but is relevant to their intellectual interests.

Eligibility

Rising seniors and juniors with GPA’s of 3.3* or greater are eligible to apply.

• Students with a GPA below 3.3 may apply but will be required to include in their application an additional statement regarding their academic preparation to undertake their proposed research project.

Haverford students majoring at Bryn Mawr are eligible to apply.

HHG Seminar in May

There will be a three-day seminar starting the Monday after the May Commencement ceremony for all the HHG Fellows. The seminar will focus on the challenges and rewards of long-term research. Fellows are required to attend unless they will be away from campus due to study abroad.

Workshop Meetings

Starting in late May or early June, there will be eight weekly workshop meetings for the HHG cohort led by two graduate student mentors to discuss work-in-progress. Fellows working on campus or in the Philadelphia area are required to attend. Fellows pursuing their research at a distance will be expected to participate by Skyping into the meetings if time differences allow. These workshop meetings are complemented by online Moodle discussions. All Fellows are required to participate regularly on the Moodle discussion board.

Presentations

The program will conclude with presentations in the fall during which each Fellow will be required to give a brief talk about their research for the campus community.

Be as specific as possible about the focus of the proposed research and what you would hope to accomplish in 8-10 weeks of full-time research. Include at least one analytical question you will explore in your research. You must also explain how your proposed research contributes to your major field of study, and include a short, 1-page bibliography of texts that will be essential to the project. Length: two to three pages double-spaced plus one-page bibliography. 

• Arrange for recommendations from two members of the Bi-Co faculty.

• One from a Bi-Co faculty member who is familiar with your academic work and who will serve as your Faculty Advisor for your summer research.
• One from a faculty member who knows your academic work. If you will have a second Faculty Advisor, they should write this recommendation.

Send the recommendation form link to your recommenders at least three weeks before the application deadline.

You must also provide your recommender information about your application (a draft of your research project proposal, academic development statement and/or resume).

Selection Criteria

A student’s overall academic record will be an important consideration in the selection process. A strong application will be one that includes an original, well-defined proposal and strong faculty recommendations.

Applicants who are selected to be interviewed will be interviewed in February and March by the HHG Selection Committee. The committee will make their final decisions based on written materials and the interview. In the case of students spending the entire year or the second semester of their junior year abroad or away, interviews will generally be conducted by Skype.

Please fill out this online Budget Form.

Payment Details

This award is treated as a Fellowship. Learn more about Payment Procedures.

International Students must contact International Advising regarding authorization before engaging in any off-campus activity. 

Students proposing projects that involve research on human subjects should acquaint themselves with the procedures of the Institutional Review Board and discuss the process with their faculty advisor. Any research involving questionnaires, interviews, observational data, or any other method by which data is collected from human subjects must be approved by the IRB.

To receive the fellowship, fellows must have their projects approved by the IRB. The approval process takes place in the spring prior to the summer of research. This can be a lengthy and involved process, so be sure to begin discussing requirements for the IRB process with your faculty advisor as you develop your application.

Research projects cannot take place in a country on either the U.S. State Department Warning or Travel Alert lists, or Treasury "embargo" lists, except when an embargo is specifically directed toward a narrow set of individuals or circumstances in a country. Travel warnings and alerts can be accessed at:  www.travel.state.gov.

The Hanna Holborn Gray program could not exist without the contributions of faculty, who agree to advise HHG fellows on their summer research projects. The HHG opportunity is usually the first time that students engage in sustained, independent research, and it gives them a taste of what graduate work will involve. Faculty are remunerated for this important work. 

Faculty do not need to meet in person with their advisee over the eight weeks of the summer, but they should be available to their advisees via email and/or Zoom.  Each faculty/fellow pair can work out for themselves how often they will be in contact, but the expectation is that faculty will be in touch with their advisees once every week or so. If a faculty member will not be available for some period over the summer, this should be discussed in advance with the HHG fellow. 

Fellows are required to submit a mid-summer reflection of three to five pages that focuses on three research questions, along with an annotated bibliography.  This assignment should be submitted both to the graduate mentors and to the faculty adviser, and they are expected to comment on the paper soon after receiving it so that the fellow can make the best use of the remaining weeks of the summer to conclude their research. 

HHG fellows are required to submit a final paper of at least 10 pages towards the end of August to both the graduate mentors and the faculty adviser.  Faculty are expected to comment on this paper.  (The precise deadlines for the mid-summer reflection and the final paper vary from year to year.  Faculty and HHG fellows will be informed of the specific dates after the HHG selection process is completed.)

The HHG program concludes early in the fall semester, when the fellows summarize their research in panel presentations.  Each presentation is ten minutes long.  Faculty advisers are encouraged to attend their advisee’s presentation, but they do not have any particular responsibilities with regard to the presentation. 

HHG fellows and their advisers are required to sign an Expectations Worksheet in the spring, after the selection process, so that the communication arrangement between advisee and adviser is clear to both parties.

• Eliza Ellis ’25, Growth and Structure of Cities

Creating Home, Defending Against it: Placemaking Practices of Filipina Domestic Workers in Paris as Resistance

In response to the mismatch between its highly educated workforce and its employment opportunities in a struggling postcolonial economy, the Philippine government’s 1974 Labor Code initiated a large-scale exportation of overseas contract workers, many of whom are women employed in domestic care work in wealthy Asian and Middle Eastern countries. While the Philippines is highly dependent on the remittances of these overseas domestic workers, its government does little to protect them from the abuse they often encounter in the privacy of employers’ homes. Despite its lack of a formal migration program for domestic labor, France has become a highly desirable destination for Filipina domestic workers in recent years; because of this informality, the majority of the 50,000 members of its Filipino community experience double irregularity of documentation and employment. Unlike most other migrant domestic worker communities, Filipina domestic workers in Paris do not live with their employers, instead living in small apartments near them in the wealthy 16e arrondissement. In France’s highly informal domestic care sector, these women are specifically vulnerable to workplace violence and exploitation, while also having access to a unique degree of spatial mobility. This project explores the complex – and sometimes harmful – ways in which Filipina domestic workers in Paris claim access to safe working conditions through placemaking efforts in religious, public, commercial, and activist space.

• Olivia Gandee '25, Classical Languages

The Mist That Blunts Mortal Sight: The Distance and Divinity of the Observer in Vergil’s 'Aeneid'

This paper examines moments in Vergil’s epic, the Aeneid, in which the main character, Aeneas, becomes distanced from the action immediately surrounding him, taking on the role of an observer rather than a participant in the events of the story. I argue that Aeneas in these moments takes on a perspective aligned more closely with that of a divinity observing from a distance the actions of mortals than that of a mortal himself, and that Aeneas enters into and remains in this perspective not of his own agency and in fact often in direct conflict with his immediate wishes. Aeneas’s vision, despite taking on a divine aspect, remains heavily controlled by the gods, and while his position as a distanced observer ensures his safety, it can also be directly exploited by the gods to prevent Aeneas from being able to assume a participatory role and act of his own will.

• Tessa Lippmann ’25, Growth and Structure of Cities

Nice to Meat You: Stories of Meat-Eating Culture in Eurasian Immigrants in Philadelphia.

Communal memory practices are ways for immigrants to carry parts of their culture with them and pass them down to future generations. This research explores how food can act as a form of cultural memory, specifically through meat. Access to meat, including type, cuts, quality, cost, and physical location, can change dramatically through immigration and can heavily impact the role it plays in cultural memory. Interviews with immigrants from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Caucuses currently living in Northeast Philadelphia paint a vivid picture of meat culture in this community. Additional conversations with meat sellers and butchers contextualized meat culture in the United States, and the many ways that meat quality can be guaranteed or compromised, such as through animal care, butchering practices, processing, and freezing. Finally, religious texts, laws and regulations, and studies on meat quality grounded these interviews in evidence and further proved the connection between meat and cultural memory.

• Jared Saef ’25, Growth and Structure of Cities & Linguistics

Racialized Spatial Language among Students at Temple University

My research project seeks to investigate, contextualize, and analyze the use of racialized spatial language among a sample of Temple University students in reference to the majority-Black community that surrounds their campus. Through the collection of student interviews and the use of transcription, this research seeks to generate quantitative conclusions about the distribution of students’ language uses, and through qualitative analysis, the project seeks to link these specific uses of language to policies of systemic disinvestment, redlining, and campus expansion in North Central Philadelphia and to critically analyze how these language uses fundamentally inform how these students perceive and interact with Black urban space. At the intersection of linguistic anthropology, urban studies, and Critical Race Theory, this project will provide insight into the role of language in spatially constructing white supremacist notions of Black and disinvested urban space within the popular imaginary and the ways in which spatial language undergirds outsider interaction with segregated spaces. 

• Vivienne Schlemmer ’25, English & History of Art

A House(wife) Rebuilt: Tracing the Poetics of Domesticity in ‘To the Lighthouse’ 

Although Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse has generated a vast body of criticism since its publication, spatial and geocritical studies have only recently emerged as popular approaches to the text. This turn towards spatiality has lingered on the natural landscapes and ecological worlds of the novel, rarely considering domestic space and its most enigmatic occupant, Mrs. Ramsay, the matriarchal figure around whom all other characters compulsively revolve. My project redresses this gap in the criticism, challenging binary conceptions of Mrs. Ramsay as either passive housewife or empowered architect of domestic harmony, insisting instead on the irreducible complexity of her spatialized consciousness. I argue that she is not a figure “in” the house but “of” the house, her mind materializing within the space she occupies, her body inscribed onto the surfaces it lingers in. Her unique narrative presence and occupation of space is a synthesis of formalism and phenomenology; it is she who precariously embodies the novel’s tension between subjecthood and objecthood, shape and shapelessness, form and its dissolution. My analysis brings recent geocritical studies of To the Lighthouse into the confines of the home, finding in Mrs. Ramsay a medium through which the immensity of place and landscape permeates the shapes and the interiors of human life. It is Mrs. Ramsay, as Woolf wrote, whose death forms the novel’s “central line”; I contend that in life, too, and in her afterlife, she disrupts and expands the implicitly straight “line” of narrative and time through her liminal orientation within space.  

• Xutong Zhao '25, East Asian Language and Cultures

A Space Beyond the Battlefield: Dilemma and Possibility in Bei Dao’s Poetry

In What Is World Poetry, Stephen Owen may have proposed a disturbing possibility: it is hard for modern Chinese poets, whose writing styles are influenced by translated works of Western writers, to find a proper position on which their poems are translatable and meanwhile fairly represent their locality. We may question that is there truly a possibility for native Chinese writers who intend to write for international audiences to create art that is resonating yet standing neutral to ideological conflict? I will focus on the close reading of Bei Dao’s poems and alienating a map that encompasses a poet's works from his youth to old, it becomes apparent how the poet’s life experiences and evolving thoughts are reflected in their poetry. Bei Dao faced a dilemma in his early stage of writing. Whether Bei Dao wanted to emancipate his poetry from political or historical interpretation, for those who share his experiences, and for Western audiences focused on China’s human rights issues, his name remains tied to 'rebellion against collective discourse. Drawing upon this, I resort to Rey Chow’s Writing Diaspora and Lydia Liu’s Cross-Cultural Writing and argue that this dilemma is dissolved in Bei Dao’s retreat from the “battlefield”. His latter poems compel readers who attempt to objectify Bei Dao’s poetry to become aware of their own gaze; in other words, they prompt readers to question the conditions upon which their reading mechanisms are established. 

• Emma Adelman '25, Growth and Structure of Cities 

• Aaditya Bhasker '25, Growth and Structure of Cities 

• Della Burke '25, Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology & Growth and Structure of Cities

• Emily Rosenberg '25, Growth and Structure of Cities

• Alexandra von Koppenfels ‘25, Growth and Structure of Cities

• Xenya Currie ’24, Literatures in English

“The Submergence of Self in Communion with Divine Perfection”: Religious and Erotic Repression in Middlemarch

My project examines George Eliot’s 1871–2 novel Middlemarch with an attention to repression in the text. I propose that Middlemarch can be read as depicting protagonist Dorothea Brooke’s trajectory from one paradigm of repression to another. Specifically, I argue that she begins the novel in a paradigm of willed and voluntarily enacted repression, drawing from Victorian scholar John Kucich’s articulation of repression as self-denial and Friedrich Nietzsche’s notions of the will to power and the figure of the ascetic priest. After her uncanny encounter with Roman Catholicism on her honeymoon, however, she moves towards a more Freudian paradigm of repression, in which the return of the repressed is inevitable. This new paradigm offers her increased psychological health, greater somatic incorporation, and makes room for the possibility of genuine noncompetitive sympathy. In this way, I suggest that Middlemarch can be understood as prefiguring the Freudian understanding of repression, the uncanny, and the inevitability of the return of the repressed before Sigmund Freud himself, who published “The Uncanny” in 1919, thereby situating George Eliot in the intellectual prehistory of Freud.

• Zoë Kaufman ’23, History

Placing Memory: Unearthing Jewish History in Parisian Memorial Culture

While Paris contains many memorials and sites commemorating the lives lost in the Holocaust (including the Mémorial de la Shoah and the Mémorial des martyrs de la Déportation), few museums, historical sites, or historical markers cast light on the medieval Jewish community which thrived in the city for centuries. While it is undoubtedly crucial to remember and commemorate the lives of those murdered by the Nazis and the Vichy government, to focus exclusively on the horrors of the Holocaust without its context—the violent antisemitism of the early modern and medieval past—casts anti-Jewish oppression as a single, aberrative event rather than a long-standing component of European culture. This project analyzes Jewish memorial culture in Paris to unearth the physical traces of Jewish medieval communities and to argue that the French obsession with the Holocaust and with the nation’s own tangled relationship with the Second World War has resulted in a Parisian memorial landscape which elides the complexity of medieval Jewish lives. There is a deep need for new lieux de mémoire, and for extant museums and historical sites to fulfill their own obligations as spaces of memory for the medieval Jews of Paris.

• Tasneem Marouk '24, Growth and Structure of Cities

Creating Community: Identity, Belonging, and Immigrant Spaces in South Philadelphia

South Philadelphia is home to numerous immigrant communities, each of whom have created transnational enclaves that memorialize and preserve cultures and countries that they left behind, while also serving as gateways to their new lives. In this project, I seek to understand how place has been utilized by two immigrant communities in South Philadelphia - the Italians and the Southeast Asians. Using the concept of placemaking to guide my research, I study the functions place serves and the meanings it takes on within each community, as well as the way the meaning of place shifts as each enclave evolves. I first set up a theoretical framework on placemaking and ethnic enclaves, focusing on the use of place in ethnic enclaves. I then draw on several aspects of each community’s history to understand the factors that shaped their enclaves, using insights from field visits to illustrate key ideas. The analyses from my case studies allow me to highlight the purposes these enclaves serve as well as the challenges they face. Ultimately, I find that though place is essential to immigrant communities, mitigating the trauma of displacement and easing their transition into a new city, their access to space is threatened by gentrification and insufficient systemic protection. This negatively impacts not only immigrants in South Philadelphia, but also the city as a whole, preventing residents from having equal rights to the city.

• Regan Riehl ’24, Literatures in English

Yet There Be Method In’t: An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Hamlet Adaptations and the Adaptive Process

This project is an interdisciplinary investigation of Hamlet adaptations and the adaptive process, examining how playwrights reshape and reimagine Shakespeare's story. Adaptation facilitates a conversation between the adaptive playwright, past playwrights, characters, and the crowd that places Hamlet adaptations in an interconnected web with each other, forming a complex relationship where past plays both serve as a foundation for adaptive playwrights and propel them to explore new terrain. In looking at adaptations like James Ijames’ Fat Ham, Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, and David Ives’ Words, Words, Words, this project also uncovers the structural and cyclical aspects that make Hamlet a compelling source for adaptation. My research focuses on the symbiotic relationship between scholarship and creative work. Alongside traditional research, I have also written Butterball, an original theatrical adaptation of Hamlet. Focusing on the sibling relationship between Ophelia and Laertes, Butterball follows the imagined futures Ophelia envisions to cope with their shared trauma. By engaging in the creative process as a playwright, this research unearths the irrational elements of adaptation that cannot be fully captured through scholarly analysis alone.

• Chloe Rimmerman '24, Art History/French

Cut from the Same Cloth: Byzantine textiles, Henri Matisse, and the fabric of l'Art Moderne

This project investigates the conferences documenting a twenty year campaign (1896-1914) conducted by the archeologist Albert Gayet (1856-1916) in the Byzantine-Egyptian city of Antinoë (modern Cheikh-Abadeh). Gayet presented his findings, notably mummified corpses, to which he assigned an identity, and presented through bizarre, romantic spectacles — creating personalities which later appeared in the archeologist’s auto fictional novel, Le Roman de Claude d'Antioche (1914). Visited by throngs even in record summer heat — from the President of the Republic, Emile Loubet, to the adolescent Georges Bracque — Gayet’s displays became a touchstone of Parisian pop- culture and would have a far-reaching impact on artists, writers, and intellectuals for generations, among them Fernando Pessoa, Henri Matisse, and Jean Cocteau. Despite his cultural impact, contemporary scholarship often refers to the archeologist as amusing and exceptional, and dismisses his work as anecdotal rather than as evidence for broader cultural patterns rooted in time, place, and discipline. Popular across the boundaries of gender and class, Gayet’s work synthesized the major preoccupations of the Belle Epoque: communion with the occult by literary and artistic circles, the emergence of the modern woman — or the lethal femme nouvelle — and the popular culture of spectacle manifest in elaborate international expositions. I argue that by resurrecting, reinventing, and eroticizing the female mummies of Antinoë, their garments, and the city itself, Gayet asserts the centrality of French culture through possession and shaping of the cultural other into a totem for French intellectual progress across the threshold of time, space, and even death.

• Caroline Robertson ’24, Growth and Structure of Cities

Public Transportation Culture: Case Studies on the New York City Subway, Washington D.C. Metro, and Los Angeles Metro

Subway systems are underground worlds that tend to be overlooked by those navigating the city above. This project explores a variety of subway systems to better understand these worlds and explore how public transportation culture varies across the United States. Public transportation culture includes the reputation of a system, quantifiable culture such as ridership statistics, and finally rider experiences. Firsthand experiences navigating the New York Subway, Washington D.C. Metro, and Los Angeles Metro are at the core of this project. The comparison of these three systems grasp how the age of a system can influence the structural and social rider experience. In addition to personal observations, interviews conducted with residents of each city revealed a variety of ridership experiences. Themes of safety arouse in these interviews illuminating the delicate balance between having effective safety policies and having a public transportation culture where riders respect these policies.

• Vivian Sandifer '24, Classical Languages

Women’s Work: Weaving as Place, Process, and Product in Homer

This paper examines weaving imagery in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Using the scene of Helen weaving her web of the Trojan War in Iliad 3 as a case study, I analyze the significance of weaving in Homer and show that weaving can signify place, process, product, or a combination thereof. When weaving signifies place, the image of the loom is used to indicate that a woman is in her proper place in the household and thus also in society. Weaving as process is more indicative of metaphorical weaving, where the emphasis is on the aspect of creation inherent in both physical and metaphorical weaving. The last category, weaving as product, refers to when the textiles produced by weavers are emphasized rather than the process of weaving or the placement in domestic contexts of women at the loom; these products act as symbols of the weaver’s identity. Each of the three types of weaving, place, process, and product, I argue, assists the poet in crafting more nuanced and variegated identities for his female characters.

• Edward A. Sullivan ’24, Growth and Structure of Cities

When Empires Meet: Encounters Between Assyria and London in Nineteenth Century Urban Space

In mid-nineteenth century London, intellectual currents ranging from foreign policy to scientific innovations held a central place in society. Many of these trends were key to an emerging sense of urban production in the imperial capital. Steeped in this landscape and empowered by new discoveries, a distinct discipline emerged: Assyriology. This archaeology of the pre-Classical past was being conducted for the first time in what is now modern-day Iraq, at the outskirts of British, and even Ottoman, influence. London, reflecting the empire it presided over, also began to expand at its edges in the form of suburbs. As Assyrian material culture was imported to London and legitimized as part of the accepted cultural canon, suburbia adopted Assyria for its own monuments. Case studies of the Albert Memorial in South Kensington and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, as well as other visual and spatial evidence from the era, demonstrate this transformation from periphery to legitimacy for both Assyriology and suburban space in London.

• Jian (Tom) Wei ’24, Growth and Structure of Cities

Navigating Imperial Desires: Land Ownership and Place Making of Chinese Communities in Philadelphi and Los Angeles 1882-1943

My project concerns Chinese American involvement in US urban development using LosAngeles Chinatown from the 1910s to the 1930s as a primary example and Philadelphia as a comparison. Through examining the primary documents available in the archives along with information presented in secondary sources, this project argues that the Chinese Americans were not simply a community made up of involuntary coolies, but a complicated group with members acting with their own volition. Specifically, this project uses historical Chinese restaurants as the metaphor of Chinese American experience. Comparing the change of ownership, naming convention, menu composition and other characteristics of the Far East Chinese Restaurant in Philadelphia and the Li Po Restaurant in Los Angeles to show the concentration of social change that took place over these decades. Therefore, the theoretical goal of this project is to define this unique form of agency exhibited by Chinese Americans during the Chinese exclusion era which set them apart from being simply Chinese or simply American. The significance of this project is to examine how American racial politics during the early twentieth century created a lasting international impact while also provoking various attempts of resistance and cooperation.

• Charlotte Yuan ‘24, International Studies, Sociology

Difficult Conundrum or Rare Opportunity? How High-Tech Middle Powers in East Asia Navigate the U.S.-China Chip War

Despite rich research by IR scholars on middle powers’ behaviors in the great power competition, little is known about their strategic choices in the area of technology, including the semiconductor sector. As Biden further tightens chipmaking export controls to China to limit its growth, high-tech middle powers face a difficult dilemma: Do they follow US’s containment policy against China, or do they support China’s national technology development goal? This paper aims to explore this question by analyzing three semiconductor leaders in East Asia: South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Contrary to the seeming conundrum, I find that all three middle powers have much to benefit from the great power technology competition by aligning closer with the US and forming internal alliances with other like-minded middle powers. Compared to China, the US is an indispensable and more reliable partner in the semiconductor industry. Furthermore, cooperation among middle powers themselves not only improves competitive advantage but also reduces potential risks in the existing vulnerable global supply chain.

• Priscilla Zhao, Philosophy

Women and Epistemic Injustice in Medicine

According to Miranda Fricker’s recent suggestion, Hermeneutical Injustice occurs when a significant area of one’s social experience is obscured from understanding due to (prejudicial) lacuna in shared resources for social interpretation. This paper challenges the original definition by Fricker. I argue that there exists a distinct form of hermeneutical injustice which occurs owing not to lacuna in/a lack of collective interpretive resources, but rather to failing to apply existing interpretive resources to due social groups and their experience.

• Liz Burke ’23, History of Art

Dance on Screens: A Close Look At Creative and Scholarly Work

This project approaches short, experimental dance films from the tense space between academic discourse and contemporary makers’ practices. I challenge the dominant use of the term

“screendance,” in favor of umbrella terms such as “dance film” or “dance and technology”, which more accurately meet the unfurling practices of those working at the intersections of art and digital mediation technology. I locate futures of dance and the “dance world” in deepening scholarly conversations and contemporary works, featuring the perspectives of artist-scholars who have historically been marginalized, whose visibility has ascended in the new era of dissemination of dance over the internet. I ultimately conclude that by making dance for the screen, director-choreographers extend dance performance through playful attention to and use of space and time, unprecedented world-building, and advancing the visibility of their craft.

• Sonya Friel ’23, Anthropology and Neuroscience

International Students and Principles of Belonging at University in the USA

My project investigates how differences in upbringing and background circumstances impact the experience of international students in the USA, particularly in regards to sense of belonging, and how this influences mental health and overall wellbeing. The purpose of the study is to learn from international college students of all backgrounds to gather insights and perspectives about their experiences in college, and the goal is that it will contribute to a body of research that will be utilized by academic institutions to better the experiences of these students in the future. 41 surveys and 13 personal interviews with current and alumni international students of small liberal arts colleges on the East Coast of the USA were conducted, involving students from 6 colleges across 4 states on the East Coast of the USA. The analyzed data suggest how influential factors, including cultural and financial background, race, ethnicity, social status, and language, mediate the experience of long-term study abroad, contribute to sense of belonging, and impact overall health, wellbeing, and academic success. The majority of international students reported difficulties in connecting with domestic students on campus as a result of their race, ethnicity, first language, or socioeconomic status. Language barriers and financial disparities were the most frequently reported barriers to connecting with other students. More reported challenges corresponded with lower perceived sense of belonging on campus. Lower perceived sense of belonging was positively correlated with reported decrease in physical and/or mental health during the college experience. All students, regardless of reported sense of belonging on campus, indicated friends and family - in particular, fellow international students - as a primary source of support during the study abroad experience. This study indicates that institutional support strategies for international students should focus on strengthening the international student community itself, rather than focusing on student assimilation into American college culture.

• Layla Fistos ’23, Classical Languages; Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

"What's up with those magic wombs?" Medicine, Magic, and Agency in Greco-Egyptian Magical Amulets

In this project, I examine Greco-Egyptian magical amulets with uterine imagery and the inscriptions on these amulets to understand how, if, and when the womb is personified. I employ the archaeological frameworks of object agency and new materialism to discuss amulets as objects that were meant to be used. I examine Graeco-Roman and Egyptian medical and magical texts pertaining to the womb to provide context for this personification. Womb personification and object agency can reveal the relationships between the self, body, and illness as they manifest in the discourse between the amulet user and the amulet. An analysis of these womb amulets shows that wombs were imagined to have the agencies of movement and consumption/desire, while the users sought to exercise proactive and reactive forms of agency, the main agentive force being the personification of the womb. The amulets themselves had agency in their visibility, feeling, and size (object agency) which influenced the interactions between the amulet user, womb, illness, and divine and are defined by the affordances the objects have. My research is relevant, not just for the ancient world, but for our present context in the current pandemic and lives of individuals with illness. We personify illness similar to how persons in the ancient world personified the womb on these amulets. It is endemic to the human condition.

• Lily Goltz ’23, Growth and Structure of Cities

Neurodivergency in Museums

In the United States, the current motivation for creating accessibility in public spaces is to meet the requirements and demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Unfortunately, the ADA does not currently include accommodations for neurodivergent people; which is a blanket term that includes people with Autism, ADHD, Down Syndrome, Tourette’s Syndrome, mental illnesses, and more. This report discusses neurodivergency in the setting of museums, comparing art museums to science museums. Through observations and interviews with four museums throughout New York City, this research looks to understand the importance of including neurodivergency in accessibility practices, specifically in museums. Accessibility is an uphill battle for most museums, having to overcome funding issues and employee shortages before they can create progress. The Americans with Disability Act seems to be the only driving force for the museums without accessibility initiatives. The individuals who are tasked with accessibility programming in each museum must have the motivation for future accommodations, where it takes time, effort, and education that they may not currently have. The research was conclusive that by including quiet hours or limited access hours for neurodivergent individuals as well as resources like sensory packets or pre-arrival online information, museums can become significantly more accessible for all individuals.

• Deniz Gonen ’23 (Haverford College), Growth and Structure of Cities

“Eating Each Other’s Lunch”: A Study of Campus Expansions at New York City Universities

This project studies Columbia University, New York University, and City College of New York to understand how these colleges view their neighborhoods and New York City as a whole, focusing primarily on physical campus expansions and the nature in which they are carried out. Traditionally, college was seen as a pastoral retreat for elite men and closed campus architecture reflects that. In cities, however, universities present themselves as bringers of democratic education. Much of how the college expands and how the community is included in that process toes the line between these two ideals. This project traces the history of these institutions from the 1950s to the present, where I look at a critical time of expansion for each institution and then see where they are now. Since these colleges are reliant on New York City for a home, an image, and a student body, it is important to consider their place as active agents in the city development process, and how their anti-urban and often anti-community bias is reflected in space and perception.

• Ananya Hindocha ’23, Sociology and Political Science

Queer and Asian in the Bay: A sociological Examination of Asian American Queer Identity in Immigrant Communities

In an effort to better understand how the intersections of immigrant status, ethnicity, and queerness influence identity, this research project examines the experiences of queer second- generation Asian-Americans in the Bay Area. The project is a sociological examination of the consequences of colonization, migration, and Asian survival in the United States as it relates to queer identity. Throughout the project, I analyze historical data in the form of oral histories, zines, and artwork as well as perform interviews with research participants. Using this data, I trace the origins of the model minority myth and the impacts it has on Asian-American communities. Furthermore, I use this framework to better understand the relationship between Asian identity and queerness, analyzing the view of queerness as a failure to achieve the standards set by the model minority myth. Finally, I use the concepts of assimilation and acculturation to understand the relationship between immigrant parents and second generation Asian-Americans in regard to queerness and cultural values. Overall, this paper is an investigation into this unique intersection and how the relationship between Asian identity and queerness may unravel.

• Claire Hylton ’23, Classical Languages

“Primeval, two-natured, thrice-born”: A study of gender-fluid Dionysos in the Bacchae and the Orphic Hymns

This paper concentrates on the gender fluidity of the gods in the Orphic Hymns, a Hellenistic Greek collection of short invocations. These hymns, mostly consisting of short epithets, are quite mysterious, given their unusual presentation of the gods and cosmogony, and the relatively little information that we have about the authorship or provenience. There is relatively little scholarship about the Hymns, and none that analyzes its depiction of gender. This paper argues that one of the most important parts of the Hymns is its depictions of the gods as gender fluid, transcending the gender binary with a fluid, expansive gender experience. This fluidity is one of the ways in which the gods of this collection are constructed as all-powerful. I use the methodology of polythetic categories and cue validity to show how gender is a constructed category, and I look at a variety of cues throughout the Hymns to evaluate how they signal gender. This study is primarily philological, looking at the specific words used to describe birth, physical function, and appearance. While one might describe the human experience of gender as embodied, the divinities do not inhabit gender in the same ways. I look at the ways in which the divine embodiment is differently conceived, set the gods outside the limitations of the human experience. The Hymns offer a curious challenge to a rigid gender binary, depicting the gods as existing beyond these boundaries.

• Ella Kotsen ’23, English

Ruth Moore’s Quietside and the Power of Island Voices

My research focuses on the traditionally working-class area of Mount Desert Island, Maine known as “the Quietside.” Using the literature of famed local female and Queer author, Ruth Moore, I will examine the legacy of both Moore’s literature and the storytelling that preserves the local community. I will be using American Literary Regionalism to describe some of the topics that make Moore’s work relevant on a grander scale in the literary field. I hope my research will show examples of real-life documented stories on the island, histories of the past, and how that affects an increasingly developing spatialized environment of Mount Desert Island through oral and written interviews with the local population. I aim to explore the dynamics of the increase in tourism and the methodology of writing about delimited, traditionally working-class communities that Ruth Moore so brilliantly wrote about.

• Michelle Tran ‘23 (Haverford College), Growth and Structure of Cities

Making and Re-Making Home: Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans on the US Gulf Coast

How do you create home in a place of contradictions? I explore what home means for Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans who have resettled in the U.S. What the implications are of their home-finding, home-making, and resettling in a greater settler colonial narrative as well as what it means to recreate a home on land that was stewarded by slaves. In investigating the intersections of place, history, and violence, I analyze the nuances of resettlement and commonalities in how we create home across timelines and geographies. Pulling home discourse between queer and feminist scholars, diasporic authors, Southern autobiographers and my family history, I assert that home is an orientation─within it, place, time, remembering, and imagining present themselves as stories.

• Saiqian Xiao ’23, Growth and Structure of Cities

From Local to Global: Reinterpretation of Food System in Philadelphia Chinatown

This research investigates an immigrant enclave – Philadelphia Chinatown – under the lens of food study and analyzes the adaptation of its food system at urban and regional scales. Even as the core of Chinatown's commerce, culture, and renown, its food is often concealed under spatial connections and overlooked by many urban policymakers. This study analyzes the structure and operation of the Philadelphia Chinatown food supply chain and distribution models for Asian food ingredients. Through doing systematic archival and library research and conducting field trips and interviews, the study uncovers interactions among the food supply chain, various stakeholders, and their spaces. Based on existing data, the food networks of Philadelphia Chinatown include three types of food suppliers on the consumer-end. The discussion of wholesalers is limited by a lack of primary and secondary data. Meanwhile, the dichotomy of the mainstream system and the alternative one needs to be reconsidered given recent development.

• Carlee Warfield ’23, Political Science

Disability, Deliberative Democracy, and the Digital Landscape

This research model evaluates how online deliberation can ease the burden of participation in deliberative democracy for disabled individuals. Theorists have studied how practices of deliberative democracy can be transformed in order to become more accessible for disabled participants, as well as how online deliberation can increase inclusivity for marginalized groups in opposition to face-to-face deliberation; however, few studies reveal conclusive results on whether online deliberation can better support disabled individuals, specifically. Therefore, this research model details how to build an online deliberative environment and assess deliberative procedures inclusive of disabled participants.

• Emily Aguilar ’22, Classical Languages

The Womb as Intermediary in Late Antique Platonic Cosmogony

My project examines womb and pregnancy imagery in Plato’s Timaeus and Symposium and two Late Antique cosmogonies participating in the Platonic tradition: The Secret Book of John and the Poimandres. Because Plato sees the womb as an intermediary between the divine and mortal, the two later texts examined in this paper also use the womb as an intermediary between the divine and mortal, but do so in different ways according to each text’s cosmogony and ideal response to the state of the cosmos. There are two directions in which these intermediary-wombs might produce. The first is from a divine parent to a mortal offspring, and is seen in Plato’s Timaeus and the cosmogonical sections of The Secret Book of John and the Poimandres. The second is from a mortal parent to a divine offspring, and is found in Plato’s Symposium and the philosophical sections of The Secret Book of John and the Poimandres. Through close reading and comparisons between the texts in the first section, we find that a significant amount of power is attributed to the womb, power that can be used either in harmony with the divine or in disharmony and ignorance. In the second section, we find that this power and potential is applied to the humans living in the world created by the first set of wombs, and that humans can use this power to reunite with the divine they have been separated from.

• Hannah Appelhans ’22,  Latin and German

Horace’s Ode 2.6 through German and English Eyes: Hölderlin and Conington

“Because there are no rules, no laws [for translation], there cannot be an absolute right or an absolute wrong” (William Weaver). Translators argued for centuries about the proper methods and means of translation: how to disclose the meaning without losing the structure; how to transfer sound, rhythm, and rhyme; how to create a good poem and a good translation—for these are naturally two very different things. Every translator makes these choices for each of his translations, but what influences him to do so? Especially for translations from Latin, the long history of earlier translations, the culture of translation, and the culture of classics and classical study affect translators immensely. Besides this, the culture of any translator’s country changes how he reads the poem: for example, the concept of Freundschaft is very different in Germany from the concept of friendship in England. When faced with the word amicus (friend) in a poem from the Latin poet Horace, a German translator will imagine something an English translator will not. These two countries—while more similar than some—have immensely different literary histories and relationships with the world of classical study, which in turn change their translation histories. Could various differences in translations point to greater cross-cultural differences? Could we apply these differences to other poems, other translators, other translations? This project explores the effect of culture on the translation of Horace’s Ode 2.6 by Friedrich Hölderlin (one of the greatest German translator-poets of all time) and John Conington (one of Horace’s most prolific English translators).

• Shreya Bhutani ’22, Growth and Structure of Cities

Deconstructing De-facto Segregation in Suburban School Systems

Exploring the issue of de-facto segregation within the realm of suburban educational systems, this research applies budgetary analyses to qualitative understandings of community spaces. The research is situated in the greater Philadelphia area, with particular emphasis on Montgomery County. This study includes a geographic analysis of race, economics, and class in connection to each educational facility and a historic investigation of suburban Pennsylvania. This study considers how school quality may be expressed through physical facilities, budgets, programs, graduation rates, and test scores. It considers the relationship between perceived quality and the amount of capital accumulated through income tax and whether or not a racial division impacts these values. Overall, the study utilizes the institution of school as an indicator of dynamics between neighborhoods.

• Daniel R. D’Elia ’22, Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology and Physics

Earth, Sky, and Power: How Astronomy Reveals the Influences Molding al-Andalus’ Historical Trajectory

Astronomy in al-Andalus was a discipline informed by the religious, political, and cultural environment within the Iberian Peninsula as well as the religious, political, and cultural environment of the wider Arabic-speaking world. Before and early in the establishment of al- Andalus in the 1st century AH/8th century CE, astronomy in West Asia, and subsequently al- Andalus, was faced with tensions rooted in the religious, political, and cultural concerns of the time such as the use of Arabian folk astronomy versus the use of outside traditions including Greek, Babylonian, and Indian astronomical and astrological traditions. As Andalusī astronomy became established as its own unique branch of astronomy in the medieval world, it meshed with a pre-existing Latin astrological tradition, making it a target of the Córdoban jurists who believed such use of the stars was contrary to monotheistic, Islamic belief, often utilizing similar arguments to reject use of astrology that were used in the early ‘Abbāsid debates on the inclusion of foreign astronomy in Arabo-Islamic astronomical scholarship and efforts to harmonize polytheistic folk practices with monotheistic ones. Unorthodox rulers such as the Córdoban chamberlain al-Manṣūr used this rejection of astrology to their advantage through ordering the destruction of astrological works and astronomical works with astrological components, thereby gaining the powerful support of these particular Córdoban jurists. Andalusī astronomical and astrological traditions, therefore, were often used as a means of maintaining power and establishing legitimacy, thus adding to the historical precedence for other works, such as Sufi works, to similarly face public destruction. These periodic book burnings had a far reaching effect of not only galvanizing the wider Sufi community but also providing an impetus for Andalusī astrological works to become increasingly esoteric, ensuring their relevance in al- Andalus and Latin Europe for centuries to come.

• George Doehne ’22, Growth and Structure of Cities

Burning Questions: A Reconceptualization of Fire and Land in California and Abroad

This project compares and contrasts California’s wildfire situation with several countries that are also dealing with cultures of fire. Some are managing to do so more successfully (like Spain and Australia), and others less so (like Portugal). This paper uncovers lessons learned from these other societies—things to do, things to avoid doing—and applies them to California in order to discover what political, spatial, and cultural changes might be needed. It tries to answer the question of what California can learn from societies where fire is endemic about the best organizational, cultural, and spatial formations to combat ever-worsening wildfire conditions. It seeks to find answers to how the ways we approach ecology, housing, and more are fueling the growth, danger, and destructivity of fires and megafires, and then what policies and ideas can help avoid placing people and places in the way of fires in the first place. Too much prior work treats these countries’ wildfires as unique and isolated disasters, even though all these cases share the important traits of being pyrocultures: societies used to fire, living among flammable Mediterranean ecologies in the midst of a growing climate crisis. Lessons from them can and should be applied to each other, and in this project I culminate by doing so.

• Cate Farrell ’22, Growth and Structure of Cities

Conversations About Race: How the Built Environment can Serve as a Catalyst for Critical Thinking

• Anna Hsu ’22, Philosophy

Recovering the Authentic Self – Examining Depression and Treatment in Relation to Autonomy

What makes someone’s decisions their own? Various theories of identity claim that what constitutes a person is their memory, their physical body, or even their moral system. In my project, however, I employ a more subjective narrative identity that we use to distinguish an individual person from others. I assert that autonomy – the capacity to govern oneself – is essential to narrative identity because it is necessary for one to maintain a sense of self, or authenticity. Our ideas about narrative identity, autonomy, and authenticity shape our daily actions and thus have ethical implications, which I will elaborate on using the case of depression. Depression’s role in personal identity is significant because it can directly interfere with one’s autonomy both during and after a severe depressive episode. Severe depression can rob someone of the ability to make meaningful choices as an agent and disrupt one’s sense of authenticity. This disruption often continues even after administering antidepressant medication. Medication, in simply trying to correct a chemical imbalance, not only oversimplifies the complexity of depression, but also may not function in restoring one to a feeling of authenticity as we would perhaps want. I argue that the most common method of treating psychiatric disorders such as depression—medication—fails to promote patient autonomy because it creates the misconception that the agent has no control whatsoever over their mental state.

• Esther (Ye Ram) Kim ’22, Comparative Literature, French, & Political Science

Reclaiming True Multilingualism in the Maghreb: The Production and Development of Written Amazigh Literature

The Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) has been facing a phenomenon of unbalanced multilingualism in which Modern Standard Arabic and French occupy an elevated literary space, while Dialectal Arabic and the Amazigh language (Tamazight) are set aside as colloquial languages only. Such linguistic multiplicity can bring about an identity crisis to the Maghrebin because a model of one people, one language, and one identity does not fit in the Maghrebi region. Through an analysis of Amazigh literature written in French and Tamazight, along with interviews with Tunisian Amazigh activists, I identify Tamazight as a “heart language” of the Maghrebins and explore how a writing of Amazigh identity contributes to the larger Maghrebi identity and literary environment. I argue that the significance of Tamazight literature will add to the multilingual writing of Amazigh literature that truly reflects multilingual characteristics of the Maghrebi region. The prevalence of multiple languages in the Maghreb no longer proves to be a reason of linguistic and identity crisis; instead, it can become the force that unites and strengthens the region to embrace and own all the languages, blur the boundary between orality and the written word, and establish a Maghrebi identity uniquely found in North Africa. Maghreb’s multilinguistic and multicultural identity will only be enriched, as a folklorized Amazigh heritage of the past becomes reinstated as a living and development-oriented identity.

• Maya Schneider ’22, Anthropology

Expanding Networks & Creating Space: LGBTQ+ Identifying Young Adults' Experiences with Identity Development Amidst a Pandemic

Since the onset of the COVID19 pandemic which fully reached the United States in the middle of March 2020, people have experienced disruption to their day to day lives. Whether young or old, living in urban or rural areas, and regardless of race, ethnicity, or sexuality, everyone has been disrupted. This disruption’s impact was and is still seen within the population of college aged young adults, many of whom were forced to suspend their in-person classes, vacate their campuses, and return home. This profound shift in day to day life impacted the way that young adults socialize with peers, their relationships with others, and their relationship with self. Identity development, while an ongoing process throughout many individuals’ entire life, realizes its potential for many young adults at the point which they leave their immediate family and go to college, living away from home for the first time. When young people were removed from their college environment and brought back to their homes, their identity development was impacted, specifically as it relates to sexuality. LGBTQ+ identity development is impacted by a variety of factors including access to peers with similar identity, visibility of role models who share a similar identity, and an accepting environment in which to develop one’s identity. Following the changes brought upon by the COVID19 pandemic, many of the ways young adults socialized and connected changed drastically, impacting these factors which influence LGBTQ+ identity development. Less access to peer groups and removal from an environment that fosters individuality and the acceptance of minority identities forced young people to adapt the ways that they socialize, connect, and interact, and in turn impacted identity development. As a direct result of the COVID19 pandemic, the ways in which young adults engaged with social media, their peers, and the world around them ended up influencing LGBTQ+ identity development. This study seeks to identify the specific reasons how and why young adults were influenced by the changes resulting from the pandemic, both generally, and specifically relating to their LGBTQ+ identity development. Through both the recreation and formation of existing and new social spaces, and the expansion of social networks during a time of increased isolation, LGBTQ+ identifying young adults utilized many tools to create opportunities for their identity development.

• Shreya Singh ’22, Growth and Structure of Cities and Fine Arts

Accessibility to living and social spaces in UAE for migrant workers

In this paper, I will argue that citizenship gives individuals a sense of security and legal protection that is crucial to move closer to social equality. The research reported in this paper provides insights into the living and leisure spaces for migrant workers in the UAE. It gives a deeper understanding of how cities, such as Dubai, can change their urban planning design to improve the accessibility to leisure spaces, such as public parks and beaches, and bridge the gap between low-income migrant workers and high-income native groups through social inclusion. While the conditions of the UAE define a limited population, questions of adequate housing, leisure and autonomy recur in the Gulf States and other areas increasingly dependent on migrant labor subordinate to the needs of citizens, ranging from Hong Kong to European countries such as Germany. In all of these places, there are often barriers that limit migrant workers’ access to necessary resources, which prevents them from fully participating in economic and social life. In this paper, I evaluate the UAE’s social structures to understand how each group constructs a sense of belonging. I use this analysis to explore solutions to improve laborers' social inclusion.

• Mackenzie Tygh ’22, Interdisciplinary Physics

Searching for a Dialogue Between Science and the Humanities: Towards a Visualization of the Divine Comedy

This project contemplates an attempt to translate a scientific phenomenon in the cosmology of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, the formation of Mount Purgatory, into code with the intention of critically examining the possibilities offered by digital visualization. Through this case study, I propose an agenda for digital humanities in the field of Dante Studies and beyond, urging both humanists and scientists to engage with humanistic theoretical principles and utilize them in the production of computational methods. My work places past engagements with the Comedy in a historical context before introducing the term digital visualization and looking at one case of this analytic device in action with reference to Dante scholarship. After detailing the processes associated with coding and visualizing Mount Purgatory’s construction, this project expands to a vision of an elaborate worldview desiring a new, digitized form of literary knowledge.

• Gemma Van Nice ’22, Linguistics and German

Testing theories of slurs

In linguistics, there are many different theories about slurs and how people think about them, but there is little empirical evidence to back up these claims. My research seeks to close this research gap by asking real speakers about these slur theories with the LGBT+ community as my case study. Over the course of the summer, I made an online survey that asks participants about six different theories relating to slurs and I am currently using it to collect data for my senior thesis.

• Elinor Berger ‘22, English

Cleopatra, She Wrote: An Analysis of how Women Wrote Cleopatra VII in Early Modern Drama

Throughout the early modern period, neoclassical dramas emerged as a popular means of relaying political and religious beliefs to private and public audiences in England. When Mary Sidney translated the French playwright Robert Garnier’s drama Marc Antoine, she began a tradition of English authors translating and writing plays following the tragic lives of Antony and Cleopatra. This project explores the impact of Sidney’s translation, particularly on the lives of early modern aristocratic women, as well as the implications of depicting the generally domestic aspects of the life of a female sovereign. In this project, I also work to trace the popularity of the Cleopatra narrative, from the “Sidney Circle” to the public stage, as I examine Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra and Katherine Philips’ translation of Pierre Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée. My investigation into how portrayals of Cleopatra varied from play to play culminates in an analysis of early modern political allegory, stoic philosophy, and how female identities changed and emerged because of the Egyptian pharaoh.

• Elicie Edmond ’21, English

Title: Deconstructing Voluntourism, and Community Engagement, in Contexts of Inequality

The study explores how college students reflect on institutionally-supported community engagement with underrepresented communities. The goal of this study is to understand how solidarity can continue in culturally and ethically competent ways as students aim to act as global citizens in contexts of inequality. A Qualtrics survey was distributed to Bryn Mawr and Haverford College students who received institutional support to undergo acts of community engagement for their summer internships and/or fellowships. Through conceptual, and theoretical, framework I analyze the strategies of cultural and ethical competency as students reflected on their summer experiences and communities they were engaging with. Lastly, I identify ways in which student recommendations on cultural and ethical competency preparation may inform other students and educational institutions in the development of internships/fellowships that look to serve underrepresented communities.

• Alix G.R. Galumbeck ’21, Classical Cultures and Societies; Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology

Partners in Crime? Deconstructing Ethnicity to Identify a Connection between the Denyen and the Peleset

Material culture is sometimes used to determine and identify an ancient population’s identity and ethnicity. Currently, many scholars associate Aegean-style pottery made from local southern Levantine clay with the ‘Sea Peoples’ based on evidence from early 12th century BCE Egyptian and 6th century BCE Biblical texts. By analyzing the ceramic assemblages from two Levantine Iron IB sites, Azor and Miqne-Ekron, allegedly associated with two subgroups of the Sea Peoples, the Denyen and the Peleset, the relationship between material culture and group identity can be explored alongside one another in order to unpack previous interpretations around identity and ethnicity in the Iron Age Southern Levant. This comparative case study of Azor and Ekron will attempt to answer whether the Denyen—associated with the Israelite tribe, Dan—and the Peleset—believed to be the Biblical Philistines—have some sort of connection, and, if so, whether approaches which use material culture to identify ethnicity are tenable. The findings of this research will help challenge current narratives of identity in the southern Levant and move the scholarship forward by exploring the cultural interactions between the ‘Sea Peoples’ and the local populations.

• Loh, Jia Yi (Johana) ’21, English

Gender Ecosystems: Responsive Gender Development in Twelfth Night

Through reconceptualising Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, I propose the novel concept of a gender ecosystem, where gender comes into being in the spaces in between individual bodies. I argue through Twelfth Night and the character(s) of Viola/Cesario/Sebastian for the potential of gender as a collective, mutually responsive construct rather than an internal, individual one. Viola, the self-described, “all the daughters of [their] father’s house, / And all the brothers too” (2.4.132-133), dismantles the singularity of the individual and provides us a conduit through which to explore the interconnected web of characters that form Illyria’s gender ecosystem. Where a child-parent relationship and femaleness are constructed in the space between Viola and their late father, a sibling relationship and maleness are constructed between Viola and their brother. Gender is constructed through what is made meaningful between characters, rather than what is true about a character in themself. Using this framework of the gender ecosystem, I reconsider the final scene of the play, generally deemed to be a restoration of hetero- and cis-normative ideas through marriage. I distinguish between the technicalities of the marriages involving two bodies, and the collective assemblage that these marriages perhaps function as conduits into.

• Kai McGinn ’21, Growth and Structure of Cities

The Wife, the Courtesan and the Machiya: Investigating the Active Presence of Edo Period Women through Spaces of Dwelling

Japan’s Edo Period (1603-1868) is heavily celebrated as a two-century long time of peace, modernization, and cultural formation; however, these glories often overshadow the patriarchal expectations that were enforced upon the era’s women, especially the courtesan and the wife. This project aims to counter the itemized understanding of these Edo women by analyzing their relationship with two types of machiyas (urban wooden townhomes): the ageya, an entertainment machiya in which courtesans worked, and the shouka, a combined residential and commercial machiya in which wives lived. The courtesan’s mastery coupled with her client’s cluelessness of the ageya’s labyrinthine circulation allowed the courtesan to situate herself as superior; the wife’s ownership of the shouka’s oku space gave her a position of command that went against expectations of obedience that society had for her. Architectural analyses on the ageya and shouka, as well as text-based analyses on Edo period narratives serve as evidence to argue both courtesan and wife used the architecture’s modes of circulation to create forms of ownership for themselves that were atypical and unrecognized in Edo Japan.

• Benita Ikirezi Mulindabigwi ’21, Growth and Structure of Cities

The Role of Urban Planning in the Development of Kigali City, Rwanda

This project looked at urban planning in Kigali, Rwanda and its role in addressing issues rising from urbanization. The Rwandan government has invested in urbanization strategies like master plan development and implementation in the Kigali in hopes of turning Rwanda into a middle- income country by 2035. Planning is a top-down approach in Rwanda, thus there is limited input from citizens on what constitute their ideal cities. Instead the government has drawn inspiration from other global cities and employed international firms to realize their aspirations through various master plans. Consequently, planning has become a tool to impose global standards in Rwanda and influence the profile of a Kigali resident. However, it has increased social and spatial inequalities. Housing development is one sector that has been affected by the masterplan with the introduction of new expropriation laws used to control who has access to the city. The research focused on the development of Kigali and Rwanda after 1994. Rwanda offers a different perspective on urban planning in African due to the limited influence of its colonial history in the creation and implementation of various planning strategies.

• Grace Salzeider ’21,  Classical Languages

Augustine’s Understanding of Natural Law in De utilitate credendi

In a religious context, natural law is the idea that humans are able to know what is just without the aid of divine revelation. It contrasts with moral voluntarism, the idea that God’s actions constitute what is just. In this paper, I outline Augustine’s implicit understanding of natural law in Catholicism as it appears in De utilitate credendi by examining the logic of his arguments regarding scriptural interpretation, original sin, human fallibility, and religious authority. Augustine argues that readers of scripture must have faith in its absolute authority and reliability, and that if the content of scripture appears to contradict God’s love, readers must somehow arrive at an interpretation of it that meets two criteria: 1) the interpretation is consistent with God’s love, and 2) the argument for the interpretation is consistent with reason. However, recognizing the limits of natural law reasoning, which stem from original sin (the cause of human fallibility), Augustine prioritizes faith over reason as the pathway to God. He also assigns religious authority the role of assisting people on this journey. Through these arguments, Augustine reveals his understanding of Catholicism as a natural law religion and works to further balance the scales between faith and reason.

• Silvan Sooksatan ’21 HC, Growth and Structure of Cities

Tension, Co-Option, and Nation-Building Through Narratives of the Post-Colonial Elite

My project analyzes the role of mixed identity within the post-colonial nation-building process, specifically in Singapore. I rely on Pankaj Mishra’s notion of indigenous modernity, an assertion of modernity, often championed by native intellectuals, that looks to take the colonizer out of national culture by centering community and self-determination around modernized and rationalized traditional cores. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s ‘founding father’ and ideological figurehead until his death in 2015, has employed his form of indigenous modernity in complex and somewhat contradictory ways. While relying on western investment and the primacy of English, he decenters former colonizers, seeing English rather as a crucial buffer in a multiracial state and emphasizing ‘Asian Values,’ Confucian morals, and the mother-tongue as a traditional anchor against western ills. His 1998 memoir, The Singapore Story, thus serves to valorize the mixed identity as a bearing for future Singaporean progress and harmony. Lee draws upon characteristics from both washed colonial authorities and passionate, yet compromised anticolonial movements to inform his rational, dedicated, and tolerant perspective. Yet, at the same time, his work places alternative indigenous modernities and community centered anti- colonial ideals in empty homogeneous time, a one-sided stepping stone towards Singapore’s progress rather than as part of an active, legitimate, and ongoing sentiment.

• Yupeng Wu ‘21, History of Art

Exhibiting Miao Textiles: Minority Politics in China and the (Re)Imagination of a Miao Identity

This study looks at the embroidered textiles of the Miao people, a minority ethnic group from Southwest China. Through exploring museum collections of Miao textiles and exhibitions that feature these textiles both in and outside China, this study pays close attention to donor information, provenance of objects, and curatorial frameworks to examine how Miao textiles are collected and exhibited. The goal of the study is to consider what these collections and exhibitions reveal about the construction of a Miao identity in the context of minority politics, the identity politics that concerns minority nationalities in China. With a focus on two case studies of museum exhibitions on Miao minority textiles (Lasting Tales, from Imaginative Hands at the Hermès Maison, Shanghai, and Ceremonial Dress from Southwest China: the Ann B. Goodman Collection at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven), this study also discusses the production of the concept of minzu (民族) in China, a multiethnic state, and the power relations behind the hierarchies of various nationalities.

• Anqi Yan ’21 HC, Growth and Structure of Cities

Collaborative Governance and Consultative Authoritarianism for Better Governance: A Study of Interactions between China’s Environmental NGOs and Local Governments

Exploring interactions between local environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and local governments in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, China, this research applies theories of consultative authoritarianism and collaborative governance on a current national environmental policy, the River Chief System, in China. Through looking at national and local government propaganda, regulations and policies on water management, NGOs and civil society, as well as the two case studies of ENGOs and research interviews with employees of these two ENGOs, this paper finds that formal channels to participate in policymaking for ENGOs remain open and vibrate, which fosters the development of civil society. Simultaneously, local governments have been co-opting ENGOs as an indirect governance tool to improve local governance and further legitimize the authoritarian regime. This paper argues that seeing the potential of civil society as a governance tool, through adopting consultative authoritarianism and collaborative governance, local governments encourages the development of a relatively autonomous civil society that does not undermine their legitimacy. However, the consultative and collaborative interactions between local governments and ENGOs cannot provide the basis for democratization. Instead, they promote reticent authoritarianism.

• Musckaan Chauhan ‘20, Political Science

The Wretched and the Political: On Subjectivity and Revolution

My research argues that reading Frantz Fanon in the double register of his political project and his selfhood allows us to envision new political futures from the perspective of an illiberal subject or—drawing from Fanon’s language—a “wretched subject”. Through critical engagements with various aspects of Fanon’s work, ranging from his phenomenological account of his experience in France to his work dealing explicitly with revolution and democracy, this essay puts him into conversation with contemporary theorists dealing with “wretchedness”— blackness, indigeneity, precolonial cultures—and political action. By elaborating upon a new reading of wretchedness, this essay attempts to reimagine citizenry, not in its current iterations, but as a revolutionary, non-episodic praxis, the ultimate politicality of being.

• Kyra Hoerr ‘20, Philosophy

Climate Models and the Challenge of Bridging Scales

Social values are particularly important to understand in climate science because the implications of climate science are inherently social. Many philosophers of science have argued that social values are entrenched in the scientific process such that values may influence both climate science and the responses to climate change recommended by climate scientists. In my research I review current accounts of values in climate science, including Winsberg’s view that social values are too entrenched in climate models to understand. I argue, however, that social values can be understood at the level of the scientific community if not at the individual level. Under my view it is not possible to separate social and epistemic concerns in climate science; however, it is possible to understand the influence of values and to critique the types of values that are appropriate in a given context. For example, social values in the scientific community may influence the types of research questions that are pursued, the modeling strategies employed, and the data included in climate models. Moving forward, I will be evaluating specific cases in which social values influence climate science.

• Hope Jones ‘20, History

Ben Zion Goldberg: Jewish National and Religious Identity in the Soviet Union

During the late 1940s, Stalin intensified the persecution of Jewish intellectuals, including members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAFC). The JAFC, based in Moscow and headed by Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Fefer, aimed to eliminate the fascist and antisemitic ideologies present in countries previously occupied by Nazis. The JAFC maintained strong connections with prominent Jews all over the world. One of these persons was Ben Zion Goldberg, an editor and columnist for a New York City Yiddish newspaper Der Tog. When Goldberg visited the Soviet Union in 1946, the JAFC influenced his plans and Goldberg grew close to Mikhoels and Fefer. After Goldberg’s trip to the Soviet Union he continued to correspond with JAFC members. When JAFC members went missing, were tried, and executed; Goldberg tried to contact and help the JAFC members. In this paper, I ask: How did Goldberg contribute to the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s aim to bolster Jewish nationality within the Soviet Union and internationally? In what ways did Goldberg help the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and Soviet Jews connect to other Jews around the world?

• Cara Navarro ‘20, Growth and Structure of Cities

Gentrified Filipino Food: Urban Philippine Restaurants and Filipinx-American Consumers in Washington, D.C.

In this paper, I investigate the relationship between Filipinx-Americans and ‘trendy’ Philippine restaurants, using Washington, D.C. as a case study due to its emerging Philippine food scene. What social processes led to the emergence of ‘trendy’ Philippine restaurants? Why do Filipinx- American restaurateurs and customers view Philippine food differently? I investigated these questions through participant observation at several Philippine restaurants, conversations with customers, an interview with a restaurateur, and a qualitative analysis of Yelp reviews. Ultimately, I concluded that Filipinx-American restaurateurs and consumers both view Philippine food through the lens of personal memory, and both use this lens to inform their respective food production and consumption processes. Restaurateurs and chefs reproduce their food memories in their dishes, and Filipinx-American consumers use their food memories to evaluate restaurant meals. However, since ‘trendy’ restaurant owners were socialized into the urban culinary field, their reproduction of their food memories was filtered through its beliefs and practices. Filipinx-American consumers were not all socialized into this field, preventing them from appreciating Philippine food in a ‘trendy’ restaurant context.

• Elina Nikoleri ‘20, Growth and Structure of Cities

London’s Pop-Ups: How Temporary Projects Permanently Affect the Urban Fabric of London

London has always been a popular destination, not only due to the multitude of tourist attractions that it offers, but because of how versatile of a city it is. Though it is a city with a deep historic past, most of London’s neighborhoods are constantly changing to cater to the needs of the habitants and the tourists. In this age, people are in search of authentic experiences which will excite them. This quest manifests itself into neighborhood revitalization and establishments with temporal features which can take the form of markets, street food stalls, seasonal events, etc. Temporary pop-up projects have started making their appearance in big cities worldwide with success and London is no exception. Through examining two of the city’s pop-ups, this research paper investigates how although such projects are temporary, they can have a long-lasting effect on the neighborhoods that host them. The greater part of the research material was gathered through semi-structured interviews with the projects’ staff members, and with residents and business owners of the projects’ neighborhoods. The interviews, along with further on-site observation, reveal that London’s temporary projects may differ from similar ones in other locations, since they go further than being another case of gentrification.

• Joseph Staruski HC ‘20, Growth and Structure of Cities; Philosophy

Prayers for Politicians: Religion and the Public Sphere in Boston, Massachusetts

How can protestant churches work to foster rational-critical discourses in the public sphere? Such discourses are essential for informed democratic society, but the contemporary situation is struggling to maintain these discourses in a healthy fashion. This paper will engage the public sphere theory of Jürgen Habermas and consider competing arguments from Jose Casanova and W. Julian Korab-Karpiwinz in an effort to understand the proper place of religion in the public sphere. It is part of a sociological research project which instigates four protestant churches in Boston. The paper uses in-person interviews, event observations, historical analysis, and theoretical arguments to explain the contemporary situation of religious institutions in Boston. The paper will make the claim that these institutions can foster the public sphere by: 1, producing public spheres; 2, establishing the proper conditions for a public sphere; and 3, creating content that serves to inform the public sphere. While religious institutions are imperfect and diverse, the actions they preform in support of the public sphere can certainly be benevolent. In sum, the contemporary public sphere requires rejuvenation, and Churches are in a position to provide some level of support for such rejuvenation.

• Alex Tucker ‘20, Classical Languages

Soul, Spirit, and the Incarnation in Clement of Alexandria

Clement of Alexandria, the second-century Platonizing and Stoicizing theologian, was at pains to establish and defend his own religious doctrine against his Christian and Jewish contemporaries. His adaptation of the allegorical exegesis undertaken roughly one hundred and fifty years prior by the Jewish Platonist Philo of Alexandria allows insight into Early Christian points of contention and self-definition. Clement’s proto-orthodox doctrine of the incarnation, wherein Jesus was both human and divine rather than only human (as Jews thought) or only divine (as some now-heretical sects thought) led to his unique understanding of how the human soul relates to the divine and the human spirit. I analyze the writings of Philo, Clement, and some of their polytheist contemporaries and predecessors to understand what each author thinks and how this relates to non-Abrahamic cosmologies and understandings of humanity. Philo’s construction of the soul in relation to human spirit and to God indicates that an individual is akin to a dim mirror image of God. Clement of Alexandria, on the other hand, treats the human soul and spirit as parallels of the eternal divine Word and the Holy Spirit.

• Emily Williams ‘20, English

The Stylings of an American: Identity Performance in 19th Century Literature

In analyzing William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or the President’s Daughter and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends, 19th-century novels written by black authors, the uses of performance theory can be expanded to the literary. These books, although fictional, draw on historical events, documents, and experiences to create an image of the United States and how people of color are allowed to exist within the expectations of a white patriarchal nation struggling with the imminent end of slavery. Using theoretical texts focused on both drag and minstrel performance, these novels demonstrate divergence from generic and social conventions of subjectivity and rework oppressive systems through the careful use of performativity. My term for such resistance, authorial drag, occurs when authors use representation to acknowledge the ever-present connection of race and gender with history by recuperating it from misidentification and revealing the multiplicity of selfhood and identity as a tool for survival and futurity. The defamiliarization of both blackness and whiteness in literature confronts the hierarchical structure of the nation and spurs a conscious effort to rework systems of power that disenfranchise marginalized communities by deconstructing the expectations of identity and exposing the intrinsically fabricated nature of race and gender.

• Jiayu Zhou ‘20, Anthropology

The “Mandarinization” of Philadelphia Chinatown: An Investigation and Analysis of an Ethnic Linguistic Landscape

Linguistic landscape refers to the linguistic signs and language-using individuals that mark the public space. This paper investigates the linguistic landscape within the main business streets of Philadelphia Chinatown, an area constituting of over 300 businesses in diverse categories. The research employed a quantitative study that surveys the diversity of the linguistic repertoire employed by the businesses, and a qualitative study that examines the hidden motivation behind language choice in a multilingual environment. Both researches yield the big picture that the surveyed businesses manifest heteroglossia in terms of both usage of written languages (languages displayed) and usage of spoken languages. Yet in contrast to what it was decades ago, the Philadelphia Chinatown nowadays has also gone through a so-called process of “Mandarinization” to certain extent. Specially, the Mandarin-speaking, simplified-Chinese-using people from mainland China have wielded some power on the linguistic and commercial spheres of the place that was traditionally defined by Cantonese-speaking, traditional-Chinese-using population. The Panasian-ization and English-ization of Chinatown is also not negligible.