Randeep Hothi
Morality, as a realm approached by philosophers to be captured by theory and grounded upon metaphysics, as the realm in which the good is discriminated from the evil or the bad by faculties of reason, is subverted by sublime gestures of the poet. These sublime gestures in the prose of Puran Singh have specifically subverted the ethical foundations of Brahmanism and Vedanta through the experience of the Sikh path. Randeep Singh’s research will delve into the Sikh experiences, in dialogue with the Western tradition of metaphysics, to provide some insights […]
Ayden Parish
Ayden is exploring the metaphors used to describe transgender identities and experiences. Cognitive linguistics understands metaphor as central to language and human cognition, allowing us to grasp abstract concepts via physical sensations and everyday experiences. There has, however, been very little put forward for a cognitive linguistics of gender: How are the meanings of gender expressed and perceived? What are the effects of particular linguistic structures on how gender is thought about and performed? How are identities in general rendered meaningful? Ayden will collect data from public sources such as […]
Amber Rose Smock
Amber will create a multimedia narrativelayering videos, performance, sound, and slidesand a written journal based on her experiences of culture shock as she explores her deaf identity as a young adult. Growing up, Amber was mainstreamed and considered herself hard-of-hearing, but had never met anyone from the Deaf community. This summer, Amber consciously immersed herself in Deaf culture and American Sign Language (ASL) for the first time. She visited the Professional Theater School of the National Theater of the Deaf (NTD) in Chester, Connecticut, observing deaf people engaged in the […]
Hillary Langberg
Hillary’s research will take her to the states of Maharashtra and Orissa in central India, to the ancient Buddhist sites of Kanheri, Ellora, Aurangabad, and Ratnagiri, among others, where the earliest relief sculptures of Tara remain in situ. In tracking the early evolution Tara’s form, Hillary’s project will examine how the goddess is increasingly incorporated into Buddhist practice in the 5th-8th centuries CE. As Tara eventually becomes the most significant female figure in Buddhism with the rise of the Vajrayana (Tantric) school, Hillary’s study asks, can these works of relief […]
Caetlin Benson-Allott
Caetlin will explore the evolution of narration in Confessional poetry in the United States during the 1950s-1960s, concentrating on such poets as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Through extensive readings in poetry, criticism, and literary and psychoanalytic theory, as well as archival research on the poets mentioned above, Caetlin plans to analyze and relate two of the key influences on Confessional narration, Modernism (the preceding poetic tradition) and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, she hypothesizes, gave direction to the Confessionalists resistance to Modernist impersonality and thus helped make new poetic subjects […]
Jessica Stevenson-Stewart
Jessica will examine the travel writings and photographic works of Gertrude Bell, an Orientalist scholar who served British intelligence in the Middle East before and after World War I. Bells extensive imperialist project resulted in volumes of writings and photographs that document these archeological and diplomatic expeditions. Addressing how Bell used such representations to validate her scholarly authority, Jessica will study the problems of authorship peculiar to the photographic medium. Taking into account post-structural and post-colonial theories, Jessica will be asking how Bell utilized the mechanistic gaze of the camera […]
Sharon Tang-Quan
In 1995, 11 million British stayed home on six Sunday evenings to watch the BBC mini-series of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. In the last decade, over a dozen adaptations of Austen’s novels have become films, and four more are forthcoming in 2006. How do these adaptations communicate 19th-century ideas and themes in a form/media not yet imagined in Austen’s time? Austen is famous for her style and narrative authority; the transformation or even destruction of her narrative voice in the conversion of novel to film is thus of concern. […]
Nicole Gordon
Current Bio: Nicole completed an MFA at UCLA in Film Production. She’s since been working in cultural programming in the non-profit sector: Palm Springs Int’l Film Society/Festivals, IKAR (ritual and advocacy), and now at Friends Of The Observatory, the non-profit fundraising and advocacy partner of Griffin Observatory in Los Angeles, CA Haas Scholars Project: The placement of a womans body attests to the gender dynamics of a film, so how do recurring spatial settings figure female characters into the collective national imagination? To address this question Nicole will conduct a […]
Lena A. Salaymeh
Shirley Ye
Shirley will investigate how early female movie fans interacted with film celebrities between the years 1910 and 1940, the formative years of film practice in Hollywood. Traveling to New York and Los Angeles this summer, Shirley will examine early fan letters, publications and other artifacts housed at archives, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Although feminist scholars have given much attention to the theoretical aspects of female spectatorship, fan interaction with celebrity culture has too often been overlooked. At the intersection […]