Sonia Gomez

Immediately following the end of World War II, the United States stationed nearly 450,000 troops in Japan. The U.S. occupation of Japan led to intimate relationships between American Servicemen and Japanese women, resulting in a large number of marriages. Between 1947 and 1975, an estimated 45,000 Japanese women immigrated to the United States as wives of U.S. Servicemen. Most scholarship on the subject focuses on the relationships between Japanese war brides and White American GIs. However, a significant number of these Japanese women came to the United States with their […]

Armen Davoudian

The Waste Land is a metapoem that doubts whether it is a poem: a paradoxical achievement of expression through expressing an inability to express. This antithetical way of writing poetry makes new relations among different tropes possible. For instance, iron–which normally either precludes or retrospectively denies pathos–can become elegy as Eliot complains that he cannot sing, thereby singing. Armen senses a similar concern in Eliot’s other poetry, and he wonders, for example, whether the many paradoxes in Four Quartets can be explained in terms of this argument. He also wants […]

Margaux Fitoussi

Revolutionary Cuba provided international support and financial assistance to the liberation movements throughout southern African. Cuba’s foreign policy of international revolution and its liberation discourse crossed boundaries erected by the apartheid state and influenced the South African emancipation movement. Despite a strong public rapport between Cuba and anti-Apartheid leaders, the majority of research on Cubas foreign policy towards Africa has excluded South Africa. Drawing on archival research conducted at the University of Cape Town and South African national archives, Margaux hopes to contribute to the analysis of Cuba’s symbolic significance […]

Kabrina Kau

Kabrina will undertake a field-study of the indigenous people of Taiwan, who were colonized by Han immigrants from mainland China in the late-seventeenth century, focusing specifically on their attitudes toward education. Using surveys and interviews with several targeted youth and adult populations in the city of Taitung, she will attempt to ascertain the factors that have impeded this minority group from using education as a means of improving their socio-economic status. She intends her research to provide information that will aid in the development of a new aboriginal education assistance […]

Kate Hunter-McPeake

Kate’s project will explore the origins of the ancient Persian civilization with a focus on its dramatic transition from tribal society to dominant empire during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. In order to better understand the influence of the declining Mesopotamian and Elamite civilizations on the emerging Persian empire, she will travel to the Iran National Museum in Tehran and renowned archaeological sites including Persepolis and Susa in order to examine archaeological and art historical evidence from the period. Kate will also engage in intensive study of the Persian […]

China Star

My research examines the changes in the prevalence of unmarried mothers in Ireland nearly a 20% between 1988 and 1999, the church and community response towards these women, and alternative interpretations of the lifestyles and demographics of single mothers. In recent years the response towards single parents has moved from one of social exclusion, condemnation towards one of outward acceptance and coping, a shift clearly influenced by the increasing prevalence of unmarried mothers and on account of moral condemnation of the alternatives of social exclusion of the mother and her […]

Debra Jeanne Kraus

Debra’s life experience as a caregiver to her husband throughout his terminal illness has inspired her to create an art exhibit that narrates his lifetime as a man and soldier groomed by the social effects and fears of the Cold War. Her work will investigate agent orange exposure of American soldiers who fought in Vietnam. Fiat Lux, will be grounded in the social understanding of artwork from the 1960s, moving forward in time to explore some of our current veteran health issues. Six multi-media sculptures, four paintings, and a video […]

Tyler Shores

Tyler’s project will examine postmodern parody as a model of discourse, and will seek to account for parodys ubiquity in a specifically mass cultural context. Although parody is of course nothing new, there is something particularly of philosophical interest about postmodernist parody. By introducing the notion of subjectivity into the discussion, the focus will emphasize the more individual implications of postmodernist parodys effects, whereas much previous literature on the subject has tended to focus upon its ideological and political implications. The instances of parody which will be investigated will range […]

Chad Vogler

Chad will travel to New York and New Haven to perform research on the unusual interracial collaborations and intercultural exchanges which occurred during the Harlem Renaissance, and this material will be used to compose a series of 25-30 poems. Inspired by recent critical discourses that redescribe modernism as a set of interracial dynamics, these poems will be composed from the perspective of a contemporary author imagining a bicultural past in modernity that potentially effaces the concreteness of the authors racial identity through his anonymity as the poetic speaker. The primary […]

Sonia Fleury

Sonia Fleury’s project will primarily address notions of history and its construction in art and contemporary cultural media–newspapers, magazines, and political/popular prints–during the 1848 revolution in France. Receiving special attention will be the artwork of the 19th century realist painter Gustave Courbet, whose Burial at Ornans challenged traditional notions of history painting in its depiction of provincial bourgeois at a funeral. Does Courbet’s assertion that history painting is by its very nature contemporary parallel broader shifts in conceptions of history during this radical revolutionary moment, whereby history was seen as […]