Isabella Oppen
What can a close reading of Berlin’s Book Burning Memorial offer to elucidate conflicts of remembering a turbulent past? Using libraries and archives in Berkeley and Berlin, Isabella will research the history and development of the current memorial; its public reception; and different uses of its location (Bebelplatz) over time. This research will also entail an in-person exploration of the memorial’s tactile and sculptural aspects, reading the memorial as an artwork confronting the past and processing history through its form within the city landscape. Isabella’s research will be grounded in […]
Nathaniel Klein
Nathaniel’s project will produce an experimental video and art show exploring the U.S./Mexico border as it is situated temporally, spatially and psychically. By living in Tijuana and crossing the border daily for six weeks; interviewing activists, architects and academics; and providing volunteer humanitarian aid to migrants, Nathaniel will investigate how the histories of the U.S./Mexico border are embodied by the people who pass through it, and by various sites along its path. Focusing his research on three primary border locations — the San Ysidro border checkpoint, the Friendship Park monument […]
Brittany Johnson
Current Bio: Brittany is now working with SURF, supporting undergraduate research. Haas Scholars Project: Brittany’s project will first explore the possibilities and limitations of fictional testimony to enact a process of trauma recovery. She will plumb the formal and imagerial depths of Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre and Villette against a background of theoretical work engaged with trauma. She will narrow her critical eye upon the ways in which these two novels articulate their respective heroines psychological encounters with inaccessible stores of traumatic memory through narrative acts of viewing. Brittany […]
Marco A. Flores
Though growing rapidly, the literature on the displacement of immigrants within the U.S. rarely addresses queer undocumented immigrants. By engaging with theories of affect, Marco’s project will explore the experiences of displacement queer undocumented immigrants encounter in their search for home. Through qualitative interviews, Marco will bring together two seemingly unrelated identities — “queer” and “immigrant” — exploring the complications of experience and sentiment driven by the dwelling that takes place in search of home; an engagement of the body in relation to a fragmented self. Ultimately, by illuminating forms […]
Clarissa Arafiles
The body of the slain journalist, elevated to heroic proportions, has become indispensable in contemporary constructions of Filipino nationalism and democracy. This project will compare two episodes in the history of Philippine media that fortify the journalists presence in the Filipino imagination: the three-day broadcast by Radio Veritas during the 1986 People Power Revolution and the 2009 Maguindanao Massacre. Between June and August, Clarissa will engage in archival research at the National Library of the Philippines in Manila and conduct interviews with news media personnel and anti-impunity campaigners. She will […]
Samantha Alford
Figurines in the shape of humans, animals, and inanimate objects, such as furniture, have been found in excavations throughout the archaeological site of Mycenae, a Bronze Age settlement and palatial center. Samantha will investigate the production patterns of these figurines by analyzing archaeological data from a Mycenaean ceramics center, Petsas House. By comparing these figurines to those from other Mycenae excavation sites, she will attempt to make inferences about the distribution of figurines and the social structure of Mycenae. Previous scholarship has suggested that Mycenaean religion was socially stratified, with […]
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 […]