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 […]
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 […]