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 […]
Jennifer Toole
Jennifer plans to write an English honors thesis that will comparatively analyze Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. She is interested in how these two writers censored sexuality in their writing even though their substantial income gave them the option of self-publication. Jennifer will explore what combination of social pressures and inward conflicts led to this. By combining historical contextualization with an intense critical analysis of the published texts as well as the drafts, manuscripts, and personal correspondences drawn from archives at Yale and the University of Sussex, she hopes to […]
Rahul Modi
Current Bio: Rahul is a private practice anesthesiologist. Haas Scholars Project: For his senior honors thesis in Psychology, Rahul will use functional MRI to study how the human frontal lobes integrate information in order to guide motivated behavior. It is well established that the frontal lobes play a critical role in short term (working) memory, a function that enables the online maintenance and mental manipulation of information. This study will build on current knowledge about the human frontal lobes to determine how rewards affect the interaction of the frontal lobes […]
Sarah Stone
My honors thesis in Rhetoric will explore the poetics of gender in the work of poet Elizabeth Bishop. While a number of critics began to address the effects of her gender on her poetry in the 1993 anthology Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, scholarship on the subject has since waned. I will offer a reading of the techniques Bishop employs to communicate her vexed relationship to gender that is informed by the most recent scholarship on the relationship between gender and literary form, including the conceptualization of gender identity […]
Ziza Delgado
My research analyzes the education reform that took place at UC Berkeley at the end of the 1960s to determine whether social movements such as the Free Speech Movement and Third World Liberation Front affected University curricula and pedagogy. Imperative to the research is a critical discussion of the power dynamic between students and the UC administration. I analyze the effect that the FSM had on curriculum reform, through the creation of a Free University and other experimental programs. The second component of my research looks at the historical context […]
Stephanie Neda Sadre-Orafai
Stephanie’s project will explore the connection between consumption and self-identification within the rapso community of Trinidad and Tobago. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Trinidadian musical form of rapso has been a vehicle for social change and cultural activism; however, to date, it has received almost no scholarly attention. In order to test her hypothesis that rapso offers a grassroots alternative to the colonial legacy of externally imposed identity, Stephanie will conduct field-research in Trinidad this summer, using participant-observation methods and formal and informal interviewing techniques with artists, […]
Marc Wolf
Marc’s interdisciplinary interest in the phenomenon of Israeli tourism in the millennial year is informed by religious studies, marketing, and the anthropology of tourism, as well as his history major. He will undertake a comparative analysis of how Israel uses its Ministry of Tourism to create a range of images in order to market itself to Jewish, Christian, and Muslim pilgrims, as well as secular tourists as an “official destination of the millennium.” Marc plans to travel to Israel this summer to interview officials in the Ministry of Tourism and […]