Javier Aros
America 2020, a creative vision of the political and social realities of the United States in the year 2020, will be an artistic presentation of Javier Aros. Utilizing room sculpture, six large silkscreen poster prints and assorted smaller prints, two wall paintings, ceramic busts, original flags and interactive historical documents and presentations, Javier will carefully design and create a future museum dedicated to the revolutionary and evolutionary events of the teen years of the 21st century. By thoroughly investigating and evaluating revolutionary methodology and methods — from independence from non-renewable […]
Dennis Velasquez
Dennis research seeks to expand the exploration of transculturation through an in-depth analysis of three vastly unrelated literary works that nonetheless contend with English Linguistic Imperialism, and reveal strikingly comparable strategies that defy it. Focusing on canonical texts by eighteenth century Scottish, nineteenth century Pequot Native American, and twentieth century Chicano authors, he will conduct a comparative study of strategies of literary subversion of English Linguistic Imperialism across disparate time periods, ethnicities, and geographic locations. He plans to investigate the distinct internal discourses of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, A […]
Marisa S. Olson
Combining research with creative expression, Marisa will be exploring digital storytelling, a new multimedia narrative form that uses images, film, text and sounds that are electronically stored and retrieved via computers. She will be investigating the structural/narratological characteristics of this new medium in order to theorize the points of divergence between analog and digital narratives and to test her hypothesis that digital storytelling endows authors and readers with greater agency. She will be looking most attentively at digital stories that are autobiographical, in order to study the nature of digitally-generated […]
Leena Her
The purpose of Leena’s study is to identify factors which contribute to variation in the academic achievement of the Hmong, a relatively recent community of Asian American immigrants to California who first arrived in the mid-1970s as refugees from the Vietnam War. She will undertake a comparative ethnographic study of academically successful, college-bound Hmong students and students who are not academically successful at a high school in the Central Valley, where a large Hmong community has settled. Leena will be testing her hypothesis that, as descendants of refugees, Hmong share […]
Marie Mathiesen
Marie will examine the works of the Danish writer Karen Blixen (1885-1962), known in America as Isak Dinesen. Dinesen lived in Kenya for 16 years, and although she was a colonialist, she respected the Africans as aristocratic and noble human beings. Her position and relations to the Africans grant her a unique dual perspective on the colonial situation in Kenya creating a bifocality that also permeates her later writing on multiple levels. Investigating the colonial aspect of this duality, Marie will use postcolonial literary theory to examine selections of Dinesens […]
Chau Nguyen Doan
Chau’s research seeks an answer to this question: Do the business interests of an increasingly corporate media undermine the reporting of news on which the public depends? Media scholars have debated this key question for years (mostly answering affirmatively), but Chau hopes to introduce a novel approach to the analysis: using news coverage of media concentration as a case study. Her project will involve a qualitative and quantitative analysis of broadcast coverage by the major networks — specifically of media concentration — before and after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) […]
Andrew Peterson
Co-branded advertising is a movie marketing strategy allying films such as Star Wars and E.T., with brands like Burger Chef and Atari. Though film and advertising have always engaged in a mutually shameless relationship, there are many important distinctions between co-branded and conventional film advertising. In contrast to the prologue-like tone of movie trailers, co-branded advertising is presented to the spectator as a kind of hyper-utopian epilogue to the film’s narrative conflict, in which “good guys” and “bad guys” alike are rewarded with consumer products. The aim of Andrew’s project […]
Pei (Tony) Zhao
On one hand, determinism claims the necessity of physical laws, together with the state of the universe at any moment, entails that what happens next must happen. On the other hand, when a person acts wrongly and gets blamed for his action, we seem to presuppose that he could have acted differently. Does determinism, or the objective view of science in general, threaten the notion of moral responsibility? Is our practice of holding people responsible ultimately unjustifiable? Incompatibilists say yes; compatibilists say no. In the summer of 2008, Tony will […]
Christophe Marc Wall-Romana
Christophe will translate for publication a volume of poetry, titledViens dit quelqu’un, by the French poet James Sacr. Sacr is one of the most accomplished French poets writing today, the winner of France’s most prestigious poetry prize (Prix Apollinaire, 1988) and highest cultural distinction (Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 1987). Translated into Swedish and Spanish, Sacr’s work is still largely unknown in the English-speaking world, despite the fact that the poet has lived in the United States for the last twenty years, where he currently teaches as […]
Matthew Lewsadder
Matthews project will take him to the British Library in London this summer, where he will investigate the censorship of plays during the transition from Victorianism into Modernism. In particular, he will be examining the significant role the Lord Chamberlain played in maintaining English morality through his censorship powers. Taking Foucaults theories as a starting point, Matthew will test his hypothesis that the Lord Chamberlains censorship activities, which were deployed inconsistently, were less concerned with the maintenance of decency and morality than they were with who had the authority to […]