Paul Sager
La Petite Gironde, based in Bordeaux, France, was one of that country’s top regional newspapers from the 1860s to World War II. When the Germans occupied the country in 1940, all of France’s media fell under their control. Newspapers were the most visible expression of French collaboration with Nazi power. La Petite Gironde was no exception. At the moment of Liberation, in 1944, De Gaulle’s new regime was supposed to have rid the country of these symbols of infamy and replaced them with newspapers emerging from the Resistance. La Petite […]
Carlos Almendárez
To the Nicaraguan people, Carlos Fonseca was the unchallenged leader and theoretician of the Nicaraguan revolution. In an attempt to propel Fonseca as the paragon of the revolution, the F.S.L.N. obscured Fonsecas doubts about the process of revolution itself. Through Fonsecas extant writings Carlos project will examine why the idea of Fonseca as a leader of the revolution was abandoned once the revolution was consolidated. Carlos argues that Fonsecas portrayal by scholars and propagandists has emphasized his role as a devout follower of Augusto Cesar Sandino. In doing so, Fonsecas […]
Christine Ma
How do you reconcile the phenomenon of self-directed racism by certain minority/oppressed groups towards their own members with the universal trend of ethnocentrism? Given past documentation of such ingroup derogation, questions remain: if ingroup derogation indeed exists among minorities and leads to negative affect towards other group members, then it will exert pressing social implications; on the other hand, if it is entirely the cognitive product of dialecticism, the predominantly Eastern belief system that embraces contradiction/opposing sides of each issue, then it would be a desirable process, rather than a […]
Mehmet Seflek
Legislation banning the Islamic headscarf in Turkish universities has caused a political and social uproar over the last two decades, but the effect of the spillover of politics into women’s private lives has often been overlooked. Mehmet will research the extent of the discrimination against women who wear the Islamic headscarf in the Turkish labor-market and, if it exists, the effect of this discrimination on the career choices of female university graduates. Mehmet will examine the class and religious inequality that discrimination may be creating, how the headscarf affects the […]
Hoai Nguyen (Julie) Pham
For her Senior Honors Thesis in History, Julie proposes to investigate an under-researched aspect of the Vietnam War: the perspective of former members of the lower and middle echelons of the South Vietnamese military. She proposes first to examine the written record of the war, including print media, scholarly works, fiction and memoirs, to examine how American writers have portrayed the South Vietnamese military. She will then compare these depictions against self-representations culled from qualitative interviews conducted with former South Vietnamese military members in San Jose, home to the second […]
Tara Rado
Tara will undertake ethnographic research in downtown Rio de Janeiro, where sex workers earn their livelihoods in extreme economic and social marginalization. They face health problems such as HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. Although their work is decriminalized, they struggle with police brutality and have little legal redress against human rights violations. In response, non-governmental organizations offer professional development predicated on an ideology of community development. Using the term profissional de sexo, outreach workers are attempting to disable stereotypes and social stigmatization and empower the citizenship of sex workers. […]
Ilmo Konstantin Kotaja
Compassion, i.e. empathetic concern for another with the desire to further their wellbeing, is one of the noblest concepts known to man, but our scientific knowledge on the topic is surprisingly limited. Approaching compassion from an evolutionary viewpoint, Ilmo’s project will examine the biological underpinnings of compassion and centers upon a physiological measurement of respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA; an indication of the impact of parasympathetic nervous system activation in the vagus nerve on the heart). The goal of the project is to assess whether RSA is a reliable biological marker […]
A. Nicholas Santascoy
Research on rejection sensitivity, the anxious expectation of and hostility to perceived rejection, has focused on mapping its possible causes and negative consequences. Positive emotion research, though, has revealed gratitude’s tendency to foster positive affect and pro-social behavior. Nicholas plans to examine the efficacy of gratitude in reducing negative aspects of rejection sensitivity while increasing positive emotions and behaviors within close relationships. In study 1, high rejection sensitive people will daily express gratitude in writing for the behavior of loved ones for two weeks. In study 2, high rejection sensitive […]
Katherine Hijar
Current Bio: Katherine received her Ph.D. in History from The Johns Hopkins University in 2009. After 11 years as a history professor at California State San Marcos, she is now a curator at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Her scholarly experitise is in U.S. social and cultural history, with emphasis on women, race, gender, urban history, and visual, print, and material culture. Haas Scholars Project: Katherine will travel to New York this summer to conduct archival research on visual and textual representations of women in the mid-nineteenth century. By […]
Timothy Poore
Tim’s study, which will become his senior honors thesis in Psychology, will test the hypothesis that being in a state of positive glow as a result of unconditional self-construal will lead to a decrease in vigilance, hindering performance, and in turn, causing a person to be more susceptible to negative feelings following a subsequent failure. Much research has focused on positive aspects of experiencing positive glow, which is a state in which a persons happiness, confidence, and internal positivity are maximized. One psychological mechanism that contributes to this positive glow […]