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. […]
Edina Bohanec
Contemporary nonviolent movements of Muslim youth around the world are often neglected in the western media and deserve more scholarly attention. Emerging in the affluent urban centers of Egypt, Life Makers is an example of such a movement. The group was spearheaded nearly a decade ago by a charismatic and popular leader, Amr Khaled, through his television programs, lectures, tapes, and speeches. Edina will travel to Egypt this summer to look at Life Makers development from a group of youth following Khaleds teachings, to an international nongovernmental organization and now […]
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 […]
Abby Stein
Shrouded in mystique and controversy, the U.S. development of belly dance remains tied to appropriation, orientalism and popular entertainment. Abby Stein’s written thesis will examine the dance phenomenon within the context of 20th and 21st century American culture and values. Through a survey of existing scholarship, interviews with influential belly dance artists, firsthand training experience, and analysis of video and live performance and instruction, Abby will analyze how Western thought has adopted and transformed this Middle Eastern tradition. She will attempt to explain the development of the dance forms many […]
Miriam Solis
The expansion of Brazils 1.5 million member Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) has provoked many changes. Two changes in particular occurred in the 1990s: the MST began to deviate from its traditional strategy of rural squatting by organizing urban land occupations; and the MST’s leadership structures changed to include committees charged with improving womens participation and leadership representation within the MST. Miriam will collect archival data and conduct interviews in Brazil this summer in order to investigate whether the MST’s rural to urban shift served as a catalyst […]
Nicholas Riggle
What is a concept? What philosophical and explanatory power should we expect from a theory of concepts? Logician, mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege tried to demonstrate the logicist thesis that all arithmetical theorems are purely logical consequences of the basic laws of logic and the logically defined axioms of arithmetic. During the evolution of his project, Frege developed his technical notion of a concepta notion seemingly very far removed from contemporary theories of concepts. Nicholas proposes to work out an account of the development of Freges theory paying close attention […]
Joel Portillo
Latinos and Blacks score the lowest on the SAT verbal section. Considering the weight that universities give to SATs when considering admissions, the implications of these statistics are great. Research documents the negative effects of stereotype threat, a fear of confirming negative stereotypes about a group with which one identifies, on performance in standardized tests. For example, reminding Blacks of their race prior to taking a standardized test impairs their performance. While race has been widely studied, the role of a subjects primary language at home in activating stereotype threat […]
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 […]
Darci Pauser
Darci will be traveling to New York City to conduct anthropological fieldwork on homelessness. Specifically, this work will be an exploration of the way in which the discourse of choice, freedom, and resistance is utilized in the lives of those who view their homeless condition as a choice– those Darci terms “houseless.” The data collected through interviews and surveys will provide means for a comparative analysis with work she has been doing in Berkeley for the past year and a half. Along with interviews and surveys, Darci will be doing […]
Dashal Moore
Dashal’s project will use a recent debate in the Richmond City Council over the proposal to declare a State of Emergency as a focus for questions dealing with violence and politics in the deindustrialized and racialized American landscape. She will investigate how violence and crisis are constructed in various discourses, and how those understandings are deployed in governance. Although the State of Emergency was purportedly proposed in response to a spike in homicide rates, Dashal believes it actually stemmed from a more hidden and deep crisis. In the context of […]