Stephanie Joan Stiavetti
This projects aims to understand how Babettes Feast and Like Water for Chocolate demonstrate the sanctity of food in relation to religious practice. My plan is to answers several questions in the course of my research: how do food and faith correlate, and how are these correlations articulated differently in these two texts? How do gender expectations shape the lives of these heroines? In telling the stories of two women, Babette Harsant and Tita de la Garza, these texts asseverate a link between the spirituality that is inherent in each […]
Alice Lucille de Young
The overall aim of the project is to provide a detailed analysis of the concept of space/place in the work of Argentinean writer Julio Cortzar, an overarching theme that echoes throughout his work and has been overlooked by both literary critics and scholars in the past. In preparation for my senior thesis for the Spanish department, I will analyze the concept of space/place via a close reading of Cortzars experimental novel Rayuela, along with a selection of his short fiction. I will focus on Cortzars depiction of topographical, societal, and […]
Eduardo Habitan Europa
My project investigates the nature of basic human economic principles with special focus on the scarcity bias – the tendency to select objects in greater scarcity. A recent study observed children were more likely to choose an object from the less abundant of two sets (Markson, personal communication). Before explaining this behavior, I am seeking factors that could confound this bias. I plan to test children and adults and see if visual information is required for exhibiting this behavior. Subjects will have the option of choosing an object after providing […]
Hannah Abigail Sistrunk
The Inka Empire is known for its extensive road system a monumental network of engineered routes across South America. My research will be focused on one section of Inka road located in Northern Ecuador in the region of the Pambamarca Archaeological Project. This area is known for fierce indigenous resistance to Inka imperial expansion resulting in the construction of several large fortress complexes. Focused on the nature of imperial expansion and local resistance, I will survey the Inka road and its features with the goal of creating a regional GIS […]
Alexandra Laure Courtois de Vicose
My goal is to investigate how a pastors wife, my great-great-grandmother (1867-1947), found the financial and technical means to paint and the significance of her work in the greater scheme of late 19th century artistic tradition. I will begin by gathering biographical information from archives, religious institutions and surviving relatives to create a psychological and chronological framework. Then I will examine her work contextually, contemplating the conditional education of middle-class nineteenth-century women, other female artists of her generation, and the tradition of still-life painting. Marcelle Jullien managed to carve a […]
Jordan Kevin Jeffery
T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, the three pillars of Modernism are bound in their use of allusions, an attempt to tie their works to those of the past. One particular element that finds itself repeatedly invoked in the works of these Modernists is the figure of the Theban soothsayer Tiresias. I hope to identify the importance Tiresias plays as character and formative reference in each of the texts. My research will focus on a close reading of these three texts, the classical texts they draw on, and literary […]
Leslie Chung-Lei Sheu
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (M.tb), along with other infectious diseases, has become a resurgent global concern, in part due to selection for drug-resistant strains in infected populations. M.tb is able to survive within macrophages (innate immune cells that should engulf and degrade foreign material) in compartments known as phagosomes by some unknown mechanism. This summer, I want to use quantitative mass spectrometry to study how specific cell wall glycolipids of M.tb manipulate phagosomal membrane protein expression in macrophage cells. By comparing protein regulation by two structurally similar but functionally very different glycolipids […]
Allison Kathleen Lahl
As a slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography bears the burden of truth telling demanded by this genre. However, this categorization has largely prohibited critics from fully addressing Jacobs’ utilization of fantasy, which becomes apparent in her seemingly unbelievable and fantastic portrayal of her protagonist’s ability to constantly thwart her master’s sexual advances. Continuing my exploration of fantasy in Jacobs’ text, I will spend this summer reading extensively in psychoanalytic theory in order to further articulate an argument that accounts for the work’s fictional aspects as a manifestation of psychological trauma. […]
Andrew Harada Rowland
This research project will use a large series of migrant worker interviews to measure the option vale of the urban environment in Beijing, China. The difference in urban and rural earnings, taking into account respective changes in standards of living, are an important component of a migrant worker’s decision to move from countryside to city. Understanding the value migrant laborers place on their new urban lives will help paint a clearer picture of what has become the greatest migration in the history of the world.
Hongsik Park
A detailed mechanism of this so-called “feature detection” has been recently studied in humans; however, this mechanism has not been investigated in any animal model yet (Neri and Heeger 2002). Due to the general belief that rodents have very poor vision, scientists have paid little attention to them on the topic of visual perception. However, studies in the last 10 years have actually shown that the rodent visual systems present properties similar to those of other mammals such as cats and monkeys. Therefore, I believe rodents could be used as […]