Alison Lafferty

World War II, one of the most significant global events of the 20th century, still has not faded from our societal memory. Specifically in the western world, this war has been moralized as an Allied victory against the grips of fascism, but recent representations of World War II events challenge these accepted moral perceptions. The representation of World War II in contemporary (post-1999) literature is not only unusual when considering that this literature was written over fifty years after the events being described, but also has potential consequences for the […]

Kimberlie Le

My research is an interdisciplinary study of the effects of agrochemicals on river ecosystems. I will be travelling the Taichung, Taiwan to conduct my study in an area which predominately farms various fruits and vegetables. I’m interested in looking at the environmental effects of the agriculture on river ecosystems by performing bioassement arrays and looking at macroinvertebrate concentration as well as water sample analysis for pesticides. To piece together my project, I will also be tracing a history of farming practices in Taiwan too see how they have changed due […]

Susan Wang

Many factors come into play in the course of an organisms growth and development, one of which is the transcriptional coregulator C-terminal Binding Protein (CtBP). CtBP has been characterized in a variety of developmental pathways, including the TGF-beta and WNT pathways, and has been shown to produce growth abnormalities when studied in drosophila melanogaster. I plan to study transcription of drosophila CtBP by using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH). Although drosophila CtBP is encoded by just one gene, there are actually several isoforms of the protein that can each produce […]

Andrew Rahman

The purpose of the P.A.I.R.S. project is to capture the reverberation of historic spaces using state-of-the-art technology for archival use, future research, experimental composition and performance, and implementation in virtual reality (VR). I intend to record an acoustic representation, or a sonic snapshot, of each space using a technology called impulse response (IR), which will output a collection of digital sound files. Using an ambisonic microphone, as opposed to a set of traditional microphones, allows these files to be decoded into any playback formatmono, stereo, 5.1, binaural, etc. Currently, no […]

Kristen Wilson

My project looks at American Children’s Literature from the 1990s-2000s. In this period, there is a remarkable shift in not only the tone of American Children’s Literature (turning away from moralistic and didactic traditions of the form), but in its popularity, gaining millions of adult readers. My research looks specifically at A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (1999-2006), a series in which three orphans face all manner of horrific and absurd obstacles as they attempt to survive alone in a world whose true order and shape is beyond […]

Stella Chen

Prosocial behavior is rooted in empathy, or the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Humans, like many other animals, have been shown to process the pain of in-group and out-group members differently, reflecting strong empathic bias towards ones own group. Encouragingly, research suggests that positive social interactions with an outgroup member leads to increased empathy for the out-group. Previous research with rats in a helping behavior test has demonstrated that rats will perform prosocial behaviors, such as releasing conspecifics trapped inside a restrainer, and will do so […]

Anita Lin

One of the great human rights crisis characterizing the turn of the 21st century is the drastic increase in the number of refugees worldwide. As of 2014 the UNHCR reported the number of people forcibly displaced to be 59.9 million people and pinpoints the number of years spent in refugee camps to be 17 years. The UN, NGOs, advocates and the international community have given great effort to meet this serious human rights crisis characterizing the turn of the century. However, the most commonly quoted statistic pinpointing 17 years as […]

Maleah Fekete

Formula fiction is a literary structure in which narratives within a genre are predictable, varying only in details, and therefore, rather than reflecting the real world, reflect a reality constructed by the formula itself. This allows works within a formula to appeal to readers’ emotional, as opposed to aesthetic, tastes. I am investigating the relationship between groups of individuals who read certain types of formula fiction (primarily romance), the emotional fulfillment specific formulas provide, and the social structures producing a deficiency of emotional fulfillment that causes readers to seek out […]

Sy Bocalbos Jordan

Filipinos living in the Philippines today are made of of more than 175 ethnic groups, and are an amalgamation of its indigenous populations, migrants from neighboring countries and the descendants of distant colonizers. For my research, I will use a critical race and gender lens to examine Filipino Identity. What was the process of racialization for the indigenous peoples of the archipelago into Filipino nationalists? How do the colonial legacies of the country persist in the Filipino identity? How and why are Filipinos imagined as a mono-ethnic group? The framework […]

Colleen Murphy

The ability to understand and predict how landscapes will evolve enables us to mitigate the effects of natural disasters and to act as stewards of the land by taking appropriate conservation and restoration measures when necessary. Currently, the geomorphic transport laws that we use to express this evolution do not quantitatively consider variations in rock types and the vegetative communities that they host. This project aims to further our understanding of the role that lithologic heterogeneity plays in landscape evolution by mapping and characterizing lithologic variability at two sites in […]