Leah Tyus
The mermaid has been symbolic of desire and danger, beauty and monstrosity, and the human and non-human. Residing in the constant flux of paradoxes, the mermaid remains a beautiful enigma to all that encounter her. She is perceived at a distance, yet remains within close proximity because she is our reflection. As a reflection of the self, the mermaid is a product of the human imagination, reconfigured and transformed to articulate our personal reality. There is more to the mermaid that promises truth, and I hypothesize the truth is in […]
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 […]
Kathy Zhang
The visual systems astounding ability to create a stable view of the world around us is critical to our everyday experiences, helping us process what would otherwise be a visually chaotic world. One proposed mechanism for such remarkable perceptual stability is a phenomenon known as serial dependence in visual perception, which is thought to facilitate a systematic perceptual bias to make objects nearby in space and time appear more alike than they actually are. Through this misperception, the visual system seems to be sacrificing accuracy for stability. For example, movie […]
Moira Peckham
I am seeking to explore the intersection between water management techniques and structures (called acequias) and community identity in Abiqui, New Mexico. I’m taking a multifaceted approach to engage with this question. I am looking at the physical irrigation structures (constructed during the Spanish occupation of New Mexico) and their connection to other structures that are important to the community, archival and literary research, and oral histories regarding shared history and water use. Another important aspect of this project is that it is community engaged archaeological scholarship, meaning that there […]
Joshua Varkel
I will be analyzing/making sense of a collection (~30,000 pieces) of lithic materials from a 20,000 year old archaeological site in the Azraq Basin of Jordan. I will then put all the information obtained from the lithic remains into a GIS and run various statistical and spatial analysis, which will allow me to quantify my results and help understand the structure of the site through time and space.
Beth Hightower
The story of genocide has largely been taken up by its victims: their testimony takes on a reparative significance, counteracting their previous erasure. Jonathan Littells 2006 novel Les Bienveillantes, however, depicts World War II through the eyes of a Nazi official, who speaks to the reader as both an intellectual and historical actor. The narrators intellectualism authenticates him, makes him relatable, places him in a French literary tradition, and facilitates his crimes. This intellectual bent allows the narrator to take an administrative position within the regime, granting him access to […]
Kevin Milyavskiy
This study explores the form and purpose of a political apology. It includes analyses of French presidential speeches regarding crimes the French state committed throughout its history both domestically and internationally, and how the presidents speak of them. The speech former French president Franois Hollande gave during his visit to Algeria in 2012 is one of the case studies. Hollandes visit received international attention because many anticipated that he would, on behalf of France, finally apologize to Algeria for 132 years of colonial rule and the 1954 Algerian War of […]
Nora Harhen
In everyday life, seldom are the choices weve made reinforced by objective reward like food or water. Rather, we tend to set goals for ourselves, and actions leading to those goals are what are reinforced, even in the absence of reward. Theoretical work has suggested that treating goal achievement as a pseudo-reward is an effective means to learn complex behavior, which may require going through many intermediary, value-neutral sub-goals before leading to reward. There has been indirect evidence for pseudo-rewards when reaching subgoals in EEG and fMRI, but as of […]
Yena Lee
The past two years have been a time of painful awakening for Korea as the country witnessed a deeply polemic gender war previously unprecedented in Korean society. Within K-pop fandom, a series of fan-initiated hashtags such as #WeWantBTSFeedback has started publicizing and demanding feedback for issues of misogyny, homophobia, and xenophobia in K-pop industry, specifically in the star text of different idols and idol groups. In this research, I will explore how the recent feminism revival in Korea has fostered a discourse on identity politics within K-pop fandom by examining […]
Celine Vezina
Skaldic poetry, a genre of medieval Icelandic vernacular poetry characterized by its ornate poetics and highly inflexible meter, typically taking the form of royal encomia, was the preeminent poetic form in much of Scandinavia during its period of composition (mid-9th-mid-14th centuries). My research will focus on the latter end of this tradition, the rarely studied Marian skaldic poems (typically) composed in the 14th century. The Marian poems demonstrate a deep self-consciousness about the function of poetry within their changing culture, effectively using skaldic traditions as affective technologies to create emotional […]