Angela Yin
Anthony Principe-Contreras
My research focuses on Ocean Vuong’s 2019 novel “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” Vuong incorporates the epistolary form–narrated by his protagonist, Little Dog, to his mother–to elucidate how Little Dog explores his identity in 21st-century New England as the son of a Vietnamese immigrant. My research will consider how Vuong’s novel integrates scholarship from post-colonial studies, queer and gender studies, and most notably, studies of the novel form. By examining the novel through this diversified lens, I will argue that its contents mimics the social conditions we see in America […]
Kaamya Talwar Sharma
My research will examine queer subjectivity in urban India, focusing on the role of virtual spaces in the development of queer identities. Through interviews and virtual participant observation, my project will use a sociological, post-constructivist, post-colonial approach to explore what the process of realization of ones non-heterosexuality feels like in urban India. Specifically, how do globalization and class, as well as the associated language, discourses, and interaction with queer spaces, affect the queer urban Indians experience of sexuality? Related questions include how and why online and offline discourses on lesbian, […]
Danny Cohen
More so than in other developed countries, United States adults are unprepared for retirement. Stagnating wages and the gradual death of defined benefit pensions in the private sector are largely responsible, as private employees are unlikely to have a guaranteed income stream in retirement beyond Social Security. These employees, however, often have access to defined contribution pensions (like 401(k)s) that allow them to contribute their own earnings to tax-advantaged accounts that can be accessed in retirement. In my study, I analyze the impact of state legislation on private employees decisions […]
Zoe Elina Ferguson
Humans are cognitively cheap. To preserve precious cognitive resources, we take cognitive shortcuts, one example being the detrimental use of stereotypes. Simply, we prefer to mentally process information about people when that information is consistent with our stereotypes about them. So what happens when someones identity contradicts the stereotypes that society has about them? Because relations between Black and White communities remains one of the most problematic racial issues in America, I have narrowed my research question to focus on this inter-group context. I hypothesize that White Americans prefer to […]
Giancarlo Tucci-Berube
In the realm of poetry, lyric, as a noun, signifies a category of poetic form, as an adjective, abstract subjectivity. The Italian poet, screenwriter, film director, and essayist-critic Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) takes up these definitions of lyric and through a diversity of mediums expands them beyond poetry, and beyond mere signification: articulating a possible critical consciousness of the concept itself. Pasolinis poetry and films are conceived through a lyric style or form that actively connects sensuality, rigorous thought, intellectual and political critique, experience of contradictionand in terms of the […]
Zoe Kiely
Much of modern life has become intertwined with disclosing personal information to third parties. Email, social media, GPS, search history, etc., all contain intimate parts of ourselves, but this information is under third-party control. Traditional Fourth Amendment guarantees of persons, houses, papers, and effects are increasingly more difficult to protect when the boundaries of self have evolved beyond our own individual body and belongings and into a digital space controlled by third parties. With this friction between between the limits of identity and third-party controlled personal information, individual privacy has […]
Bryan Chavez Castro
By examining the intersection of sound and image, this research will trace the convergence of popular music and Salvadoran literary and artistic traditions both at home and in the diaspora, with a particular focus on its engagement with images of violence. Drawing from the cultural production of the years of the Salvadoran civil war (1980-1992) and the postwar, I will track emblematic cultural objects that affront the reality of repression of the years leading up to the war, the bloodshed of the war, and the reverberations in the years that […]
Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk
My research examines the tensions between Geoffrey Chaucers canon and modern scholarships dismissive treatment of the Legend of Good Women (the LGW). My research will uncover the historical and cultural forces causing this minor poem to be overshadowed by the infamous Canterbury Tales, a foundational text in every undergraduate English department. Through a codicological approach (study of the book as literary artifact), I will revisit the original early modern print anthologies that first consolidated Chaucers literary authority in the emergence of print culture. The primary anthologies of Thynne, Speght, and […]
Gabriel Sarnoff
How can I insert computer music into the intersection of improvisation and composition? My research will explore the ways in which I can use the computer as an instrument in itself and, conversely, as a medium between instrument and sound production. Computers enable a constant and spontaneous flow of information between the musician and the digital soundscape. Learning how to control this flow will let me bring composition and improvisation into a modern context without losing the integrity and intricacies of live performance. My project will be to create a […]