Fikreselam Habebo

In 2009 the country witnessed a spate of suicides among foreign maids, and last year a 33-year-old Ethiopian woman [Dechesa] killed herself shortly after being filmed being beaten by a Lebanese man on a Beirut street. With increasing reports of immigrants and abuse of domestic workers in the Gulf countries, the conditions of these migrant women need to be closely studied. My research question asks: 1) How is domestic work in Beirut, Lebanon racialized and gendered and 2) How do Ethiopian domestic workers in Lebanon experience race? I will approach […]

Nicole Lang

My project explores the ways in which 3D, digital technology can assist in analyzing and teaching about lithic technologies, e.g. stone tools. Over the summer of 2013, I will experiment with different methods that allow me to reproduce accurate 3D models that will be included in an online digital reference dictionary. The methods I will be using are photography of Jordanian lithic material and computerized 3D modeling from the photographs to reproduce the models digitally. I will be working closely with my mentor, Lisa Maher, a Jordanian lithics expert, to […]

Soo Yeon Han

In todays culture, the east is often defined as archival and conservative, the west being its modern progressive counterpart. Nevertheless, the patriarchal dominance had significant influence in both hemispheres. Of the same nationality yet of contrasting environment, Korean and Korean American poets maintain similar yet different perspectives. How do contemporary Korean women poets express themselves differently from their mothers who suffered oppressions? Furthermore, how would the Americanized daughters of the Korean mothers develop similar thematic approaches as part of their poetics? As my senior thesis, I intend to analyze the […]

Alina Enoiu

Many communities in the San Francisco Bay Area struggle with food insecurity or the lack of access to healthy and affordable food, making them more likely to suffer from diet-related diseases such as obesity and diabetes. Because these communities have a base of corner stores where people already shop, such as liquor stores or other smaller-scale stores, bringing healthy options to local corner stores may be a more effective strategy than developing larger supermarkets. My project will examine whether the federal governments strategies of providing financial incentives to storeowners is […]

Andrew King

The 1957 obscenity trial of Allen Ginsbergs Howlthat cornerstone epic of the Beat generationis understood as a major episode not only in the history of American and West Coast poetics but in the history of American culture. Missing from prevailing accounts of the trial, however, is an assessment of the role of Gil Orlovitzs text, The Statement of Erika Keith and Other Stories, Poems and a Play. When undercover officers Russell Woods and Thomas Pagee purchased a copy of Howl in order to arrest City Lights Books clerk Shigeyoshi Murao […]

Hussin Kordi

There are 50 million individuals suffering from hunger in the United States an absurdity when one considers the amount of food produced and wasted. Without accessible alternatives, North America and Europe waste nearly half of their excess consumable food. Despite an abundance of charity and emergency food services, the traditional hand-out model cannot seem to remedy the hunger epidemic. My research will examine nonprofit organizations in food security; I will examine how these organizations may contribute to more structurally transformative, long-term solutions in the communities they serve while simultaneously providing […]

Dayna Stimson

My research focuses on the growing recognition that the scientific study of consciousness is lacking in one crucial element: a rigorous methodology for examining the first-person, qualitative aspects of conscious states. While neuroimaging and computational cognition have greatly enhanced our knowledge of brain function, we are no closer to bridging the explanatory gap. That is, how does neuronal activity create the deeply complex, subjective, and personal world that each of us experiences? Though conventional scientific study does not currently recognize introspection as a valid method of inquiry, I will examine […]

Morgan Lewis

My research will focus on the role of women in forming the gender and family politics of the New Right in the 1970s and 1980s and if their views differed from New Right men. I am also interested in complicating the idea of ‘traditional values’ by looking at how the privileging of certain issues and identities in fact represented a departure from the past.

Suzanne Ubick

Something happened to Homo sapiens, our species, between 75,000 and 60,000 years ago, that resulted in a very different suite of behaviors and the first population boom. I argue that modern humans underwent a biological change that, coupled with environmental changes driving dietary change, allowed humans, especially human females, to lay down large stores of body fat under normal nutritional conditions. I will draw from the archaeological record in the form of ancient artworks, the ethnographic record in the documented changes in stature of the Andaman Islanders over time, and […]

David Yufan Yang

Between 2004 and 2011, China implemented the largest secondary education reform in its history. Although the reformed textbooks embody many shifts in ideology (such as perspectives on Confucius), the primary goal of secondary education remains to enforce an overt set of ideologies onto Chinese students. My research project asks: how effective is Chinas centralized education system in passing down these changed ideologies to students through the textbooks? This project consists of two major stages. First, I will quantitatively measure and compare the ideological content across different textbooks. Then, I will […]