Andrew Levine-Murray

The Castro District in San Francisco, California is frequently referred to as the Gay Mecca, a home for those of us who have been pushed to the margins because of our sexual orientation. However, demographics of and race relations within the Castro tell quite a different story, as people of color are largely absent or excluded from the community. Thus, my research question asks how queer people of color who congregate in the Castro neighborhood perceive their membership within the community. To answer this, I will conduct participant observation within […]

Eli Wirtschafter

In 1849, two competing performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth sparked a deadly riot in New York City. What began as a rivalry between two actorsan American star with a working-class fan base and a British tragedian with an aristocratic followingbecame a conflict over class divisions, British cultural influence, and permitted conduct in the theater. Previous scholarship tends to focus on the two actors, at the expense of understanding what led audiences at the time to invest so heavily in performances of Shakespeare. Using a mix of archival documents and secondary sources, […]

Karen Vang

My research project is to explore what traditional Hmong shamanism is within a western scientific context and how has it transform within the past thirty years as Hmong migrate and settle abroad, particularly in the northern California. The questions that I ask are: when, how and under what conditions did spiritual belief and behavior shift between a loss, renewal and continuation of traditional Hmong spirituality, and what are new and different forms of practicing shamanism today? I will also inquire how Hmong in northern California currently understand spirituality, spiritual experiences […]

Jamie Andreson

Throughout my 6 month journey through Brazil I will investigate and experience the conflicts of race relations in a different colonial and historical context. Since arriving in January, I have explored through personal travels and a 3.5 month UCEAP program in Salvador, Bahia studying the History and Culture of Afro-Brazilians. My SURF research focuses on the legacy of Sociologist Edison Carneiro, who worked as one of the first Afro-Brazilian Ethnographers to analyze the history and culture of African descended people in Brazil in the 1930-1950’s. His academic, journalistic and activist […]

Giuliana Blasi

Dance Learning and Situated Social Practice” examines how social position, culture, and community influence learning processes and outcomes in youth dance programs. In this investigation, I ask: How do interactions between identity, culture, and community mediate students’ learning experiences in dance programs across different genres? This summer, I will conduct an ethnographic case study at AileyCamp- a dance and youth development program for underprivileged middle school aged children. To focus on the sociocultural aspects of learning, I am using situated social practice theory as a conceptual framework to describe how […]

Kouros Falati

Karuk is an endangered language indigenous to Northern California. One of its most interesting features is its large variety of verbal prefixes and suffixes, expressing everything from person and tense to the direction of motion relative to the Klamath River. For my summer research project, I will be focusing on just one suffix, the essive, which roughly provides the meaning of being in a certain condition. For example, when applied to the verb imus, to see, the result is imus-ahi, to look like. I plan to take a more modern […]

Kirsten Lew

My research deals with a trend in American prose that, starting around the nineteenth century, led to an increasingly speech-based way of writing, called plain speech, characterized by simplicity in language, conciseness, and straightforwardness. Starting with Mark Twains Adventure of Huckleberry Finn, which was the first time that a serious work of literature maintained the use of a dialectical speaker throughout itself for a purpose other than humor, American literature entrenched itself in the vernacular, breaking with the verbosity and erudition of Anglo writers. I am tracing how, starting with […]

Tabitha Mancini

It is estimated that approximately 15% of the U.S. population has some type of learning disability (LD) (LDA, 2012). Though there is a growing body of research about people with LDs, this population is still dramatically misunderstood and underserved. Due to the amount of people in the U.S. who are now discovered to have LDs and the magnitude of the correlations to the social issues that exist, there continues to be a growing interest in identifying the barriers to success that this population faces. This research focuses on the effect […]

Maia Wolins

The 2003 war in Iraq displaced 4.2 million Iraqis, deployed over 170 thousand American troops, and changed the lives of many. Its repercussions are seen among the 40 thousand Iraqi refugees in the US, most of whom left behind successful lives as doctors, journalists, and artists. The wars aftermath is also evident among American veterans, who returned home to a community that had a shallow connection with the intense experience the troops had just lived in Iraq. For my senior honors thesis, I will examine the local effects of the […]

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.