Yasmine Kaki

My project focuses on the role family and its creation and extension through marriages played in the consolidation of political power for the ruling family of Tunisia under its Ottoman regency. Since the Ottomans allowed for a great degree of political autonomy for the Bey (the governor of Tunis), rather than appointing a Bey to the region, the Ottoman government allowed for a continuous hereditary ruling family to control Tunisia. I will be looking specifically at the Husaynid Dynasty reigning from 1705-1956 but bracketing my period of research with the […]

Mel Kritikopoulos

Diasporic storytelling is not without the acknowledgement of language shifts. My research focuses on how contemporary authors in the Vietnamese diaspora use their inherited languages (French and English) to create works of multigenerational autofiction that offer insight into the experiences of their respective diasporic communities through a literary analysis of Line Papin’s ‘Les Os des Filles’ and E.M. Tran’s ‘Daughters of the New Year.’ I will use close reading, bibliographic research, and person-based reportage to ask two major questions: first, how does the form of autofiction reveal these modern female […]

Pilar Jacqueline Farr

In 1856, the Lerdo Law took effect in Mexico, signifying a future in which liberalism would be the preeminent political philosophy to govern Mexico. Most historians of Mexican history point to this era (La Reforma) and its landmark Law (Ley Lerdo) as the first instance of land reform in the Republic. The Law privatized lands owned by corporations and not individuals, which meant that Church lands and Indigenous lands were the primary victims of the Lerdo Law. The Hijeulas project that I would pursue contests the idea that land reforms […]

Lucia Rhiannon Harrison

All the it-girls are dissociating. Dissociative feminism has become the new cool-girl branch of white, neoliberal feminism which has been picked up by teenage girls online who idolize problematic characters who dissociate to cope with their trauma. Otessa Moshfegh’s unnamed narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation while drawing on elements of the gothic genre, satirizes this new media trope. I argue that the rise in dissociative feminism is indicative of a larger social incapacity to cope with trauma through a particular affective position of dissociation, in response to […]

Jacqueline Chavez

Indigenous erasure has been prevalent throughout history affecting the way people choose to identify with their roots. This is a struggle that 1.5 and second-generation Oaxacan-identifying students pursuing post-secondary choose to identify with their indigenous roots. By interviewing Oaxacan students about their experiences growing up and qualitatively analyzing their experiences, I seek to understand the power of storytelling and memory pathways with an emphasis on factors that have led to their identity formation. While some immigrant families tend to preserve their traditions and maternal languages, the intention of retaining their […]

Annie Cheng

Labor poetry in China emerged from the growing exploitation of migrant workers in the post-reform era. Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, a worker-turned-poet has gained attention through her writing of female migrant workers’ gendered experience of the highly mechanized, desexualizing process of industrial production. While her work has received critical attention from feminist and eco-critical angles, it has often been read within a narrow factory setting. This project aims at filling the gap through close-reading Zheng’s work via an ecofeminist synthesis, which relates the oppression of women to that of nature. I […]

Isadora Duskin-Feinberg

Dance historian Marion Kant exclaimed, “Ask any young woman on her way to a [ballet] performance…what most clearly symbolizes ballet and she will probably answer – the skirt and the pointe shoe. She will not quote sentences from the story and may recall only a few names of the characters…Has ballet no message?” The wider public focuses little on the messages of Ballet, such as academic research focusing mostly on the science of ballet. My research focus for this project will be comparing and contrasting the messages/depictions of ballet created […]

Alejandra S. Aguilar Arce

The Spanish speaking population has been growing rapidly in the U.S in the past decades, particularly the Mexican dialect. For this reason, understanding the dynamics of dialect contact and bidialectalism between Spanish dialects is important. I aim to conduct research to investigate the extent of influence that the Mexican dialect of Spanish has had on other Spanish speakers and their native dialects within the California Bay Area. Despite extensive research on dialect contact in cities like New York City and Los Angeles, there has not been enough conducted in the […]

Brayan Ortiz Ramos

During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration began the process of repatriating Mexican laborers – roughly 1.8 million people would leave the United States during this period. The Mexican state – embroiled in agrarian reform – took the repatriation of their countrymen as a positive for the country and enacted policies in line with Cardenista redistribution. One effort, however, proved of a different character. Starting in 1933, an attempt was made to construct colonies of the newly arrived Mexicans from the United States. These artificially constructed neighborhoods were intended […]

Arin Kim Wise

Literature regarding Korean queerness has expanded within the last decade, but current dominant Korean understandings of queerness view it as a “Western” and modern phenomenon, as well as against Christian values. Therefore, research into Korean queerness across Korean history remains relatively unexplored, and at times, actively suppressed. Through this project, I hope to understand the role that Confucianism and Christianity had in the erasure of queerness from the Korean historical canon, and use the frame of queer and gender theory to re-understand and illuminate queer meanings of historical and modern […]