Grace Cauthron
As a genre, Cyberpunk was birthed by a generation of writers who grew up being influenced by technological commodities like TV, computers, video games, etc., which sprang from the rise of multinational capitalism. Entertainment and image-based commodities such as these fundamentally altered how humans interacted with reality. Thus, themes of disembodiment, or disconnection from physical reality, became routine in the genre. Although Cyberpunks believed they had discovered a revolutionary new form, after its initial popularity in the 80s, Cyberpunk has since been criticized for its techno-orientalist aesthetics, its racially “colorblind” […]
Finn Finneran
I am researching anti-racist working-class lesbian literature of the 1960s-90s, with a focus on the work of Judy Grahn and Leslie Feinberg. Judy Grahn is a poet, publisher, and leading figure in the Bay Area’s lesbian feminist movement. Leslie Feinberg (zie, hir pronouns) was a transgender activist, historian, fiction writer, and life-long anti-imperialist. Both were white, working-class participants in anti-racist political struggles. My research seeks to understand how these authors theorized cross-racial solidarity and antiracism in the post-civil rights era, which saw the dawn of liberation movements for people of […]
Ella Morrison
This project explores the intersection of prison abolition and narrative justice. Through a combination of community engagement, narrative-motivated research, and film production, this project will delve into abolitionist media, examine cinematic alternatives to the ways the prison-industrial complex manifests in mainstream media, and explore how systems-impacted communities are reimagining safety, justice, and accountability without reliance on incarceration. By collaborating with youth directly impacted by the juvenile justice system in the Bay Area, this project hopes to be a space of collective dreaming where youth are empowered to challenge the systems […]
Elizabeth Shepherd
In attempting to uncover where Rivke Kope’s poetry and theories of psychoanalysis intersect, I will trace how Jewish women in Europe envisioned the past, while rebuilding their communities. In the silence of a post-war Paris, Rivke Kope wrote Yiddish poetry that experimented with sound. She adopted the rhythms, clarity, sobriety, and interiority of the modernist Inzihksin (“Introspectivist”) Movement of the 1920s and 30s. As they brought psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious into modernist Yiddish poetry, Kope attempted to bring a voice to the issues of Jewish women in Europe in […]
Daphne Rose
I will research the parallels between the novels of Vigdis Hjorth, Norwegian pioneer of autofiction (virkelighetslitteratur, lit. “reality fiction”) and the portrayal of women in Ancient Greek tragedy. How has the representation—and the cathartic function—of female trauma shifted from the literature of classical Athens to the contemporary autofiction movement? Through a close reading of novels Will and Testament and If Only, I will explore the universal themes employed by both Hjorth and the authors of Ancient Greece, as well as specific narrative similarities between Hjorth’s work and Greek drama. This […]
Clara Brownstein
Often regarded as nostalgic and utopian, the campus novel has recently undergone something of a makeover. In the past two decades, as the university has seen massive changes in funding and purpose, campus novels both reflect and resist this transformation. My planned thesis focuses on the ways several contemporary narratives of undergraduate experience—Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and Either/Or, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and Hua Hsu’s memoir Stay True—portray the tension between their protagonists’ deep desire to learn and the material realities of the university that prevent them from doing […]
Ava Ratcliff
My research is on Catullus 64, a Latin epyllion, or “little epic poem.” Most people know it as a major inspiration for Virgil’s Aeneid. However, while Catullus 64 follows follows epic conventions of meter and theme, it is much shorter than poems like the Aeneid– barely 400 lines! Catullus 64 is further unique because over half of the poem is an ekphrasis, or vivid description, usually of art, and in this case of a woven bedspread. The most extensive part of this ekphrasis is a speech by Ariadne, the Minoan […]
Ashlyn Reynolds
Residues of the prominent performance artists of the last half century tend to accumulate in two places: the museum gift shop, sold as hyper-commercialized trinkets, or already laid to rest as “documents” in abject filing cabinets of major institutional archives. These conventional repositories for impermanent art provide a suffocating arrangement for artistic movements broadly intending to subvert traditions of preservation and commodification. My summer research will investigate the art preservation practices of the Marina Abramović Institute. By extending Abramović’s legacy through participatory workshops centered around her artistic method–rather than reducing […]
Qiyue Zhao
The 1980s witnessed the rise of Women’s Studies in China as a critical response to previous female construction defined by ungendered socialist labor. Female corporeality became a charged field for allegory, anticipation, and criticism. This change projected onto the cinematic screen and brought new female figures beyond associations with the historically dominant socialist developmental propaganda. However, instead of receding into the background, such developmentalism enjoyed a neoliberal and capitalistic transformation. What complicated the screen was the entanglement between the heterogeneous representations of female liberation and an alternative force of neoliberal […]
Ellen Wu
The field of space exploration has seen significant shifts from its beginnings in the Cold War “Space Race” between the United States and Soviet Union, to today’s NewSpace era of commercialization via startups and venture capital. These shifts in the industry have been accompanied by the development of sociotechnical imaginaries: collective visions of ideal futures that are based on a common view of social order, and support advancements in science and technology. Space is an industry ideal for the application of this concept due to heavy government involvement and its […]