The Humanities Center is pleased to announce the recipients of winter break Student Research Partnerships awards. Congratulations to all!
Jenna Conklin (Linguistics) and Lizbeth Ramírez Gaytán ’21 (Linguistics) will elicit listener’s judgments on the accentedness and intelligibility of Spanish-accented English. To fully model the impact of minute differences in vowel reduction, the study design will make minor acoustic adjustments to recordings to produce sets of otherwise identical sound files differing only in the degree of reduction of unstressed vowels.
Mihaela Czobor-Lupp (Political Science) and Noah Rosenfield ’21 (Political Science) will articulate the main features of non-ideological thinking – a form of thinking that resists ideology, prejudices, and cliches and that remains committed to factuality and to the complex particularity of reality – through an engagement with the work of Hannah Arendt and with that of the Jewish Romanian writer and journalist, Mihail Sebastian.
James Ryan (Computer Science) and Kaeden Berg ’21 (Computer Science) will attempt to translate into English a remarkable 1677 work by John Peters called “Artificial Versifying,” which is a technique for procedurally generating Latin hexameter verse.
Lori Pearson (Religion) and Natalie Marsh ’21 (Religion) will explore gender-related material on Émile Durkheim necessary for several chapters of Lori Pearson’s book project, Sexuality and Secularization, which uses the work of Marianne Weber (today remembered as Max Weber’s wife) to explore how debates about women’s rights informed early 20th-century theories of religion and modernity.
Lei Yang (Asian Languages and Literature) and Saraswati Vadnais ’22 (English) will translate and analyze Émmanuel-Édouard Chavannes’ and several other French scholars’ publications on Shiji (Records of the Historian). Written by Sima Qian (145—86 BC), the founding father of Chinese historiography, Shiji (Records of the Historian) is a monumental history with an unparalleled status in both Chinese historiography and literature.