Humanities Center Student Research Partners Winter Break 2010
Pierre Hecker (English) and Anna Preus will collaborate on a project involving 20th century performance history of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Anna will engage in broad-based library research and will gain experience dealing with both primary texts and secondary material. She will aid Pierre in creating an annotated bibliography relating to the performances (including articles, books, reviews, and images); work with materials from the Library of Congress that are available online; and in one instance work with the facsimile of an original prompt book.
Christopher Holt (Classics) and Jeffrey Troy Samuels will develop a study of the Performance History of Roman Comedy, 240 BCE to 43 BCE. Troy will read a set of four books containing Cicero’s political and prosecution speeches, noting all explicit references to performances, as well as implicit evidence (e.g., references to actors, jokes comparing people to characters from plays, mention of festivals with dramatic elements). The two will then work together to interpret and sort this evidence before formatting it into a user-friendly catalog.
Meera Sehgal (Sociology/Anthropology) and Shreya Singh will explore how Sangat, a south Asian feminist network, builds bridges, raises women’s consciousness about the links among patriarchies, neoliberal development, militarism and religious fundamentalism, and mobilizes networks in South Asia through its annual feminist capacity-building course. Shreya will help conceptualize and write grant applications to fund this research, formulate focus group questions for fieldwork in the winter, and reformulate email surveys appropriate for course participants, trainers, and organizers in five countries.
Angela Willey (Women’s and Gender Studies) and Sara Cantor will undertake a project on gendered discourses in popular non-fiction on monogamy, addressing the relationship between academic scientific publishing and broader cultural discourses about monogamy. Sara will create a database of information about the content, publication, and reception of popular non-fiction books on monogamy, including venues where they are reviewed, discussion on blogs, interviews on television, and other citations in popular culture.
Qiguang Zhao (Asian Languages and Literatures) and Kathryn Schmidt will work on a book in English about Taoism in modern society. The book discusses the usage of the philosophy to reduce the greed and anxiety in both Eastern and Western life. In collaboration with Qiguang, Kathryn will collect documents and edit the text, with particular attention to thorny translations and cross-cultural communication.