The Humanities Center is pleased to announce the recipients of summer break Student Research Partner (SRP) awards for 2021.* Congratulations to all!
Stacy Beckwith (Middle Eastern Languages) and Apoorba Misra ’22 (Cinema and Media Studies) will look into how and why Netflix began streaming ‘Cathedral of the Sea’ after its May 2018 debut in Spain, and how the series has played with a range of Netflix viewers since.
Cecilia Cornejo (Cinema and Media Studies) and Ceile Kronick ’22 (Cinema and Media Studies) will work on Sonic Landscapes of Rural Minnesota, a sound-mapping website designed to explore notions of home and belonging from a rural perspective.
In conjunction with the The Great River Shakespeare Festival production of Duncan Macmilan and Jonny Donohoe’s EVERY BRILLIANT THING Andrew Carlson (Theater and Dance) and Hannah Sheridan ’23 (undeclared) will start a community–wide conversation about topics related to mental illness and suicide, doing outreach in the community that connects to local health partners.
Andrew Flory (Music) and Ann Beimers ’23 (undeclared) will create a large-scale database of photographs related to Marvin Gaye, using a mix of images found widely online, those found in more selective licensing databases like Getty Images and others taken from archival research.
Shaohua Guo (Asian Languages & Literatures) David Ahrens ’22 (Chinese) and Marianne Gunnarsson ’22 (Chinese) will examine the role that live streaming platforms play in structuring the flow of user attention, commodifying the performative space, and catalyzing new forms of sociality online. By contextualizing the study of interactive digital entertainment, this project primarily seeks to explore three issues: the new possibilities that developments in digital media create in the fabric of people’s social, political, and cultural lives; the dyadic relationships between old and new forms of media; and the interconnections between conventional and emergent cultural trends.
Alex Knodell (Classics), Sam Wege ’22 (Classics), Noah Eckersley-Ray ’23(Classics), and Sophie Rast ’24 (undeclared) will travel to the Small Cycladic Islands for an archaeological survey project on the smallest of the Aegean islands. The group will conduct fieldwork as well as artifact study and analysis, to explore how tiny islands provided important stepping stones to more sizable landforms during the initial colonization of the Aegean Basin.
Seth Peabody (German) and Esme Krohn ’24 (undeclared) will work toward completion of Seth’s book project, Environmental Fantasies: German Film History for the Anthropocene.
Liz Raleigh (Sociology) and Zoe Poolos ’22 (Sociology and Anthropology) will assemble an archive of “Dear Birthmother” letters, a peculiar genre that tasks prospective adoptive parents with soliciting a pregnant woman considering making an adoption plan. The archive will be used to explore how the tone of the letters written by White parents seeking non-White children has changed since the events of 2020.
Kim Smith (Environmental Studies) and Moses Jehng ’22 (Political Science) will work on a book project exploring how American law schools have incorporated climate change into the curriculum, covering the period from 1985 to the present.
Cherlon Ussery (Linguistics) and Jack Uchitel ’22 (Linguistics and Math) will work on a project that examines the variation between the two Insular Scandinavian languages, Icelandic and Faroese. They will test the degree to which scholarly claims about ditransitives in English extend to Icelandic and Faroese. They will also examine properties related to morphological case and word order that are unique to the two languages.
*Awards made possible by a generous gift from Alison von Klemperer ’82 and support from the Dean of the College.