Roger Bechtel (Theater) will work with Shavera Seneviratne ’13 pursuing research for his new book, which examines the emerging aesthetic(s) of contemporary avant-garde theater performance in America. They will be working together to understand the ways in which postmodernist and modernist forms are merging with particular regard to two questions: Diderot posited, roughly speaking, that, paradoxically, an audience can have a genuinely emotional response only if an actor incorporates a degree of artificiality into her performance. How has this idea played out in theory and practice since? 2. Video projections are now ubiquitous in live performance. How can we theorize the co-presence of live and virtual bodies on stage?
Devashree Gupta (Political Science) Meghan Keane ’13, and Connor Lane ’13 will work together to catalogue and archive primary documents (interviews, correspondence, posters and artwork, organization documents, etc.) from Northern Ireland and South Africa. They will be developing meaningful criteria for categorizing the materials, building a digital repository of the sources, devising a database of tags that can be searched, and beginning to tag documents, as well as running initial queries on the database to observe the kinds of patterns (spatial and temporal) that emerge in the collection.
Laska Jimsen (CAMS) will work with Hannah White ’14 to draft a journal article that examines the work of Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault within the context of international post-war film movements. Together, they will analyze his technical and formal strategies, particularly in relation to cinematography, and explore the notion of truth in his work. As well as collaborating on the analysis of texts and films, Hannah will be transcribing Laska’s interviews with Brault and assisting with French translations.
Tim Raylor (English) will work with Rachel Porcher ’13, on a study of the great political philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s important but understudied early Latin poem, De mirabilibus pecci (The Wonders of the Peak), written, c.1627. The poem exists in no reliable modern edition, so they will first establish a text of the poem (on the basis of manuscript and early printed editions) and then undertake selected searching in relevant databases for phrasal debts to classical Latin poetry. Rachel’s work will include experimenting with data searching for short word strings in resources such as the Perseus Project’s digital library of texts.
Steven Schier (Political Science) and Henry Gordon ’15 will analyze election results and help to devise effective visual representations of this analysis for a chapter in Schier’s forthcoming co-edited book on the 2012 American elections. Henry’s work will include the creation of maps of electoral college results for 2008 and 2012, as well as the analysis of exit poll results and polling trends during the fall 2012 campaign.
Jeffrey Snyder (Ed. Studies), will work with Dylan Holck ’14, on a book-length project titled Free Schools and Open Classrooms: Educators Revolt Against the “System”. Dylan will be helping Jeffrey locate and analyze primary sources on the many radical and experimental schools and educational programs that emerged in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. They will focus particularly on the ways that educators applied ideas about democracy and freedom to their experimental educational programs, while also examining the influence of such radical forms of education on mainstream schools and educational policymakers.
Serena Zabin (History) will work with Marlise Williams ’15, Becca Giles ’15, and Lucas Rossi ’15. The students will do both archival research and database integration related to Serena’s book project on the social history of pre-revolutionary Boston and the famous 1770 Boston Massacre. The SRAs will work with multiple primary sources (probate records, newspapers advertisements, and legal documents) to determine the locations of military families and other inhabitants in colonial Boston and then link a digitized eighteenth-century map to her research database, an innovative exercise in historical GIS that will make use of the students working as a team of researchers.