The Humanities Center is pleased to announce the recipients of summer break Student Research Partner (SRP) awards for 2020.* Congratulations to all!

Barbara Allen (Political Science) and Beck Woollen ’23 (Undeclared) will study how changes in ownership in news gathering services affect the local TV news coverage received by voters during the 2008, 2014, and 2016 elections, focusing on how information is framed in relation to race, gender, age, and experience; time given to candidates to voice positions; and time devoted to types of ads.

Cecilia Cornejo (Cinema and Media Studies) and Louisa Bellinger ’21 (Cinema and Media Studies) and Arya Misra ’21 (Cinema and Media Studies) will continue working on The Wandering House. The project features an ice-fishing house retrofitted as a mobile audio-recording studio and was designed to engage the residents of Northfield, MN in reflection on the significance of “home,” a concept in a state of flux as more people around the globe become displaced.

Catherine Fortin (Linguistics) will work with Emma Ismail ’21 (Linguistics) on two projects on aspects of the syntax of Indonesian. The first is an investigation of the structure of comparative clauses within a generative syntactic framework, and will culminate in a jointly-authored conference paper; the second is a preliminary exploration through existing annotated corpora of Indonesian, with the goal of better understanding how these resources can complement and enrich her existing research program.

Melanie Freeze (Political Science) and Emma Diers ’21 (Political Science/ International Relations) will work to build a database, conduct analyses, and write an article that explores the strategic nature of minor/third party candidate entry in modern state legislative elections.

Clara Hardy (Classics) and Naomi Brim ’21 (English) will do bibliographical research on one or two chapters of Clara’s current book project: a deep dive into the year 404/3 in Athens, when the city was briefly ruled by a violent cabal known as the Thirty Tyrants. As the book is intended for an undergraduate audience, Naomi will also read drafts for clarity, and help with framing and structuring the material to make it maximally engaging for non-experts. 

Jessica Keating (Art and Art History) and Horace Fusco ’23 (Undeclared) will do research for a book Impossible Nature: The World of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Through a series of close visual investigations, this slim book (45,000 words), will reveal the ways in which Arcimboldo’s work pictured and contemplated anew the codependency of art, nature, and governance during the second half of the sixteenth century. (Due to the COVID-19 crisis, this research will be carried out in 2021.)

Alex Knodell (Classics) and Sam Wege ’22 (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. (Due to the COVID-19 crisis, this research will be carried out in 2021.)

Jake Morton (Classics) and Scott Shafer ’22 (Classics), Lauren Townsend ’22 (Classics), and Corrah Gonzales-Lipham ’21 (Classics) will travel to northeastern Greece to conduct fieldwork in the southern Olympus range on the Roman troop movements of the 169 and 168 BC campaigns as well as the workings of the Macedonian fort network which Morton has proposed was in place to prevent such an invasion. (Due to the COVID-19 crisis, this research will be carried out in 2021.)

Susannah Ottaway (History) Adam Smart ’22 (History) and Michael Schultz ’22 (History) will work on the project, “Blindness in Britain, c. 1500-1850.” They will do research on blindness and the history of disabilities in the early modern period, and will examine primary sources on the Norwich Hospital and School for the Indigent Blind, drawing also from various newspaper archives from this period.

Meera Sehgal (Women and Gender Studies) and Alec Morrissey ’21 (Sociology and Anthropology) and Sadie Ray Smith ’23 (Undeclared) will work on a project focused on transnational feminist praxis in South Asia, including a book manuscript and two conference papers.

Cherlon Ussery and Anna Grove ’21 (Linguistics) and Marcella Jurotich ’21 (Linguistics and German) 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.