Welcome to the Spring 2015 issue of Carleton College’s new Undergraduate Journal of Humanistic Studies. This will be the first of many issues that strives to bring together the best original research papers from across the humanities and social sciences. We are very proud of this collection of work, which we believe represents some of the highest-quality research and writing in the humanities and social sciences at Carleton College.

We would like to thank our faculty advisers Susannah Ottaway, Silvia Lopez, and Anna Moltchanova for their support and guidance; Web Content Specialist Doug Bratland and Web Designer Steve Bentley for their help designing and implementing the website; and our student guest editors Sarah Goodman ’15 (American Studies), Will Sheffer ’15 (Art History), Emma Sunog ’16 (Linguistics), and Morgan Tuff ’15 (Art History) for their discipline-specific expertise.