SRA Awards for Summer 2017 Announced

27 March 2017

The Humanities Center is pleased to announce the recipients of summer break Student Research Assistantships awards. Congratulations to all!

HUMANITIES CENTER: SUMMER 2017 SRA AWARDS*

Palmar Álvarez Blanco (Spanish), Carinna Nikkel ’18 (Spanish), and Christina Tarazzi ’18 (Spanish) will travel to Spain to record and film interviews with active participants in various citizen projects (colectivos). The research intends to contribute to the documentation and better understanding of Spain’s 15M movement.

Roger Bechtel (Theatre) will work with Emma Halper ’18 (Theater and English) to create a piece entitled The Anarchist’s Handbook, which will premiere at the Minnesota Fringe Festival in August. They will research the anarchist movement from Malatesta in Italy to Chomsky in America, as well as its current forms, and will turn this research into dramatic scenes for the performance.

Cecilia Cornejo (Cinema and Media Studies) and Fernando Saldivia Yanez ’20 (Undecided) will travel to the small town of Maltrata in Veracruz, Mexico, to shoot for the film Ways of Being Home. The film examines issues of displacement and marginalization of the local Mexican community in Northfield, of which as many as 70% of its members trace their roots back to the town of Maltrata.

Michael Flynn (Linguistics), Yitong Chen ’19 (Linguistics), and James Smith ’19 (Linguistics) will visit and work at the Lake Traverse Reservation of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate as part of a long term collaborative project on the production of a pedagogical grammar of the Dakota language, which will help preserve it, and will be used for teaching the language to generations to come.

Dev Gupta (Political Science) and Jean LaFontaine ’18 (International Relations) will examine the ways in which activists frame their grievances, develop their tactics, and forge their identities by researching the ways in which concepts of space and place function in the virtual environments of distinctive online activism.

Clara Hardy (Classics) will work with Madison Chambers ’18 (English/Psychology), and Elliot Schwartz ’19 (Undecided) on feedback, discussion, and revision of her text about 415 BCE in Athens.

Alex Knodell (Classics/Archaeology) will work with Russell Li ’19 (Classics), and an international team of students and faculty, in the Mazi Archaeological Project in Northwest Attica, Greece. Russell will be conducting archaeological field surveys, as well as doing lab work and data analysis on site. 

Anna Moltchanova (Philosophy) will work with Allegra Tashjian ’2020 (Undecided), Jenny Portis ’20 (Undecided), and Hannah Uttley ’20 (Undecided) on gender-based epistemic limitations imposed on individuals by their group membership. They will be researching and discussing  literature at the intersection of cognitive science, psychology, sociology and philosophy. 

Annette Nierobisz (Sociology) will work with Camille Jonlin ’2019 (Undecided) coding interviews and analyzing the full data set for her project on older workers living in Minnesota who experienced job loss between 2008 and 2014.

Susannah Ottaway (History) will work with Claire Jensen ’18 (History), who will be building a database of information gleaned from account books maintained by an English workhouse, doing some quantitative analysis, and looking at notes on children who run away from the workhouse, in order to piece together their life stories. This summer collaboration is part of a larger research project on a narrative history of the workhouse in England in the long eighteenth century.

Kathleen Ryor (Art History) will work with Yue Wu ’19 (Undecided), who will be going through catalogs of Chinese paintings and compiling lists of handscrolls that depict plants in order to track the expansion of the genre of flower and plant painting during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in China.  

Kathryn Wegner (Educational Studies) will work with Emma Bessire ’19 (History) on a research project that investigates why and how citizenship education disappeared from public discourse curriculum after WWII in the United States. They will be examining primary sources such as Federal Education Policy, Laws, and Court Cases.

Thabiti Willis (History) will work with Jackie Culotta ’2019 (Undecided) on GIS data analysis for an ongoing digital humanities project entitled “Between East Africa and Arabia: Mapping Migration of Runaways Slaves in the Gulf Region, 1906-1949”; a project that seeks to contribute to the larger study of enslaved peoples and the African Diaspora in the Persian Gulf region.

*All awards made possible by a generous gift from Alison von Klemperer ’82.

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