Class of 2025
Andrew de las Alas
Major: Global Studies
Minors: Sociology, Asian American Studies
Mentor: Chris Eng
Project title: “Gateway to the East: Filipino Americans in a Black and White City”
Project description: After over 300 years of Spanish occupation, Roman Catholicism has seeped into nearly every dimension of Filipino society and culture. Even after migrating to the United States, the religion still plays an integral role in behaviors and beliefs of Filipino Americans. While a majority of the population is located on the coasts, Filipinos are still very present in the Midwest and have a deep history in St. Louis. To focus in on a relatively understudied population, I intend to conduct interviews to examine Roman Catholic religiosity in the St. Louis Filipino American, its role in creating community, and its contributions to racial identity development.
Jeffrey Camille
Major: Global Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Mentor: Rachel Brown
Project title: “The Ideal Monster in Conflict-Related Sexual Violence ”
Project description: During warfare, both state and nonstate actors frequently and deliberately perpetrate sexual violence against civilians and combatants. This crime is uniquely gendered in its constitution and execution, with men acting as its primary perpetrators across geographic and temporal boundaries. When not resulting in death, the horrors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) inflict long-term mental and physical trauma, fracture kinship within communities, trigger involuntary displacement and fuel other illicit activities. Given that this violence occurs within states and that, in many conflicts, states themselves are held solely or partly responsible for CRSV, there exists a potential (and indeed macabre) relationship between states and men in the infliction of this crime. My project identifies and problematizes this connection to argue that states arrange conditions that render men, irrespective of their civilian or combatant status, as the model agents of these abuses. Ultimately, in their reproduction of violence for so-called sovereignty, states make men the ideal monsters of CRSV. Those men who elect to embody this monstrosity are embraced in what is a violent communion with the state.
Joy Hu
Major: Economics
Minors: American Culture Studies and Finance
Mentors: Gaetano Antinolfi and Dave Walsh
Project title: “The Rush for Digital Gold: Regulatory Reactions to Cryptocurrency and New Financial Frontiers”
Project description: My project analyzes competing public narratives surrounding cryptocurrency’s contentious legal and regulatory position in the United States. I focus on arguments advanced by regulatory entities at the federal and state level as well as counternarratives from companies seeking wider freedom for cryptocurrency operations. My research examines how these conflicting narratives influence the ongoing litigation surrounding cryptocurrency’s legal status as well as the implications for future frameworks of financial regulation. By comparing contemporary regulatory battles to controversies surrounding other digital innovations in the previous three decades, I seek to uncover how the federal government approaches regulating novel technological and financial instruments for which little precedent exists.
Lena Levey
Major: Religious Studies
Minors: Writing and Spanish
Mentor: Christin Zühlke
Project title: “Sensual Desires and Bestial Indulgences: Sexual Sin as a Cause of the Flood in Midrash and Oryx and Crake”
Project description: Although the book of Genesis offers an expansive description of the Flood’s destruction of the Earth, as well as Noah’s survival, the text provides no account of the specific sins of humanity that provoked God’s punishment. The rabbis interpreting Genesis 6–9 in Midrash offered their own explanation of humanity’s corruption, which also served as a warning for their contemporaries about unacceptable behavior that would invoke the wrath of God. These explanations frequently justified the Flood by depicting the antediluvian Earth as sexually sinful, using anecdotes about humanity’s insatiable and untempered lust, as well as unregulated interspecies reproduction. In my article, I argue that Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake modernizes these rabbinical descriptions of sexual sin through her depictions of violent pornography and genetic engineering. These descriptions offer both a justification for Crake’s manufactured “Waterless Flood” and an implicit warning about moral corruption in contemporary Western society.
Melina Marin
Majors: English Literature and French
Minor: Biology
Mentor: J. Dillon Brown
Project title: “Navigating the Scare-ibbean: Tracing the Socio-Political Legacy of Monstrous Figures in the Caribbean”
Project description: This project aims to examine monsters (mainly the vampire, zombie, and cyborg/modified human) in Caribbean speculative fiction media as visualizations of cultural anxieties responding to long-standing colonial structures and sociopolitical changes such as socialist revolutions or US/Russian involvement in Cuba. In undertaking this project, I will analyze how authors, filmmakers, and artists employ monsters in their works to process and critique both the stagnant aspects of colonial hierarchies and the rapidly changing movements that paradoxically support and modify these systems. My particular interest lies in how these authors interact with existing monstrous figures pulled from both inside and outside the Caribbean to crystallize a distinct national and Caribbean identity as a response to the diasporic origins of the Caribbean as an intersection of native, colonial, and enslaved populations.
Cecilia O’Gorman
Majors: English Literature
Mentor: Jessica Rosenfeld
Project title: “The Self-Identification Trap"
Project description: As human beings in the world, we cannot and do not decide unilaterally what we mean. What we can do, through a set of concrete actions, is change the ways others assign meaning to us. This project argues that an unworkable philosophy of self-identification has hijacked the contemporary trans movement: people are whatever they say they are, full stop. This view, motivated by noble intentions, is tragically wrong: meaning is social, and gender is a set of relations. What would our movement look like without its recent anti-social streak? And what, in the end, is the role of persuasion? My aim is not to tear the trans cause down, but to make it better, sleeker, and stronger. There is hope, I argue, after all.
Aja Topps-Harjo
Majors: Psychological and Brain Sciences, and African and African American Studies
Project mentor: Seanna Leath
Project title: “Dismantling the Master's House with the Master’s Tools: An Examination of Black Women Scholars’ Pursuit of Equity within the Legal System”
Project description: My research project — framed by Audre Lorde’s question, “Can the master’s house be dismantled with the master’s tools?” — addresses a critical and complex issue at the intersection of law, race and gender. By focusing on the experiences and strategies of Black women scholars and legal professionals my project offers an essential exploration of how the legal system, despite its historical ties to racial exclusion and elitism, can potentially be harnessed as a tool for promoting equity within the United States. My project aims to uncover the challenges, successes and perceptions of Black women within the legal profession, shedding light on their pursuit of legislative avenues to effect societal change.
Class of 2026
Ryan Altman
Majors: History and Political Science
Minor: Legal Studies
Ryan’s project will examine Jewish relations with local African communities in Northern Rhodesia during the early 20th century and how Jewish mining conglomerates affected the lives of local Africans.
Sonal Churiwal
Majors: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Political Science
Sonal’s project lies at the intersection of decolonial thought, critical South Asian studies and disability studies, examining the British occupation of South Asia as a mass disabling event. Rather than maintaining a rigid paradigm of disabled as clinically defined, she aims to understand colonization as physically, socially and culturally disabling South Asian communities and generations.
Halla Jones
Major: Art History
Minors: African and African American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Halla’s project will explore sculpture as an artistic medium used by Black female artists and will engage with questions about the racial politics of artistic exhibition and museum spaces.
Marissa Mathieson
Majors: American Culture Studies and Political Science
Minor: Psychology
Marissa’s project will be a comparative analysis of three indigenous communities — Navajo, Native Hawaiian and Maori — within the context of mobility, freedom and resistance under settler colonial conditions.
Avery Melton-Meaux
Majors: English and Creative Writing
Minor: Drama
Avery’s project will trace the genealogy of queer Nigerian poetry, focusing especially on the online spaces where the authors of these poems have developed new collectives.
Emilio Parra-Garcia
Major: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Minor: Spanish
By analyzing eating disorders, Emilio’s project seeks to uncover how systems of heteronormativity and white supremacy ostracize Black and Latinx queer bodies, while advantaging white cisgender women. He will focus on these dynamics through the lenses of queer, disability and critical race studies.
Lauren Perkins
Major: History
Minor: Political Science
Lauren’s project aims to gauge the extent to which Black political leadership has translated into material benefits for African American constituents. She plans to answer this question through a case study of St. Louis’ first African American mayor, Freeman Bosley Jr., within the larger context of U.S. electoral politics as a means for Black social advancement. Through employing a mixed-methods approach examining both quantitative and qualitative data, she will gain an understanding of Mayor Bosley’s mayoralty on the city’s Black residents. This will allow her to contribute to an extant body of scholarship that attempts to gauge whether African American citizens should look to electoral politics for social advancement or if they should primarily focus on independent economic avenues as the primary vehicle for change.