Class of 2024

Mary Rose Bell
Majors: English and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology
Mentor: Claudia Carroll and Becko Copenhaver
Project title: “How could one express in words these emotions of the body?”: Phenomenal Mental States and the Reader-Text Relationship in To the Lighthouse 
Project description: My project pulls on cognitive literary studies and philosophy of mind to analyze Virginia Woolf’s representations of phenomenal consciousness and perception in To the Lighthouse. The inaccessibility of other minds and the ineffability of phenomenal mental states (e.g., “what it is like” to be conscious) frustrate philosophers and Virginia Woolf alike. Yet, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose and attempts to record the mind’s intricacies repeatedly place readers in the minds of her characters. In her fiction, then, minds are wholly accessible, and the reader is privy to their phenomenal mental states. Since my project attends to the reader’s positionality, I also turn to cognitive literary studies and Theory of Mind to investigate the efficacy of such representations. The reader-text/character relationship enables Woolf to wholly convey her understanding of reality, which, as she notes, is visceral, nebulous, and like phenomenal mental states, also quite outside the realm of language: “For how could one express in words these emotions of the body?” 

Julia Cleary
Major: Political Science
Minors: Religion and Politics and Legal Studies
Mentor: Amy Gais
Project title: “Racial Bias in Voir Dire: Case Law and Community Reactions”
Project description: In the United States trial system, racial bias is unequivocally present. However, academics often fail to address how voir dire contributes to this. Prior research establishes the presence of racial bias in jury decision-making. But, reforms to decrease jury bias have thus far failed. Through my research, I hypothesize that racial bias in the jury system persists because court decisions addressing bias in voir dire fail to be enforced.  My methodology for this project is to conduct a legal analysis of case precedent and court records. I will look at Supreme Court cases that address jury reforms and then analyze subsequent Supreme Court cases to see if the change has been adequately enforced. Next, I examine affected community reactions to the changes to see whether the cases produced theoretical or actual changes. I will conclude by presenting reforms intended to increase equity in voir dire.

Kayla Harrington
Major: Psychological and Brain Sciences
Minor: Legal Studies
Mentor: Lori Markson
Project title: “Black Girlhood: Adultification Bias in the Education System”
Project description: Adultification, a relatively newly described phenomenon, is a form of racial discrimination in which Black children are treated by adults as being older than they are. This social stereotype is meant to effectively reduce or remove the consideration of innocence and childhood within the Black child. Black girls’ behavior in schools are often understood by educators as being more socially, physically, and sexually mature than their white counterparts. In relation to this perceived maturity, Black students are subjugated to harsher and stricter surveillance and punishments. As the new phenomena of adultification has been studied, there is little investigation for how this may negatively affect the development of Black girls within the education system. For my project, I will analyze and conduct interviews with teachers, principals, and educators to explore the ways in which adultification bias affects the way Black girls engage with, internalize, and interpret their treatment from adults at school.

Dylan Maya-Tudor
Majors: International Affairs and Latin American Studies
Mentor: Steven Hirsch
Project title: “Revolutionary Solidarity and Cross-Continental Connectivities: Vietnam and Latin America from the Cold War to COVID”
Project description: Vietnam’s solidarity with Latin American revolutionaries during the Cold War has been largely overlooked. My research seeks to redress this oversight by analyzing Vietnam’s relationship with various guerrilla organizations including Colombia’s FARC and El Salvador’s FMLN as well as successful revolutionary movements like Nicaragua’s Sandinistas. It will also examine the close revolutionary cooperation between Vietnam and Cuba. In particular, it will highlight Cuba’s role as a conduit for Vietnamese arms and supplies and as a staging area for PAVN training courses.

Omaer Naeem
Major: Global Studies – International Affairs
Minors: Asian American Studies, and South Asian Language and Civilization – Urdu
Project mentor: Shefali Chandra
Project title: “A Vignette of Resistance in Militant Pakistan: Analyzing Iqbal Bano’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’”
Project description: This project explores, contextualizes and critically analyzes Iqbal Bano’s rendition of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Hum Dekhenge” as an act of resistance against General Zia ul-Haq’s military regime in Pakistan from 1977 to 1988. This analysis will construct an emotional history and landscape behind the Zia regime and the performance itself, suggest the limitations behind this act of resistance, and reimagine the consequences of this protest.

Nash Overfield
Major: African and African American Studies
Minor: Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Mentor: Timothy Parsons
Project title: “Seditious Doctrines: R. Mugo Gatheru and Representations of Pan-Africanism in the Cold War”
Project description: My project will examine the historical connections between Pan-Africanism and organized labor. My project will cover the period from the First Pan-African Congress in 1919 to the mid ’60s as African nations gained independence, with most of my research focusing on the latter years. I will specifically be researching the individuals who were major Pan-African and labor leaders and see how their involvement in both influenced them and how the influences of the two movements affected each other.

Violet Walker
Majors: English Literature and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies
Mentors: Amy Cislo and Beth Windle
Project title: “From Sex-Changes to Changing Sex: the Discursive Production of Sex and the Possibility of its Rearticulation”
Project description: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, published in 1928, is a biography about the fictional life of Orlando, an English noble who, suddenly and quite inexplicably, changes from male to female after a long rest. While the novel, through this transformation, explores gender in ways useful and relevant to transgender individuals, the supernatural element of Orlando’s instant and complete sex change does not reflect the long and frustrating transitions trans* individuals may undergo. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor, which reimagines Orlando as Paul, a queer college student who freely shapeshifts between sexes, is similarly at odds with actual transgender experience even as it explores gender, sex, and sexuality in 1990s lesbian, gay, and queer subcultures. This project seeks to explore the tensions between magical and real-life gender transitions and explore what magical transitions say about gender embodiment, bodily plasticity, and gendered meanings of the body.