Margaret Zvanut

Emotional contagion is defined as the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and movement with those of another person. It is a major means by which one human being comes to feel and behave in the same fashion as another, and may be fundamental to empathy and prosocial behavior. For Maggie’s Senior Honors Thesis in Psychology, she will study whether emotional contagion can be seen in young human infants. To conduct this research, she will videotape infants of different ages (4 to 12 months) interacting with […]

Oron Frenkel

Pushed aside by a tradition of Cartesian dualism, the mystery of consciousness has recently resurfaced as a problem on the cutting edge of intellectual thought. My expanded honors thesis for Systems Biology will investigate if we can better understand what consciousness is, based on processes occurring throughout the whole organism, instead of just inside the brain. I will evaluate the ability of modern theories and experiments on brain processes to account for findings outside of neuroscience that suggest consciousness to exist on an organismal level. I hope to explore alternative […]

Jennifer Toole

Jennifer plans to write an English honors thesis that will comparatively analyze Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. She is interested in how these two writers censored sexuality in their writing even though their substantial income gave them the option of self-publication. Jennifer will explore what combination of social pressures and inward conflicts led to this. By combining historical contextualization with an intense critical analysis of the published texts as well as the drafts, manuscripts, and personal correspondences drawn from archives at Yale and the University of Sussex, she hopes to […]

Shanesha R. F. Brooks

Exploring the lyrical conversation between the jazz and blues poetry of Langston Hughes and contemporary hip-hop musicians, Shanesha will analyze the musical techniques and poetic structure of Hughess poetry and the lyrics of musicians Black Star and Jazzmatazz, musical poets who contribute to what she calls the New Poetic Genre. Identifying parallels between the socio-political and historical contexts of Hughes and of these contemporary musicians, Shanesha will research the consciousnesses conjured from resistance, the search for identity, and the subsequent struggle for self-expression. As a double major in English and […]

Timoteo Rodríguez

Throughout Mesoamerica the effects of archaeological practice and the prospect of tourism on communal farmlands have caused native communities and foreign scholars to interact in roles ranging from adversarial to collaborative. A major in social/cultural anthropology, Timoteo’s project is to examine the relationships of North American archaeologists to the Maya farming communities of Chunchucmil and Kochol in rural Yucatan, Mexico. The local communal farmland is a largely unexcavated, non-touristy ancient Maya archaeological site embedded with tens of thousands of artifacts and dozens of pyramids. Archaeologists seasonally conduct research in this […]

Elizabeth Bremner

Localization of biologically relevant stimuli in the world is a basic feature of sensory systems and is well studied for visual and auditory stimuli. It is well known that mammals are very sensitive to odors and can trace them to their sources, but it is not well studied nor understood whether this localization can be accomplished egocentricallythat is, with the head kept stationary. For her Senior Honors Thesis in Psychology, Elizabeth will evaluate the abilities of humans to egocentrically pinpoint odor sources in space. She will first address the behavioral […]

Martín Olea

This project, which will be Martín’s senior honors thesis for Interdisciplinary Studies, will explore the process through which a small town, populated mostly by farmworkers, approved the construction of carceral facilities that are detrimental to a significant portion of its population. Prisons today are of significant importance to the communities of the California Central Valley, yet rigorous debate persists as to whether this is a positive trend. This research, which will draw from key informant interviews and archival research, will try to illustrate why it is important to comprehend the […]

Carlos Almendárez

To the Nicaraguan people, Carlos Fonseca was the unchallenged leader and theoretician of the Nicaraguan revolution. In an attempt to propel Fonseca as the paragon of the revolution, the F.S.L.N. obscured Fonsecas doubts about the process of revolution itself. Through Fonsecas extant writings Carlos project will examine why the idea of Fonseca as a leader of the revolution was abandoned once the revolution was consolidated. Carlos argues that Fonsecas portrayal by scholars and propagandists has emphasized his role as a devout follower of Augusto Cesar Sandino. In doing so, Fonsecas […]

Marie Mathiesen

Marie will examine the works of the Danish writer Karen Blixen (1885-1962), known in America as Isak Dinesen. Dinesen lived in Kenya for 16 years, and although she was a colonialist, she respected the Africans as aristocratic and noble human beings. Her position and relations to the Africans grant her a unique dual perspective on the colonial situation in Kenya creating a bifocality that also permeates her later writing on multiple levels. Investigating the colonial aspect of this duality, Marie will use postcolonial literary theory to examine selections of Dinesens […]

Shannon Mathes

Shannon will examine the effects that Rastafarianism has had on the political economy of Jamaica since the implementation of structural adjustment programs by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1977. Specifically, she will describe and analyze the ways in which Rastafarian organizations have challenged the policies of the Jamaican state regarding land use, land availability and small-scale agriculture in relation to the lowering of trade barriers and currency devaluation imposed by the IMF. This summer, Shannon will travel to Kingston and Ocho Rios, Jamaica to conduct archival research and interviews […]