Jordan Troeller

This History of Art thesis project will examine how the contemporary participatory art of Rirkrit Tiravanija overlaps with and departs from the work of Hlio Oiticica in 1960s Brazil. Rather than creating discrete objects, these artists engender interactive situations. Recently dubbed relational art, such installations involve the viewer in various social activities, such as cooking or dancing, thereby challenging the distinction between art and everyday life. While Oiticica’s work emphasizes the relationship between participation and political agency, Tiravanija’s art examines the interface between artifice and leisure activities. Examining the relationship […]

Joshua Arribere

Alternative splicing of pre-mRNA is critical to development and differentiation, allowing metazoans to generate a large amount of protein diversity from a single gene. Despite its importance, our understanding of the factors that influence this process is limited. The objective of Joshs project is to investigate the role of the Fox family of proteins, which have been implicated as splicing regulators. Through experiments with zebrafish he will asses the effect that Fox has on a library of alternatively spliced exons in the hope of better understanding this protein familys role. […]

Samuel Pittman

In recent decades, artists and writers have created self-narrations that deliberately thwart the conventions of autobiography and question even the most contemporary conceptions of the self and self-representation. Inspired by these works, as his ISF honors thesis Sam will create an autobiographical installation entitled Parthenogenesis, a term meaning asexual reproduction, which refers here to effectively creating oneself due to the difficulty of remembering ones past in light of both having very few photographic mnemonics, as well as having faced numerous hardships during childhood which may have caused memory-blocks. In his […]

Javier Aros

America 2020, a creative vision of the political and social realities of the United States in the year 2020, will be an artistic presentation of Javier Aros. Utilizing room sculpture, six large silkscreen poster prints and assorted smaller prints, two wall paintings, ceramic busts, original flags and interactive historical documents and presentations, Javier will carefully design and create a future museum dedicated to the revolutionary and evolutionary events of the teen years of the 21st century. By thoroughly investigating and evaluating revolutionary methodology and methods — from independence from non-renewable […]

Spencer Orey

Spencer will travel to El Salvador this summer and conduct anthropological fieldwork focusing on the not-for-profit organization Pro-Búsqueda. Focusing primarily on reuniting children disappeared in the Salvadoran civil war with their biological families, workers at Pro-Búsqueda have not only helped to advocate processes of justice and repatriation but have also played an important role in lobbying for reparations legislation as well. Using ethnographic methods, Spencer will collect data through first-hand participant observation and interviews in order to examine the importance of finding and reuniting children in reconstructing civil society and […]

Shahrzad Abbassi-Rahbar

Thalassemia is a disease common to 60 countries worldwide, with high prevalence in Middle Eastern countries. The Iranian population consists of many who exhibit the beta-thalassemia hemoglobinopathy, which reduces red blood cells ability to carry oxygen, and even more who are carriers of this life-threatening disease. In the past, most of the children born with beta-thalassemia failed to survive during the first decade of life. Medical advances have recognized that placental and umbilical cord blood of a newborn is a rich source of blood stem cells, which can replace the […]

Keith Orejel

Keith will be traveling to Washington D.C. to do archival research at the Library of Congress and National Archives. He will be studying funerals in the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. Scholars of the Civil Rights and Black Power Eras often focus on the institutions and individuals who fueled the creation of these social movements, while ignoring the role of culture and cultural politics in this process. Keith will attempt to study funerals as a way to look at how existing cultural rituals become transformed in periods of African American politicization. […]

Yu Lei

Nanocrystalline materials have shown promise in many applications, such as light-emitting diodes, solar cells, biomedicine, optoelectronics, etc. Shape-controlled nanocrystals are important because different geometries of nanocrystals possess various electronic properties which can be tailored to their application. In this project, Yu will conduct synthesis experiments of Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) by varying the amount of solvent. By analyzing nucleation kinetics in the synthesis of the CdTe, Yu hopes to develop a mechanistic explanation for crystal branching and increase the reproducibility of the tetrapods shape syntheses. Moreover, this approach to understanding CdTe […]

Alex Kogan

In the last thirty years, psychology has seen an explosion in research on love and interpersonal relationships. Much of the work, however, has focused on either mapping styles of love or the functionality of romantic love within the evolutionary and attachment traditions, leaving much of the terrain unexplored. Alex’s research aims to go beyond the current models, encapsulated by three prime objectives: 1) establish the difference between “to love” and “to be loved”; 2) garner initial support for the love processor model, which attempts to unify and expand love outside […]

Khatchadour Khatchadourian

Khatchadour will travel to Beirut, Lebanon this summer to study Armenian and Lebanese community formation. By conducting interviews and implementing professionally administered surveys, he hopes to gain a more insightful understanding of how each community views itself in relation to the other. Khatchadour will also meet with community leaders and politicians to assess the impact of communal relations on local politics. By analyzing the political, economic, and socio-cultural frameworks the Armenian community employs to express its uniqueness, Khatchadour hopes to comprehend assimilation and community development in the Lebanese context.