Irem Kurtdemir
My research focuses on the representation of Turkish characters in English-language fiction, using Ben Tran’s concept of “literary dubbing” as a framework. In Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (originally written in English), the characters experience life in Turkish, but Shafak represents their thoughts and speech in English. This choice resonates with dubbing foreign films. Shafak, in a way, “dubs” the thought-language of the characters, detaching voices from bodies and characters from sociolinguistic contexts. My project asks: How can we analyze the voices of Kazancı women in The Bastard of […]
Laurie Desiderio-Giampiccolo
What does it mean to be an American author today? How does language legitimize the nationality of a text and define authorial identity? In his collection Unaccompanied (2017), Salvadoran poet Javier Zamora blends the trauma of immigration and assimilation with longing for his war-stricken homeland through linguistic hybridity. This technique reflects an emerging literary movement that challenges the monolingual understanding of nationality within the multicultural reality of 21st-century America. My project compares Zamora’s use of Spanish—rooted in intimate and quotidian expression—with 20th-century code-switching practices. In Corky Gonzales’s “Yo Soy Joaquín” […]
Voica Armstrong
Political-economic conditions shape collective temporal experiences. Under neoliberal capitalism, we experience accelerated and fragmented time, with labor and leisure increasingly convergent. This is the lived temporality that postmodern science fiction authors inherit and, I argue, actively contest through formal narrative choices. For my project, I will close-read six select postmodern science fiction novels in relation to their socio-economic contexts, arguing that SF proposes alternative models of societal time. I seek to describe how and when science fiction’s various narrative forms become sites where the politics of time turn contestable and […]
Eva Reineck
When patients describe cancer as an enemy to be fought or a thief that steals time, they are assigning agency and blame to the disease, and implicitly to themselves. These moral metaphors, which cast cancer as an entity with intent, shape how patients understand their illness and evaluate their own resilience. This project aims to look at how metaphors that frame cancer as a moral agent differ across patient, caregiver, and institutional perspectives in English, French, and Spanish, and investigates the psychological implications of these differences. This project introduces two […]
Elise Fisher
My research project seeks to reveal how the pronatalism movement in the U.S. manifests in modern popular culture, namely in the space between Mormon mom influencers and Silicon Valley tech bros. In recent years, media has been flooded with headlines fearing the declining U.S. birthrate, and subsequent profiles on “pronatalists” who seek to address this problem by having large families and promoting such a lifestyle. A danger lies in the failure to recognize that this movement is rooted in white supremacist ideology and fascist demographic preservation, now being parroted by […]
Chesney Evert
In 1915, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats mailed a poem to his friend, a six-line declaration of abstention from writing any war poetry. Not a year after Yeats enshrined his own vow of silence in verse, however, he wrote some of the most famous war poems in the history of the English language. It is against the backdrop of this negotiation—to stay silent, to write of war—that my research seeks to analyze the poet’s role in wartime and its transformation since the early 20th century. Reading poetry as a self-revelatory […]
Alexei Lanigan
This project identifies and explores queerness as resistance to colonialism in the story “The Life to Come” by 20th century British writer E.M. Forster and the novel Babel by 21st century Chinese-American writer R.F. Kuang by tracing how queer resistance to colonialism has developed between the texts. Grounded in the idea of queerness as antithetical to colonialism, this project explores and contrasts the two portrayals of queerness as unable to fully exist within Empire and thus demanding its destruction to survive. This project will explore the effects of colonialism on […]
Travis Zhu
This study poses a simple question: how can we read a “home,” if we follow French phenomenologists Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, not merely as an abstracted sociological object in dominant scholarship, but as an intimate space that we live in? Situated in post-socialist China, where the commodification and privatization of housing have displaced older forms of state-allocated housing and collective dwelling, this study examines how new residential forms such as gated communities (xiaoqu) have transformed not only the material organization of inhabitation, but also people’s intimate experience of living […]
Pollia Ng
This project explores the epistemological construction of the racial other through popular fiction in late Qing China by comparing Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890) with Lin Shu’s classical Chinese translation《案中案》(1904). In the detective novel, Tonga, an indigenous Andamanese, is figured as the culprit and sinks into subaltern silence under the Thames and on the page. I will trace his absences and his reconfigurations as “barbarian” and “black man” in the translation in order to examine how Western colonial categories, in linking ethnology with criminology, were assimilated and […]
Angel Reyes
Marx’s theory of alienation marks a worker’s estrangement from the material world under capitalism. How, then, can a socialist artist both overcome this alienation and reveal the labor it embodies? My project investigates how Yugoslav director Vlatko Filipović’s early short documentaries– U zavjetrini vremena (1965), Punta velikog mora (1966), and Hop Jan (1967)– reimagine the relation between worker and material across diverse natural resources and geographical conditions in Yugoslavia. Drawing on Soviet avant-garde cinematic concepts, I utilize Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage and Dziga Vertov’s cinematic “truth,” with labor choreography […]