Natalie Posner
How did Jewish newspapers allow immigrants in New York City and Montréal to forge a community in the diaspora? Specifically, how did the Jewish press compare in these two hubs for Jewish immigration? My research sets out to answer these questions by examining newspapers published by and for Jewish people in these regions from the late 19th-century to the mid 20th-century. By establishing an organ of Jewish thought and opinion, New York and Montréal Jews alike sought to counteract the antisemitism echoed in mainstream press and forge a stronger community […]
Melina Tisopulos
Data centers are the backbone of the global internet, responsible for storing and computing all our data. In the United States alone, they account for over 4% of total United States power usage, a figure predicted to rise with developments in Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models. As data centers continue to expand in number and scale, policymakers and communities are concerned about the strain this places on the central power grid. Simultaneously, the data center industry is searching for strategies to reduce energy costs and enhance the resiliency of […]
Megan Lee
From the brooding Edward Cullen of the “Twilight” saga to the alluring Mary of Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” vampires have long captivated the American imaginary. Their thirst for blood is often marked by their drooling mouths, associating their existence with the horrific, but also with insatiable desire. When we also map race onto the vampiric body, this further disrupts the ethics of pleasure, revealing anxieties and fantasies in the construction of the American sexual identity. Leaning on the disciplines of gender, race, and film studies, as well as concepts of racial […]
Lily Burkin
Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake of Nosferatu centers on the erotic and deeply parasitic relationship between the maiden and the Gothic monster and, in doing so, illuminates a connection between femininity and the undead that has persisted throughout–and beyond–Victorian gothic horror literature. Works of horror intrinsically serve as a mirror of the conditions within which they were created–as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which displays the shifting roles of women in the late nineteenth century while also revealing anxieties about homosexuality, the aristocracy, and the Jew. A tale as widespread as Dracula, […]
Jake St Clair
Far from mere free market capitalism, Wendy Brown explains neoliberalism as the prevailing political rationality of our time. It follows that many American media productions we consume would appeal to this rationality. This project takes the 2014 film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as a case study in this process. The film, written and directed by Iranian-American filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour, was performed in Farsi and shot in California. Critics claim that by featuring a rebellious, chador-cloaked female vampire, Girl should be celebrated as a feminist triumph, and […]
Henry Guzmán Mitchell
The Jewish of community of Rhodes had lived under fascist Italian rule until the promulgation of the Race Laws of 1938. In 1944, under German occupation, nearly the entire community was deported to Auschwitz. Surprisingly, the stories that surviving members of the Jewish community on Rhodes, called Rhodeslis, tell about the period of Italian colonial governance from 1912-1942 are generally positive in spite of the fascism. The younger generation tended to identify with the Italians and the “modernity” they brought; others felt an affinity for Italy owing to its rich […]
Helen Parra
Emerging from the early victories of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro addressed members of the United Nations in the fall of 1960 and announced his ambitious agenda for the upcoming year—an intense national literacy campaign aiming to teach reading and writing to every illiterate Cuban. Although the newly established socialist government was met with skepticism, the 1961 literacy campaign proved to be widely successful with Cuban literacy rate reportedly increasing to roughly 96% after progress in the campaign. The achievements of the literacy campaign were made possible by the […]
Grace Cauthron
As a genre, Cyberpunk was birthed by a generation of writers who grew up being influenced by technological commodities like TV, computers, video games, etc., which sprang from the rise of multinational capitalism. Entertainment and image-based commodities such as these fundamentally altered how humans interacted with reality. Thus, themes of disembodiment, or disconnection from physical reality, became routine in the genre. Although Cyberpunks believed they had discovered a revolutionary new form, after its initial popularity in the 80s, Cyberpunk has since been criticized for its techno-orientalist aesthetics, its racially “colorblind” […]
Finn Finneran
I am researching anti-racist working-class lesbian literature of the 1960s-90s, with a focus on the work of Judy Grahn and Leslie Feinberg. Judy Grahn is a poet, publisher, and leading figure in the Bay Area’s lesbian feminist movement. Leslie Feinberg (zie, hir pronouns) was a transgender activist, historian, fiction writer, and life-long anti-imperialist. Both were white, working-class participants in anti-racist political struggles. My research seeks to understand how these authors theorized cross-racial solidarity and antiracism in the post-civil rights era, which saw the dawn of liberation movements for people of […]
Ella Morrison
This project explores the intersection of prison abolition and narrative justice. Through a combination of community engagement, narrative-motivated research, and film production, this project will delve into abolitionist media, examine cinematic alternatives to the ways the prison-industrial complex manifests in mainstream media, and explore how systems-impacted communities are reimagining safety, justice, and accountability without reliance on incarceration. By collaborating with youth directly impacted by the juvenile justice system in the Bay Area, this project hopes to be a space of collective dreaming where youth are empowered to challenge the systems […]