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Undergraduate Humanities Forum
Research Fellows,
Siobhan C. Atkins, College '09, History
The American Student Power Movement of the 1960s
The “student power” movement of the 1960s in America was characterized by a push for curricular reform, academic freedom, and a greater student and faculty role in decision making at universities across the nation. Not only was the movement widespread—virtually no university remained untouched—but it also resulted in tangible reforms, many of which remain to this day. What hopes and concerns did America’s youth have towards their society at the dawn of the postindustrial era? How did school administrators, parents, and intellectuals react? And what do these findings reveal about the generational conflicts at the heart of student dissent of the 1960s?
Abby E. Brisbon, College '09, History
Good Hair, Bad Hair: African-American Hair Relations in the Early Twentieth Century
Why an African-American woman chooses to do her hair in any particular style embodies a complex history of an evolving relationship with acceptable standards of beauty, both within the community and as part of the larger society. This project will examine that evolution from the opening of Madame CJ Walker’s business in 1905 through the Great Depression. What do cultural expressions such as advertisements, literature, and art say about how African-American women might have internalized the beauty standards that were placed upon them, and how did their ideas about hair evolve over the first part of the century?
Yuen Kit (Jacky) Chau, College '10, Philosophy, Politics, Economics/Finance
Hong Kong: Ten Years Since the Handover
On July 1, 1997, China resumed its sovereignty over Hong Kong. In 1984, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping proposed an intriguing idea that Hong Kong could continue to operate under its capitalist system and lifestyle for 50 years, a policy that was later adopted in the Basic Law of Hong Kong. Now more than ten years have passed since the handover. What are some of the major social, economic, and political changes that have occurred in Hong Kong since 1997? In particular, the study will look at the tensions between forces of convergence and divergence in Hong Kong over the period.
Nicole E. CuUnjieng, College '09, History
The Regime of Ferdinand Marcos and the Role of the Supreme Court of the Philippines
My research centers on the Philippine political tradition and contextualizing
President Ferdinand Marcos's 1972-1986 dictatorship within that perspective. I
wish to intervene within the existing academic debate on the nature of this
tradition. Challenging the established scholarship, which presents Marcos's
regime as the anomaly of the Philippine patronage system, I instead argue that
Marcos is the perverse apotheosis of the system. I wish to argue that Marcos
embodies all the ills already present in Philippine politics and merely brings them to their extreme conclusion. More recent scholars have also championed
this reading and I wish to further develop the argument by examining the
legitimizing role that the judiciary played in this history.
Benjamin P. Fletcher, College '09, English
Increasing Awareness for the Indigenous in the 21st Century
This study is part of a larger project entitled “Ben Franklin and the Lenape Indians,” underway at the Smithsonian Library of Congress maps section, whose purpose is to locate colonial maps of Pennsylvania that depict Lenape villages and place names. Historically, the Lenape are one of the most important tribes of the Eastern US, yet neither the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania nor the federal government recognizes them. Through the use of digital technology—videos of the Lenape’s current Chief Bob Redhawk Ruth, tribal archival records and oral history, as well as historical documents and maps—I hope to clearly identify the Lenape as an integral part of Pennsylvania’s cultural history.
Lizzie Frasco, College '09, Art History, Visual Studies
Non-Traditional Methods for Non-Traditional Art: Conserving Art in the 20th Century
Art conservation as a practice of preventing change in a useful way has recently begun to change with the more ephemeral nature of the material that increasingly characterizes late 20th-century art. Today’s neon lights, foil, newspaper, synthetic paints, soil, glue, and Magic Marker have not been tested for durability or chemical stability. Their uneven and unpredictable rate of degradation further complicates their analysis and evaluation during conservation. What are the current technical, historical, and ethical challenges in contemporary art conservation, and what do they tell us about the chances for the long-term survival of this art?
Sarah P. Gibbons, College '09, History
The Savings and Loan Crisis: A Morality Play of Modern American Finance
Owning your own home is often considered as big a part of American life as voting or apple pie. But who or what created this culture of home ownership, and has it always been beneficial to America's economy and citizens as a whole? I will explore the encouragement of home ownership by the U.S. government and how it has lead to economic catastrophe for America in the form of the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s. I will trace the government-sown culture of home ownership beginning with the New Deal, explore historical motives and reasoning for this mission, and explain in an historical context how this culture lead to, and worsened, the Savings and Loan Crisis.
Chloé O. Hurley, College '09, History
Member, UHF Steering Committee
The Passed and the President: Presidential Obituaries
Although tradition dictates that in eulogizing the dead, we turn ordinary qualities into great virtues and minimize the flawed or banal, the presidential obituary is more complex than it may appear. How the death of a president is presented to the public has a far greater impact on later perceptions of that president than does any coverage during his administration. Using the obituary as an entrance point, this study is an investigation not just into presidential legacies, but into how a president is characterized at the moment of death, and whether that characterization can thereafter be redrawn.
Nina S. Johnson, College '09, Philosophy
Citizenship and Nationality in a Globalizing World
Liberalism, as a philosophical doctrine, is based on the idea that individuals matter. Individuals set fundamental ends that they believe to be valuable and then revise and pursue those ends in the real world. Where a person is born can have a profound effect on the ends that a person sets and the means with which they examine and realize them. Given that people do not choose the nation in which they are born, nationality seems arbitrary from the moral point of view. This paper examines nationality and what it means to be a member of a national community, in an effort to show that the experience of being raised in such a community ‘marks’ individuals in a way that is normatively significant. Ultimately, I argue that the fact that individuals are bounded to particular nations changes the way in which we should look at them from the perspective of justice.
Kojo Minta, College '09, European History, Classical Studies, Religious Studies
The Aesthetic of the Ascetic
This study examines the casuistry of William Perkins in order to reconcile differing contemporary representations of the puritan tradition. These differing conceptions centered on whether puritan doctrine produced comfort, or despair. Puritan divines acknowledged that despair was a serious issue among their flock, and the varied works read and composed by the godly indicate a sustained engagement with despair, which was often precipitated by uncertainty over the assurance of one’s election. In Reformation theology, however, the doctrine of election was viewed as providing uncommon comfort to the believer. Reading Perkins’ casuistry allows us to understand that puritan divines did believe that the doctrines they espoused represented comfort, but that they also realized that, paradoxically, the more developed one’s conscience, the more likely one was to realize more fully the wretchedness of one’s sin and thus fall into despair. The casuistry of Perkins, specifically, his Cases of Conscience, are emblematic of a conscious and concerted effort on the part of Elizabethan divines in the 1590s both to preempt and treat a specific malady, despair, among the godly.
Brooke S. Palmieri, College '09, English, History
Impudence to Copy: The Relation Between Print Culture and the Manuscripts of Francis Daniel Pastorius
In 1683, Francis Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719), a German-born Quaker and well-trained Lawyer, arrived with the first German settlement to found Germantown, under a charter given him by William Penn. By 1696 Pastorius began the most ambitious of his works, “Beehive”, a massive folio comprising thousands of entries quoting hundreds of books he had read. But Pastorius's concerns with the collection of knowledge at the book's conception had assumed, according to him, "quite an other form or face" by the time the book had doubled in size at the end of his life; a change reflected in the books he gathered commonplaces from, and the system of organization he developed in order that each collected work could be recollected with ease and efficiency.
Elizabeth B. Raposa, College '10, Comp Lit, Psychology
Serena S. Stein, College '09, Anthropology, Comp Lit
Trauma and Metamorphosis:
The Narratives of African Refugees in Philadelphia (Joint Project)
Beyond the terror and trauma of conflict, adolescent refugees face numerous challenges when adapting to critical lifestyle changes in a new country, grappling with destabilized notions of self and world. This project draws on in-depth interviews and the literature of refugee narratives to explore issues of individual identity, as well as shared patterns of experience among young adult refugees currently living in West Philadelphia. Exposure to violence and trauma organizes thought along dichotomies of past and present, homeland and country, and prior and possible selves. We engage the ways that traumatic events are narrated and incorporated into the sense of self, how refugee collectives are organized and interpreted, and, moreover, how exile and relocation constitute a transformative event.
David M. Reinecke, College '09, Science, Technology, and Society
Technostalgia: How Old Gear Lives on in New Music
Working from a series of interviews with musicians, dealers, and collectors over the past three semesters in collaboration with Professor Trevor Pinch (Cornell), this study explores the current major revival in vintage music equipment. For the past 20 years, vintage gear has become a much sought after commodity, fetching extraordinary prices on the second-hand market. Jumping on the bandwagon, companies have begun to reissue and imitate their own earlier designs, and new software companies have taken to emulating audio equipment from the past. Far from being obsolete, vintage music technologies have new utility.
Naomi R. Rosenblatt, College '09, History
Oil and the Eastern Front: US Foreign and Military Policy in Iran, 1941-1945
During World War II, the United States established a military presence in Iran that marked a dramatic change in U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Unlike earlier centuries when Americans traveled to the Middle East primarily as missionaries, merchants, and pilgrims, during WWII, the U.S. government began to establish deep political and economic ties to the region. How did U.S. foreign policy towards Iran develop within the context of a global war? What sort of tensions developed between the State Department's long-term diplomatic goals and the War Department's urgent short-term military aims? Through my research, I hope to illuminate how the United States balanced its own competing interests in Iran: that of ensuring a speedy victory at minimal human and financial cost, while all the while keeping in mind that its military efforts could very well disrupt its long-term diplomatic interests.
Daniel Ross, College '09, History; Science, Technology, and Society
2008–09 Coordinating Research Fellow
Jew Like Me: An Oral History of Congregation Temple Bethel, a Black synagogue in the West Oak Lane Neighborhood of Philadelphia
Congregation Temple Bethel is a 58 year-old Black synagogue in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia. It began as a prayer group in the living room of the founder, Rabbi Louise Elizabeth Dailey, and is today a thriving Jewish community. Mother Dailey died in 2001, but she was succeeded by her daughter, Rabbi Debra Bowen, who shares, along with several older members of the congregation, memories of the synagogue's earliest days. Theirs is a story that deserves telling, in the form of this oral history. The American Jewish community is considered whitewashed, yet a survey of the American Jewish universe increasingly uncovers a constellation of ethnic, class, and social backgrounds. This project is about the changing face of American Judaism, and the emerging identities behind it.
Philip J. Shecter, College '09, English
Member, UHF Steering Committee
The Angel of History: Rituals of Recovery in Post-9/11 Fiction
In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin writes of "the angel of history" that it "would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed." Carolyn Forché adopted the phrase, half a century later, as the title for her third collection of poems - a meditation on memory and survival in the context of twentieth-century atrocities. Now, more than two decades on, the angel of history has re-emerged. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, novelists have attempted to use fiction as a means of rehabilitating a world stuck in a state of post-trauma. This presentation evaluates various conventions contemporary writers have implemented as rituals of recovery.
Noah M. Weiss, College '09, History
"A campaign promise is one thing, a signed pledge is quite another": A Political History of the 1994 Republican Revolution
January 4, 1995, signaled a momentous change in American politics as Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-MO) handed the gavel of the House of Representatives to the newly elected Speaker of the House, Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA). For the first time in four decades, Republicans constituted a majority of the House. This research will examine the 1994 U.S. midterm elections, the so-called Republican Revolution, in which 54 seats changed hands. Was the Republican landslide truly a revolution? And, was it fundamentally a triumph of ideas or of partisan politics? To answer these questions, I will examine Republican strategy, the formulation of the “Contract with America,” the Democratic Party’s response, the Contract’s legislative implementation, and finally the stalling of the Revolution with the government shutdowns of 1995–1996.
Tali Yahalom, College '09, History
Roman Holidays: The Role of Publicity in Criminal Trials
The media sensationalized the 1954 trial of Sam Sheppard (accused of murdering his wife), his acquittal, and post-prison years. The intense coverage set journalistic and legal precedents, motivating various judges to address, in legal terms, the media’s role during pretrial investigations and courtroom proceedings. This thesis uses newspapers, magazines and court opinions to explore the extent of the media blitz, and addresses the question of whether the press compromised justice. This thesis also examines the case's continuing relevance: Why was this particular case so popular? Why did the public react with a collective desire to convict Sheppard? As an indelible presence in American public memory, how did the case change the legality and culture of trial coverage in the US? The recurring presence of the trial in publicity-related cases today highlights the irreconcilable tension between a public's right to a free press and a defendant's right to a fair and speedy trial.
Jessica M. Yu, College '10, English
Up in Smoke: The Afterlife of America’s Industrial Beacon
The clock is ticking for smokestacks in America. For the relics of 20th century industry, the transition to softer commerce has penned dates for their destruction. Hundreds of people attend festivals to witness the explosions and artists capture on canvas the moments when Worcester, MA, and Bethlehem, PA, bid farewell to a bygone era. Smokestacks, once an icon of economic progress, are now an ironic symbol in present-day deindustrialization. As Rust Belt cities dispel their manufacturing identities, what are they transitioning into and which relationships are being replaced?
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