“The Object, The Virgin, The Holy Figure”, An Album and Musical Dissection of the Way in Which We Come to Be

This is a jazz fusion album written largely about childhood, growth, memories and how we become ourselves. Included is a short writeup, the sheet music and wav files including a midi performance of the pieces

Rhythmic Motor Execution Reduces Emotional Arousal

Recent advancements in neuroscience have shown that rhythmic motor activity can reduce emotional arousal and support emotion regulation. However, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear; specifically, whether motor rhythm alone is sufficient to produce these effects. To investigate this question, I tested whether engaging in rhythmic hand movements affects emotional reactions to images from the Open Affective Standardized Image Set (OASIS). I conducted three separate experiments comparing participant ratings of images’ arousal and valence when stationary versus when performing a bimanual finger-tapping task. I recruited 110 participants from the Psychology 101 pool at Bates College and convenience sampling methods, between ages 18 and 41 years old. In Experiment 1, participants were divided into three groups (control, simple rhythm, and syncopated rhythm), and I observed evidence that rhythm performance may affect arousal ratings but not valence ratings. So, I conducted Experiment 2 as a follow-up study, simplifying the experimental design by dividing participants into only two groups: control and alternating rhythm. The results of Experiment 2 confirmed the evidence from Experiment 1, but over a limited range of valence ratings. Therefore, I conducted Experiment 3, replicating the procedures of Experiment 2, to evaluate whether my findings generalized to a broader range of valences. Altogether, my findings show that the performance of a bimanual rhythm flattens extreme arousal ratings without affecting valence ratings. This suggests that rhythm performance reduces the subjective intensity of emotional experience, consistent with my hypothesis that rhythmic body movements can contribute to emotional desensitization. This finding suggests that therapeutic approaches involving movements such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy may operate by affecting emotional arousal in response to traumatic memories while preserving subjective appraisals of the valence associated with those memories

Jujubes on the Margin: Trauma, Community, and Memories of a Village in Central Shanxi

In the first four years of the Guangxu Emperor’s reign (1876–1879), a severe famine, known as the Dingwu Famine, devastated northern China, claiming thirteen million lives. The experience and memories of the famine were far from “natural.” In my research on the memories of Dingwu Famine, I investigate how the residents of a 2,000-person village, Gulian, in Shanxi Province organized their community, tried to save themselves during a crisis brought about by both environmental and political failures, and later remembered both their trauma and achievements. What their memories reveal is the broader story of Chinese local cultural and social history, and how contemporary communities continue to engage with and narrate their past. This research engages closely with a growing body of scholarship in environmental history, the history of famine, and the history of state-society relations in late imperial China. Adopting the method of microhistory, it draws on both unpublished sources from private collections and published materials, including gazetteers, missionary journals, newspapers, and local cultural and historical records, all of which hold great narrative potential

Women for the Home, Children, and Resistance: Motherhood as a Political Strategy in Chile’s Anti-Allende and Anti-Pinochet Movements

Chile’s history in the 20th century was defined by two forms of leadership: Salvador Allende’s left-wing, socialist policies that focused on the working class and land reform, and Augusto Pinochet’s far-right dictatorship that lasted seventeen years and led to the disappearance of thousands. However, each presidency was opposed by a large group of women, whose protests and organization started the continuous scrutiny to each man until the end of his leadership. Right-wing women were behind the infamous March of the Empty Pots and Pans that opened discussion about the shortages of goods during Allende’s presidency. Left-wing women started sewing arpilleras, tapestries that depicted the horrors of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Although the two groups look different, their methods of resistance and demonstration had to do with their beliefs as women and mothers. My thesis explores how politically right-wing women and left-wing women protested against Allende and Pinochet using motherhood as a personal motivation and political tactic. I discuss why motherhood became a factor in protests against each administration’s financial crises, and how this appeared in various media from 1970–1990. I also discuss how Chile’s gender roles influenced women’s perceptions of their motherhood and activism, and how this affected the image they portrayed of themselves to the public and a wider world in protests

My Love is Like Eternity: A Process in Choreography and Immersive Performance

This study expands and reflects upon creating and producing My Love is Like Eternity,my original durational performance. The work, which premiered February 12-13, 2025, infused choreography, video, improvisation, costume, scenic design, and text. In this paper, I discuss my creative research in conversation with the works of artists and scholars Faye Driscoll, Kitty Winslow, MP Landis, Tristan Koepke, Diana Taylor, Max Kozloff, and Miguel Gutierrez. Throughout, I investigate choreographic themes of duration, nature’s cyclical existence, liveness, and decay. I employ performance theories and practices to critique Western culture’s binary of life and death and instead propose ideas of cycle and regeneration. I also discuss more broadlymy choreographic process, including the specific challenges and successes of working in a multimedia form. Combining narrative with rehearsal documentation and drawn images, I demonstrate the multilayered process of imagining and building an immersive performance. Additionally, I expand on various choreographic devices my collaborators and I utilized as we experimented with subtraction and abstraction to conjure hazy and ephemeral movement architecture. Lastly, I examine the culmination of this research, reflecting on the bodily and emotional experience of performing My Love is Like Eternity and discussing ongoing choreographic inquiries

Transforming Ivan the Terrible: History, Memory Politics, and Monuments in Putin’s Russia

Like Joseph Stalin before him, Vladimir Putin has brought Ivan the Terrible back from oblivion and has made the memorialization of one of the country’s most infamous and brutal rulers a centerpiece of the Kremlin\u27s contemporary propaganda toolkit. Analyzing a wide spectrum of Russian language sources such as the political speeches, historical lectures, protest posters, and Russian social media posts, this paper explores the various factors motivating the Putin regime’s revitalization of Ivan the Terrible and outlines how ordinary Russians have responded to the politicized whitewashing of their history. In 2016, with much fanfare, the provincial city of Orel erected Russia’s first ever monument to this infamous tyrant. Ripe with direct analogies between Ivan the Terrible and Putin, the highly nationalist and religiously-informed rhetoric around the Orel monument creates what I call a genealogy of sacred autocracy. By celebrating Russia’s first autocrat as both an exemplary Russian leader and a predecessor of dictators like Stalin and Putin, the Kremlin is creating an idealized and false historical legacy of triumphant, strong, and inevitable Russian authoritarianism—a narrative that naturalizes and legitimizes the regime’s imperialism, human rights violations, and crackdown on domestic dissidence

SMER, Anti-Western Populism, and Political Violence in Post-Communist Slovakia

In recent decades, the European continent has seen more and more anti-Western populist parties emerge and gain a loyal following. Many of these parties support extremist narratives that reject both international cooperation as well as racial and religious tolerance. In eastern and central Europe in particular, many parties of this nature have begun to both gain popularity and also use the conflict between Russia and Ukraine to push an anti-NATO and anti-European Union narrative that seems to strike a chord with many European voters. A textbook example of one of these parties is the Smer-Social Democracy party of Slovakia. Slovakia, like many other former Eastern Bloc states, underwent a substantial post-communist transition process that had lasting impacts on the nation, and particularly its voter base. Through examination of Slovakia’s post-communist transition, it is clear that this transition created an environment where a populist party like Smer could thrive. This type of extreme political discourse fosters an environment where political violence, like the attempt on Smer frontman and Slovak prime minister Robert Fico, can take place. Foreign policy is a major concern of these modern right-wing populist parties, and Smer specifically aligns itself with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has major implications on the global stage

“Better a Witty Fool Than a Foolish Wit”: Feminist Wit in Shakespeare’s Comedies

This project interrogates William Shakespeare’s use of wit in his comedies, both as a tool to safely critique power structures and a transportive verbal skill that creates utopian communities for female characters. Many of Shakespeare’s comedies feature female characters whose wit is celebrated by the men around them but is never truly understood despite the innate truths about oppression and power that lay just under the surface of their words. I utilize queer and feminist theory on wit, utopia, and ethics to propose that feminist wit, in the case of Shakespeare, is a survival tool that actively creates eroticism and visibility between characters. My project starts with Kate from The Taming of the Shrew. She, I argue, begins Shakespeare’s investigation of wit as a tool for critiquing patriarchy. The following section focuses on Beatrice from Much Ado About Nothing where feminist wit is further developed. Beatrice not only uses wit to critique patriarchy, but also to unravel patriarchal consumption, and create mutual love with Benedick. Finally, feminist wit is perhaps most effective in the case of Rosalind and Celia from As You Like It. Queer utopia begins for these two women in the forest of Arden and is continued through their shared wit into their everyday lives in a patriarchal society

Effects of synesthetic photisms on visual cognition: Investigating the temporal organization of grapheme-color synesthesia and object trimming in the visual processing pathway

The present study aims to determine the order in which object trimming and synesthetic associations occur during visual processing and examines the way that these two phenomena may influence each other. The first two experiments used grapheme-color synesthetes and flashed a numeral with an adjacent two-dot mask on a screen. Participants were asked to identify the synesthetic color triggered by the target (Experiments 1 and 2) as well as the number they saw during each trial (Experiment 2). Results showed strong evidence that trimming occurs before synesthetic associations in the processing pathway, as participants responded with the color of the trimmed number in all trials where trimming occurred. A third experiment, similar in design to the first experiments but allowing for the addition of non-synesthete control participants, used colored two-dot masks and asked participants to identify the color of the dots as well as the number that they saw. Findings suggest that object trimming has the ability to alter the speed of visual processing, and even modify the way that different streams of visual processing interact with each other

Investigating Educational Outcomes for Providence Community Advocacy

Education systems in multilingual communities face unique challenges, particularly when balancing equity and accessibility for students of diverse linguistic backgrounds. Within Providence, a city heavily comprised of Latin American, as I am, and English as a Second Language populations (ESL/ELL), Early-Ed students are struggling to meet the appropriate proficiency standards. Using data analysis methods present in R, we investigated the discrepancies of ELL and Non-ELL student performances under a variety of factors. The results obtained showed that on each test, ELL students performed significantly worse, even including the long-term solutions of Charter Schools and Takeovers. These findings underscore the failures of the Takeover and Charter Schools as an equitable solution to increase performance for all students. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of restructuring the pedagogy present in Providence and creating more effective solutions for all students of all demographics