Bryn Mawr College

Current Fellows

Cohort 24:

Orsola Capovilla-Searle '15: Research Interest: Mathematical knots, specifically Legendrian knots.

Whitney P. Lopez '15: Research Interest: The social and cultural factors contributing to the unemployment and underemployment of Black, Latina, and Southeast Asian women in North Philadelphia.

Esteniolla Maitre '15: Research Interest: How certain marginalized identities, particularly students from inner-city public school backgrounds, interact with English as both a language and an academic discipline.

Chandrea Peng '15: Research Interest: How schools facilitate–or fail to facilitate–development of identity, especially in students for whom the American education system is a challenge–language-wise, culture-wise, and class-wise. Also interested in themes of memory and identity in refugees and their children.

Serena Pierce '15: Research Interest: The sociolinguistics and comparative analysis of Walserdeutsch, an endangered Germanic language native to the Swiss Alps. Comparing use in Walser (the native area of the language) to use in Vorarlberg (a canton in Austria where speakers migrated).

 

Cohort 23:

Genesis Bui ’14 is from Pomona, CA  and is a Spanish Major. She will be researching the literature of Migration and Immigration in Latin and Hispanic literature. She will be interning this summer with Haverford’s CPGC Partnership Program. She will be working in Mexico City with the Casa de los amigos, a Quaker guesthouse for refugees from Central and South America, and other places around the world. There she will focus her studies on the Central and South American perspective. While on the other hand, Genesis also plans to study abroad in Granada, Spain in order to focus her studies on the African and Asian perspective. Her mentor and major advisor is Professor Maria Cristina Quintero.

Krystal Caban '14 is an English major from Brooklyn, New York. She is interested in learning about the formation of Mixed-race identities and how they are represented and in turn misrepresented throughout contemporary works of Creative Writing; her focus on but not limited to memoir, short fiction and poetry. She is also interested in how popular culture and media choose to define Mixed-race and the repercussions of these portrayals. Krystal will be conducting her project under the guidance of Professor Linda Susan Beard of the English department. This summer she will be based in New York, researching critical race theory.

Madiha Irfan ’14 of West Chester, PA is majoring in Religion with a concentration in Middle East and Islamic Studies. Her mentors are Professors Travis Zadeh and Tariq al-Jamil. Madiha’s main academic interest is the “gender jihad” and its critical and creative engagement with Qur’an, hadith, and jurisprudence for gender justice in various Muslim worlds. For her project, Madiha plans on exploring premodern Muslim women’s participation in religious education, focusing on female hadith transmitters. Anyone with questions or comments about Madiha’s project is welcome to e-mail her at mirfan@brynmawr.edu.

Archana Kaku is an English and Political Science double major at Bryn Mawr College, with a specific interest in postcolonial studies in the Middle East and South Asia. Her research is focused on how the digital humanities can provide new platforms for minority scholars and the ways in which digital texts create new opportunities for creating and understanding literature from the margins. She is researching ways in which the contemporary concept of the bound book limits minority author's potential for expression with the hopes that the growing world of digital literature can provide a means of redressing these limitations. Her mentor is Dr. Jennifer Harford Vargas, Professor of English at Bryn Mawr.

Karina Siu ’14 is from Wichita Falls, Texas and is a Political Science major and Economics minor. She is interested in political economy and public policy formation. Karina’s research will focus on ways in which capitalism informs a state’s political structure and its effect on public policies and citizens. While attempting to have a broad comparative look at different states and regions, the majority of her research will focus on the United States, Germany, China, and Russia. With help from her mentor, Professor Carol Hager, Karina hopes to address the following questions: How are those marginalized in society affected by public policies and how much is this effect attributed to the role of capitalism in society? Ultimately, she hopes her research will shed more light on the shortcomings of public policies, possible areas for development, and more discussion for the increased effectiveness of policies and protection for these subjugated groups.