How Bryn Mawr Professors Spend Their Summer Break: On the Road and in the Labs

Engaging with English

Faculty from the English department will be traveling domestically and abroad learning, researching, and teaching.

Bethany Schneider

Associate Professor Bethany Schneider will be completing revisions on her upcoming novel, Philadelphia Divine, which imagines what would happen if Philadelphia was not only invaded by the British in 1777, but also by a troublesome family of Greek gods. She will also be traveling to Prague with Anita Kurimay and Catharine Slusar to plan for their 360° Program, “Revolutions.”

Jamie Taylor

Professor Jamie Taylor is going to the Rare Books School in Charlottesville, Virginia. She will spend a week learning about manuscript and early print texts, publication histories, and bibliographic development, after which she will spend another week focusing on the histories of Indigenous book production.

Kate Thomas

Professor Kate Thomas will serve as the faculty host aboard the alumnae river cruis e from Basel, Switzerland to Amsterdam! She will also meet up with her editorial team from Palgrave Macmillan and other authors in London.

Pardis Dabashi

As a 2024 recipient of the Modernist Studies Association First Book prize, Assistant Professor of Literatures in English Pardis Dabashi will serve on the committee that decides next year’s prize winner. This summer she will read and judge the entries, in preparation for the announcement of the winner in Fall 2025. Dabashi's award winning "Losing the Plot" explores the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema and reveals a profound longing for a plot in modernist fiction.

Read about Dabashi's 2024 award

Summer Science Research

Many of our STEM faculty spend their summers mentoring undergraduate students as a part of Summer Science Research. Since 1989, the College has provided 35-plus students with 10-week research stipends to conduct independent research, supplemented by professional development workshops and a poster session where students present their research to the college community

Explore Summer Science Research

Summer Science Research Faculty

Biology

Chemistry

Student sitting doing work at a computer

Computer Science

Elizabeth Dinella

Geology

Mathematics

Physics

Psychology

Selvi Kara

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Selvi Kara is serving as a visiting researcher at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences this June where she will work on her project on understanding which algebraic invariants are preserved under Alexander duality. She will also attend a week-long workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study called “Research Community in Algebraic Combinatorics.”

Math at Bryn Mawr

Exploring Languages

Faculty from foreign language departments are spreading their roots around the world, creating tangible results with their research.

Juan Suárez Ontaneda

Suárez Ontaneda is on the move this summer as he heads on a research trip in Nashville to conduct archival work at the Zapata Olivella Collection at Vanderbilt University before starting a summer residency program at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He'll be working on his manuscript, Palimpsests of Blackness in Latin America: The Performative Lives of Nascimento, Zapata Olivella, and Santa Cruz, in addition to conducting research at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Neus Penalba

Assistant Professor Neus Penalba is spending her summer working on a major project at the Museum of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona. She is curating an exhibition on Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda, translating her literary imagination into visual terms. Opening in December, the exhibition will explore the major themes of Rodoreda's work and cover 1300 square meters.

Marina Rojavin

Visiting Assistant Professor Marina Rojavin will finish her manuscript of Russian Comprehensive Grammar, an upcoming textbook for intermediate-to-advanced Russian students. She will also work on a new book tentatively titled Post-Soviet Russian Film as Open-Source Intelligence, which will demonstrate how national cultural production can be analyzed for geopolitical purposes. By subjecting post-Soviet Russian film to formal cinematic analysis, this book argues that humanities education must be a central pillar of Western national security strategy.

Paul Thomas Annotated: In the Margins

Associate Professor José Vergara is working on his ongoing project funded by a Digital Bryn Mawr Grant, a set of annotations for Paul Thomas Anderson’s nine narrative films. It will build on his experience with the "Encyclopedia of the Dog" but with a new focus on the visual arts, new digital tools, and a much bigger scope. Vergara will also join the College’s Summer Humanities Research pilot program as a faculty mentor for an undergraduate researcher.

Read about "Encyclopedia of the Dog"

Summer Humanities/Social Science Research

This year marks the first year of the Humanities/Social Science Research pilot program, in which undergraduates have the opportunity to pursue fully-funded independent research under the tutelage of faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Summer Humanities/Social Science Research Faculty

Modeling a Divided Berlin: Parallel Lives in a Multilingual City

Senior Lecturer in Russian Irina Walsh and Lecturer in German and German Studies Margaret Strair are spending their summers working with students on a Digital Bryn Mawr Grant. They are building a 3D visualization of Berlin, focusing on daily life on either side of the Berlin Wall, which will be used in Russian and German language classes.

German and Germanic Studies

Russian

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