Faculty-Led Undergraduate Research Projects 2023-2024
Undergraduate research connects Humanities majors and minors to faculty-led research projects in the Division and it provides a valuable opportunity for students to apply their knowledge and develop skills to make an impactful intellectual or creative contribution to their field. Students gain practical experience and professional training that builds on their studies in the Humanities. At the same time, faculty benefit from students’ assistance and academic expertise.
Employing Humanities has funded the following undergraduate students to assist faculty-led humanities research during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Artificial Intelligence and Human Imagination with Associate Professor of Literature Zac Zimmer
About the project: Researchers will be turning lectures from the course Artificial Intelligence and Human Imagination into two short book projects. They will be approaching "data" itself from a critical perspective, and studying how training data forms the foundation of Artificially Intelligent Technosystems.
- Jennacess Carreon (Literature)
- Marissa Omaque (Anthropology and Literature)
Biblioteca Amazonica with Associate Professor of Literature Amanda Smith
About the project: This bilingual researcher will assist the faculty research team, and a team in Peru, with ongoing work with the Biblioteca Amazónica to digitize its collections and equip regional archives with the tools and skills they need for prevention and preservation work. It will involve preparing bilingual resources guides to be distributed in the local community, a social media campaign to promote the digital collections and orient people how to use them, and compile best practices to be used by team members to train personnel in the Iquitos area.
- Antonio Franco (Spanish Studies)
Black Radical University with Associate Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Xavier Livermon and Professor of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Christine Hong
About the project: CRES 70B, Black Radical University, is a student-initiated, peer-to-peer course that represents a collaboration between UCSC’s Black Student Union and the department of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Two undergraduate co-coordinators facilitate the course under the guidance of, and alongside, the faculty adviser. As researchers working with the Center for Racial Justice , the co-coordinators will work to map and begin archiving histories of Black student organizing on the UCSC campus–and to the extent that they are able, to begin considering histories of Black community organizing beyond the campus.
- Junebug Sonnenberg (Film & Digital Media and Black Studies)
- Rae Williams (Theater Arts, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, and Black Studies)
Corpus in Paraguayan Spanish and Guarani with Assistant Professor of Languages and Applied Linguistics Josefina Bittar
About the project: This project aims to build and publish a database of interviews (a corpus) in Paraguayan Spanish and Guarani. After correcting the transcriptions, and anonymizing the audios, they will work with the manager of the California Language Archive to upload the interviews and transcriptions into the Archive.
- Madeleine Powell (Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism, Spanish Studies)
Discourse Analysis with Writing Program Professor Kimberly Helmer
About the project: The research team will transcribe focus-group and individual interviews with Chinese international students. The interviewed students were in their final quarters at UCSC and reflected back on their writing (and other) experiences, specifically how their first-year writing courses may have assisted them with their diverse studies. The researchers will learn how to analyze the "talk" transcribed. Findings from this analysis will provide greater insights into the international student experience and how we can better serve them.
- Maxine Altura (Applied Linguistics)
- Millie Hacker (Environmental Studies, Linguistics)
- Grace Nighswonger (Cognitive Science, Linguistics)
Discourse-Based Research with Professor of Languages and Applied Linguistics Saori Hoshi
About the project: This project is text-based research where students will learn how to conduct discourse-based research that involves quantitative and qualitative analysis of Japanese linguistic data sets. The team will work on transcribing conversation data and adding transcription conventions adopted from conversation analysis research. They’ll also work on basic statistical analysis to generate important findings for the study.
- Sunny Jiang (Language Studies and East Asian Studies)
- Benjamin Fredericks (Linguistics)
Curriculum Resource Curation in NEH K-12 Institute on Japanese American Post-War Resettlement in Chicago, 1943-1950 with Professor of History Jasmine Alinder
About the project: The fellowship will involve researching and selecting curated materials to aid a cohort of teachers in developing effective lesson plans focused on the history of resettlement, aiming to equip educators with the necessary knowledge and tools to comprehensively teach and understand the socio-political implications of Japanese-American incarceration and resettlement. The materials gathered will be tailored to include resources relevant to each teacher’s local community and curriculum requirements.
- Researcher will be hired Spring 2024
The Local as Ethnic Studies Curriculum with Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Christine Hong
About the project: The goal of this project is to ground local ethnic studies curriculum in Santa Cruz’s occluded histories, with a focus on migrant labor, land dispossession and exploitation, and histories and realities of freedom and unfreedom. This project positions the team as community-collaborative researchers, enabling them to apply ethnic studies methods to the area that most–for a time–call home. They, along with our community partners, will contribute to a digital archive of local histories by taking part in the recording of community oral histories, identifying relevant documents in the Museum of Art and History archives about early Santa Cruz (and reading such documents against the grain), investigating and collating ephemera from student organizing at UC Santa Cruz, digitizing historical traces, and presenting their findings in a public forum.
- Lucy Liu (Linguistics)
- Aamir Asadi (Robotics Engineering)
- Researcher will be hired in Winter 2024
- Researcher will be hired in Winter 2024
Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California (MuHSiC) with Professor of Languages and Applied Linguistics Mark Amengual
About the project: This research team will be contributing towards developing a robust and linguistically rich corpus of bilingual Spanish-English speech samples culled from 200 hours of sociolinguistic interviews and naturalistic conversations among speakers of diverse social profiles and regional origins throughout California. The audio recordings will be made available on an open website where researchers, teachers, students, and the public will be able to access a linguistic map of California Spanish-English bilingual speech.
- America Damaris Garcia (Legal Studies and Spanish Studies)
- Karen Hinojosa (Psychology and Spanish Studies)
- Siliva Iniguez (Environmental Science and Spanish Studies)
- Rosario Mendez (Spanish Studies)
- Claire Skelly (Politics and Spanish Studies)
- Dacia Van Wormer (Cognitive Science and Linguistics)
- Joscelyn Osorio (Spanish Studies and Psychology)
- Katie Arnold (Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism and Linguistics)
- Cassidy Ponce Ventura (Spanish Studies and Latin American and Latino Studies)
Okinawa Memories Initiative with Professors of History Alan Christy and Alice Yang
About the project: The Okinawa Memories Initiative (OMI) is a public history project that explores the postwar history of Okinawa, Japan, from a global perspective through collaborative storytelling. By learning in the field with immersion travel, students participate in global historical understanding in ways they could never achieve in the classroom. Two Lead Interns are responsible for the management of the undergraduate division of OMI, and three Team Leads work with student volunteer participants on Archival, Exhibits, and Media projects.
- Jaxon Chester (Film & Digital Media and Global Economics)
- Geneva Samuelson (History)
- Nixie Young (History and Classical Studies)
- Walter Barnaby (History and East Asian Studies)
- James Leyton (History and Politics)
Selling Saqqara with Associate Professor of History Elaine Sullivan
About the project: The team will work to gather archival and secondary source information on a series of Egyptian artifacts that were excavated at Saqqara cemetery in the late 19th and early 20th century and sold abroad by Egypt’s Antiquities Service.
- Isabel De Blois (History)
- Gabby Manzoni (History and Politics)
Shakespeare in Santa Cruz: Performance History, 1981 to Now with Professor of Literature Sean Keilen
About the project: The goal of this project is to explore the records of Santa Cruz Shakespeare in McHenry Library for information about past productions of Hamlet and As You Like It and to write brief histories of those productions for use in community education programs sponsored by Shakespeare Workshop and in playbills and other publications associated with the upcoming summer season at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
- Researcher will be hired Spring 2024
- Researcher will be hired Spring 2024
Syllable Structure in Dialects of English with Professor of Linguistics Rachel Walker
About the project: This scaffolded inquiry connects with an investigation that Prof. Walker is leading on syllable structure in dialects of English (US English and Australian English). The research focuses on words like ‘file’ and ‘hour’, which speakers tend to have difficulty classifying as one syllable in length or two. Probing the source of these difficulties will shed light on how consonants and vowels are organized into syllables in English and how this organization may vary within and across dialects.
- Samuel Almer (Linguistics)
- Ben Sommer (Sociology and Linguistics)
Ultrasound/Acoustic Analysis with Professor of Linguistics Jaye Padgett
About the project: The team will work together to develop and carry out an experiment under the driving question – why do phonological contrasts in languages tend to be lost at the ends of words?
- Jennifer Goi (Linguistics)
- Cassidy Hatfield (Linguistics)
- Lorelei Howe (Linguistics)
- Tony Butorovich (Language Studies)
- Claire Wellwood (Linguistics and Psychology)
Visual Constructions of the Pajaro and Salinas Valleys with Professor of History of Consciousness Dimitris Papadopoulos
About the project: The project will collect, classify, and archive pre-existing historical and contemporary visual artifacts of two major agricultural regions in the Central Coast: the Pajaro and the Salinas Valleys. Rather than generating a comprehensive and exhaustive record of existing images, the main objective is to capture and analyze key themes and phases in the visual constructions of the valleys. The database of the images that the team will gather will serve as a research device to elucidate key transformations, self-definitions and social conflicts of these two major agricultural areas of California. These visual materials will allow us to explore how the interplay between the local and global economy, the environment and ecological challenges, transnational labor movements, and social composition have shaped the current profile of these regions.
- Researchers will be hired Fall 2024
- Researchers will be hired Fall 2024
Watsonville is in the Heart with Professor of History Kathleen Gutierrez and Professor of Sociology Steve McKay
About the project: The Watsonville is in the Heart digital archive preserves and uplifts the stories of the “manong” generation (Ilokano/Tagalog for "older brother"), the first wave of Filipino migrant farmworkers to arrive in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Focused on the pioneering families of Watsonville and the greater Pajaro Valley, the archive enshrines the manong, the women who married the manong, and their descendents’ memories of migration, labor, leisure, and community formation.
- Ian Doyle (History)
- Maia Michelle Mislang (History)
- Jacob Press (History)
- Sharan Sethi (Literature, Philosophy, History)
- Janeth Pérez-Quirke (Education, Literature)
