Humanities Scholars Program Spring Research Conference
Friday, May 1, 2026 9:30am to 4pm
About this Event
121 Presidents' Drive
Humanities Scholars Program Spring Research Conference
This annual conference features the outstanding student research of Cornell seniors from various humanities fields.
The day will consist of brief presentations (12-15 minutes each), organized into panels based on common themes, and followed by Q&A. Panels and Q&A sessions will be moderated by Professor Verity Platt, (Director, Humanities Scholars Program), and Drs. Mary Danisi and Spencer Beswick (Postdoctoral Associates, Humanities Scholars Program). Join in and pose your questions to the student presenters!
Note: we ask that attendees plan to join for full panels when possible.
The event is sponsored by the College of Arts & Sciences Humanities Scholars Program (HSP) housed at the Society for the Humanities and will include presentations from HSP seniors as well as other students not in the program, but presenting research from across humanities departments.
Please write to hum-scholars-pgm@cornell.edu with questions, or for accommodations.
Conference Schedule - Overview
- Breakfast served beginning at 9:30 AM.
- Presentations from 10:30 AM - 4:00 PM.
- Lunch 11:30-12:30 PM.
- A reception will be held from 4:00 - 5:00pm at the A.D. White House following the conference.
- Free and open to the public.
Conference Schedule - Full Program [subject to change]
Please click here to view the program including presentation abstracts.
[Breakfast: 9:30-10:30 AM]
Session 1: 10:30-11:30 AM
Rm 109 - Race, Culture, and Politics
Alianna Wray, “Dehumanized, Disbelieved, and Denied: Anti-Black Misogyny as a Cross-Institutional Logic in American Law, Media, and Governance”
Christina MacCorkle, “The Limits of the Liberal Imagination: Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin and the Failure of Interiority in Early Cold War Literary Politics”
Zilala Mamat, "At the Threshold: Transnational Repression and the Erasure of Uyghur Identity in Central Asia and Turkey"
Rm 110 - Insiders and Outsiders: Political factionalism and discourses of the other
Bella Swope, “The Human and Entomological Other: Insect Metaphors and their Implications”
Samara Schiffman, “On Earth As it is in Heaven: Comparative Religious Nationalisms of the US and Israel”
Noah Freedman, “Failing Cordon Sanitaires in Western Europe: Examining the Fate of Far Right Political Shunnings in a New Media Age."
Guerlac Room - Rethinking the Classics in Art, Architecture, and Film
Esther Brenner, “Grace Under Pressure: Civic Service and Votive Practice in the Architecture of the Classical Greek Polis”
Grace Ling, “The American Public Library in Transformation: From Historic Palaces to Contemporary Hubs”
Elizabeth Musso, “Feminist Films? The Role of Women in 6 Films of Roberto Rossellini”
[Lunch: 11:30-12:30]
Session 2: 12:30-1:30 PM
Rmm 110 - Formulations of Rhetoric and Reform: Authorization or Education
Max Ehrlich, “Religious Exemptions in Education - Ascertaining an Approach that Protects the Rights of Children”
Tae Kyu Lee, "Rescaling Prison Education: A Comparative Anylsis of New York and England/Wales"
Roxana Behdad, “The Lawgiver's Echo: Prophetic Auothirty and Founding Moments in American Political Thought"
Guerlac Room - Space, Time and Embodiment in Literature
Christina Bonarti, “Desire on the Menu: the Paradox of Appetite in the Middle Ages”
Stacey Na, “Space-Time Eco-Synthesis: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry into Nabokov’s Narrative Niches”
Ruby Massengale, “Debris of a Once Desired Dialect: A Spatial Poetry Anthology”
Session 3: 1:45-2:45 PM
Rm 109 - Systems of Language
Nina Davis, "(Mis)Understanding Through Translation; Reading Borges, Perec, and Lispector"
Zelazzie Zepeda, “Taracahitic Languages Omission in Southern Uto-Aztecan Historical Linguistics”
Lucas Li, “Constraining semantic proto-role properties for metaphorical event generation”
Rm 110 - Encounters Between East and West
Leo Glasgow, “Becoming What We Oppose? U.S. Policy in the Age of China”
Arushi Kende, “The Cultivation of Altruistic Cultures: Seva as a Regenerative Social Economy from India to Ithaca”
Nicholas Vega, “‘The Wisdom of the Atheists’: A Seventeenth Century Spanish Reading of Confucianism”
Guerlac Room - Beyond the Archive
Aitan Avgar, “For Us of For All?: Old Habonim, the New Left, and a Transforming Jewish Radicalism between 1960 and 1976”
Cristobal Ramirez, “No Hay Nada de Ruinas: Computational Hauntology in the Rio Grande Valley”
Emma Alexander, “Witchcraft and Society: A Dive into the Cornell University Witchcraft Archives”
Session 4: 3:00-4:00 PM
Rm 109 - Humanistic Approaches to Health and Wellness
Anya Shukla, “Engineering Utopia: Startups, Women's Health, and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence”
Jeffrey Ho, “Public Health on the Hill: Creating Community Through Communication”
Emmy Kanarowski, “Rewriting Memories: The Political Economy of Accelerated Resolution Therapy”
Rm 110 - Struggles for Hegemony in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
Miranda Stewart, “Buying the Game: Saudi Arabia and the Transformation of Global Sport"
Zoran Naroo, “Inventing the Homeland: Internal-External Security Amid the War on Terror”
Mia Battistella, “An American Century: The Role of Latin America in Negotiating U.S. Postwar Hegemony”
Guerlac Room - Art, Identity, Ownership
Hannah Quigley, “The Underground Radio: An Oral History of 1960s Folk Counterculture”
Ashley Kim, “Who Owns What?: Intellectual Property Legalities and Loopholes in Art and Apparel”
Max Nam, “‘Shaman Painting’: Kim Tongni's Discovery of Korean Landscape”
[Reception: 4:00-5:00 PM]
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