2012
Roundtable: Conflict Response, Negotiation, and Transformation – From the Global to the Individual
Facilitator: Shane Lloyd, Assistant Director for First and Second Year Programs, Third World Center
Cindy Lung, Health Caring Men: Male Veterans’ Coping with the Psychological Effects of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars | Slides
Alina Kung, Lan Mei, and Qian Yin, Strait Talk: Transforming the Taiwan Strait Conflict through Youth Advocacy and Conflict Resolution
Sarah Wilbanks, “Cherry-Picked” Humanitarian Interventions: A Complexity Approach to Explaining Libya 2011 | Slides
Jonah Fisher, Interfaith Exchange: Stepping Beyond Dialogue and into Social Action to Transform Interfaith High School Education
Roundtable: Channels of Choice: Do We Have a Say in Representation?
Facilitator: Gail Cohee, Director, Sarah Doyle Women’s Center
Reuben Henriques, The Jury Box and the Ballot Box: Mandatory Participation, Democracy, and the Liberal Citizen
Leor Shtull-Leber, From Scholarship to Sales: Sounds, Meaning, and Memory in Branding Linguistics
Tyler J. Rogers, Gender, Race, and Reality Television: Discourses of Sisterhood on “Braxton Family Values”
Sam Karshenboym, Does Television Change Attitudes?: A “Breaking Bad” and “Weeds” Study
Roundtable: Look Again
Facilitator: Jim Amspacher, Career Advisor, Center for Careers & Life After Brown
Arianna Ahiagbe, ADHD, Injury, & the Effect of Medication Adherence in Children | Slides
Gabriella Ferrari, A beautiful tool of power: Ancient Greek and Roman art in public collections
Beth Caldwell, The Financial Frontier: Slave Mortgaging and the Creation of the Deep South
Roundtable: The Intimacy of Repression
Facilitator: Jim Amspacher, Career Advisor, Center for Careers & Life After Brown
Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, Guatemala was Spanish for Palestine: Israeli Social Engineering in the Guatemalan Dictatorship
Yuri Tomikawa, Working Mothers, Childrearing Fathers: Implications of Family Policies on Gender Roles in Japan
Sabrina Skau, Friendship as a Way of Life: Online Fan Communities and Queer Everyday Resistance
Quyen Ngo, Between Innocence and Dissidence: Multimedia explorations of the politics of everyday life in contemporary Vietnam
Roundtable: Telling a True Story: On Stage and in Research
Facilitator: Alan Flam, Director, Advising & Community Collaborations, Swearer Center
Kara Kaufman, The Role of Judaism in the Environmental Movement | Slides
Alexandra Keegan, Reflecting on Dead City (a modern riff on Joyce’s Ulysses): A Narrative of Female Connection
Colleen McDonald, ”It’s a human tragedy and these bastards who are bringing these boatpeople should be shot”: Framing people smugglers in Australian news media | Slides
Roundtable: Living Structure
Facilitator: Gail Cohee, Director, Sarah Doyle Women’s Center
Amalia Gonzalez and Josh Jubelirer, A Path to Better Health: Navigating Structural Barriers to Improve Well-being
Shay O’Brien, Cause I don’t wanna put it on anyone else: Negotiating feminist language ideologies in the Female Sexuality Workshop
Julia Sheehy-Chan, Government Strategy Behind Religious Conflict: Explaining Violence Against Christians in Egypt and Jordan
Roundtable: Conceptualizing Boundaries and Transcending Borders
Facilitator: Nukhet Sandal, Postdoctoral Fellow, Watson Institute for International Studies
Tara Prendergast and Jesse McGleughlin, Bridging borders: Relationships as Social Justice | Slides
Vasundhara Prasad, The Problem “In” Kashmir, The Problem “Of” Kashmir: Tracing the 60 Year Old Conflict in the Indian Subcontinent and Its Implications for Regional and Global Security | Slides
Kara White, Getting Closer to the Feline Gaze in Human-Cat Relations
Roundtable: Identity, Community, Change
Facilitator: Janet Isserlis, Lecturer & Program Manager, Swearer Center for Public Service
Veronica Clarkson, “Say Cheese!”: Viability of heritage-based agricultural cluster economies in promoting rural development and resilient systems in the United States
Marie Ripa and Clay Thibodeaux, $ocial Classmates: the Other Way of Looking at Money Matters at Brown
Leland Lazarus, Chino-Latino: Navigating Chinese Identity in Latin America | Slides
Roundtable: Practice in Context
Facilitator: David Blanding, Graduate Student, Political Science
Kirstin Purtich, Conserving the Art Object at the RISD Museum: Principles and Execution
Chahney Hinds, Education in the Virgin Islands: Purpose, Practice, Progress
Roundtable: Confined: Bodies and Selves
Facilitator: Kisa Takesue, Director, Student Activities Office & Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center
Blair McNamara, Hepatitis C and Incarcerated Young Adults
Natalia Fadul, The Female Mind and the Absent Body: Writing Female Subjectivity
Jessica Bendit, I See You: Facilitating Creative Arts in Prison
Roundtable: The Politics of Labeling
Facilitator: Alan Flam, Director, Advising & Community Collaborations, Swearer Center for Public Service
Juan J. Martinez-Hill, Bobby Hunter, and Catherine Carbone, Adult Education with “Marginalized” Communities
Ann Crawford-Roberts, Visible & Invisible with HIV/AIDS: Stigma Symbols in Botswana
Catherine Mardula, Virtue Survives Death: Uncovering 16th- and 17th-Century Women from Their Epitaphs
Roundtable: Living Memory/Constructing the Past
Facilitator: Katrin Dettmer, Graduate Student, German Studies
Gili Kliger and Nicole Friedman, In Conversation: Aging Across the States | Slides
Frank Rinaldi, Remembering Africa: The Role of Memory in Shaping the Possibilities for Development
Saskia Brechenmacher, Memory Wars in Divided Societies: The Political Uses of the Past in Contemporary Ukrain | Slides
Charles Pletcher, Memory and the Construction of the Self
Poster Session
Amit Jain and Nabeel Gillani, Learning Exchange: Finding new ways to motivate students to learn
Annika Finne, Investigating Authenticity: the Authorship of Anna Zborowska
Caitlin Conn, Marketing Mindset: Harnessing Psychology for Green Change
Chishio Furukawa, Can solar lamps replace kerosene candles and improve health, education, and safety of non-electrified households? – Evidence from Uganda
Frankie Camacho, Compressed Sensing and Its Applications to MRI reconstruction
Graciela Kincaid, No Talk, Some Walk: Obama Administration Rhetoric on Climate Change and its International Climate Finance Commitments
Indu Voruganti, Development of fluorescent probes for gene expression analysis and purification of heterogeneous mesenchymal stem cell populations
Innessa Colaiacovo, Not Just the Facts: Asylum Determinations of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (2006-2010)
Jean Hazel B. Mendoza, Song of New York: A Photographic Essay
Jennifer Ju, Serotonin Signaling and Sleep in Caenorhabditis elegans
José M. Rodriguez, Microenterprises: the Dominican entrepreneurial experience in Los Ciruelito, DR and Providence, RI
Kathryn Ries Tringale, Towards the Optimal Design of an Assistive Communication Device
MariaLisa S. M. Itzoe, Effects of Music on Measures of Arousal, Mood, Attention and Memory: An Age Related Study
Marie DeLuca, Traumatic Brain Injury and Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures
Michael Wagman, Numerical Simulations of Turduckened Black Holes
Nabeel Gillani and Amit Jain, Learning Exchange: Finding new ways to motivate students to learn
Nadejda Drenska, Numerical Approximation of Spectra for Localized Oscillatory Structures
Sarah Rutherford, How We Evaluate Political Philosophies: The Relationship between Philosophers’ Gender Values and Brown University Students’ Opinions of Their Philosophies
Theresa Lii, Pain and Hypersensitivity: Investigating Key Regulators of Membrane Excitability in Sensory Neurons
Thunwa (Nics) Theerakarn, Regularity of center manifolds via the graph transform
Roundtable Presenters
Cindy Lung
Cindy is a senior concentrating in Sociology and Education Studies with an emphasis on human development. She will be pursuing her Masters in Urban Education Policy at Brown University in the Fall.
Advisor: R. Tyson Smith
Alina Kung
Alina is a proud member of the Class of 2012, and a concentrator in Development Studies and Human Biology. She is interested in international health and the power of dialogue.
Lan Mei
Lan Mei is a sophomore concentrating in computational biology.
Qian Yin
Qian is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Modern Culture & Media and Economics.
Sarah Wilbanks
Sarah Wilbanks is a senior concentrating in International Relations with a focus on Global Security and the Middle East. She is particularly interested in international humanitarian law and human rights, and is presenting the work of her honors thesis.
Advisor: Catherine Lutz
Jonah Fisher
A Senior in the Department of Religion, Jonah Fisher is honored to be speaking about the project that has truly culminated his learning, public service work, and personal growth during his time at Brown. Originally hailing from New York City, Jonah now lives in a beautiful haunted mansion off-campus with six of his closest friends – he spent last spring in Buenos Aires and hopes to be moving to Israel after graduation.
Advisor: Janet Cooper-Nelson
Reuben Henriques
I am a senior from Madison, Wis. concentrating in political theory. Next year, I will be working at the MATCH Charter High School in Boston, Mass.
Advisor: David Estlund
Leor Shtull-Leber
Leor, originally from Ann Arbor, MI, is a Cognitive Science concentrator. As a part of her independent study last semester, she served as a Brand and Naming Intern at Hasbro, helping to bring science to the toy naming process.
Advisor: Laura Kertz
Tyler J. Rogers
I am a proud native of Pawtucket, Rhode Island and a double concentrator in the Ethnic Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies programs at Brown. Beginning in the fall of 2012, I will continue my education in the American Studies Ph.D. program at Yale.
Advisor: Tamar Katz
Sam Karshenboym
I am a senior from New Jersey concentrating in sociology and French. My interests include playing with dogs, watching great television, and trying new food.
Advisor: R. Tyson Smith
Arianna Ahiagbe
Arianna Ahiagbe ’12 is a Human Biology concentrator from Philadelphia, PA. Her thesis focuses on the relationship between unintentional injury in children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and pharmacological treatment for ADHD. Her research interests include disability, chronic illness, and children.
Advisor: Dr Bruce Becker
Gabriella Ferrari
I am an international student from Italy. I am concentrating in Classics and Slavic Studies. My areas of interest are Roman literature and culture, as well as Russian art, language and culture.
Advisor: Lisa Mignone
Beth Caldwell
Beth is a history concentrator from Augusta, Georgia. After graduation, she will be moving to North Carolina to work for a nonprofit organization addressing issues of poverty and economic development in the South.
Advisor: Seth Rockman
Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn
Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn was raised in Central Florida. He concentrates in Africana Studies and History.
Advisor: Naoko Shibusawa
Yuri Tomikawa
Yuri Tomikawa is an East Asian Studies and International Relations concentrator from Tokyo, Japan.
Advisor: Kerry Smith
Sabrina Skau
Sabrina is an anthropology concentrator from Portland, Oregon.
Advisor: Catherine Lutz
Quyen Ngo
Quyen Ngo is a Development Studies Concentrator who started playing around with media in a fairly cursory way when she entered Brown. This led to soul and funk and slow jams, Malcolm X, installations alongside fancy sound people, and eventually, this capstone project. She enjoys noodles, beats, and color.
Sponsor: Konstantinos Kometis
Kara Kaufman
As an environmental studies concentrator, I have become passionate about moving our economy toward more sustainable forms of food and energy production. For the past year, I have researched the ways in which Judaism and the environment intersect, interviewing Jewish leaders and surveying community members to gauge their opinions on the role that faith can play in the environmental movement.
Advisor: Caroline Karp
Alexandra Keegan
Alexandra is a senior concentrating in English Literature & Theatre Arts, focusing on directing and mental illness’ dramatization. She directs, produces and is otherwise involved in Brown theatre.
Advisor: Kym Moore
Colleen McDonald
Colleen is an insatiably curious Development Studies concentrator who loves food friends and cooking, and has been involved in UCS, the Bruin Club, BRYTE, the BDH Editorials Board, Eat Play Love, and the Brown Disaster Relief Group while at Brown. She is incredibly grateful for everything that she has learned from her peers while at Brown, and excited to continue the exchange at this Theories in Action conference and beyond.
Advisor: Cornel Ban
Amalia Gonzalez
Amalia Gonzalez (’12) is a neuroscience concentrator from Guilford, Connecticut. She has structured her time at Brown to balance her interest in laboratory research and her commitment to health-related causes, especially as a coordinator of Health Leads.
Advisor: Alan Flam
Josh Jubelirer
Josh Jubelirer is a senior Human Biology (Race and Gender) concentrator. His interest in social determinants of health began in the classroom at Brown and inspires his work with Health Leads, a non-profit that connects low-income families to non-medical resources to improve their health.
Advisor: Alan Flam
Shay O’Brien
Shay O’Brien is writing an honors thesis in Anthropology on language use in the Female Sexuality Workshop (FemSex). She has been working with linguistic anthropologist Professor Paja Faudree since her first year at Brown.
Advisor: Paja Faudree
Julia Sheehy-Chan
As an International Relations concentrator at Brown University, Julia Sheehy-Chan studies social problems and threats to human security in Middle Eastern countries, with special emphasis on violence against minorities. Her research questions to what degree governments are responsible for the extent of religious conflict.
Advisor: Claudia Elliott
Tara Prendergast
Tara Kane Prendergast is a history concentrator. She has worked with Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE) as a tutor and coordinator since her freshman year at Brown.
Advisor: Alan Flam
Jesse McGleughlin
Jesse McGleughlin is a sophomore at Brown concentrating in Africana Studies. She has worked extensively with Tara as coordinators of Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE.)
Adviser: Alan Flam
Vasundhara Prasad
Vasundhara is a Senior from Bombay, India, double-concentrating in International Relations and Economics. At Brown, she is the President of the Brown International Organization and the Secretary-General of the Brown University Simulation of United Nations. She will be working at Teach For America after graduation and eventually wants to pursue a career in international human rights law.
Advisor: Minh Luong
Kara White
Kara is an anthropology concentator from Las Vegas, Nevada. Her thesis emerged from her lifelong interest in cats, with her cat Lara providing much inspiration for this and potential future research ideas. Her plans after Brown involve completing a masters thesis at the University of Chicago and spending a few years in Japan after that before completing a phd program in anthropology. Her other research interests include Japan, human-animal relationships, subjectivities, agency, and animal rights.
Advisor: Nicholas Townsend
Veronica Clarkson
Veronica is an Economics and Environmental Studies concentrator at Brown. She works with the Brown Agricultural Resilience Initiative on the economic, social and environmental viability of alternative agriculture.
Advisor: Kathryn De Master
Marie Ripa
I am a first-generation college student, double concentrating in Education and Italian Studies. My interests include teaching Italian, identity development and competitive bowling.
Advisor: Shane Lloyd
Clay Thibodeaux
Clay Thibodeaux is a senior from Los Angeles, CA, concentrating in Environmental Science. He founded the student discussion forum, $ocial Classmates with fellow senior Marie Ripa in the spring of 2010 as a means of engaging the Brown campus community in dialogue surrounding social class identity.
Advisor: Shane Lloyd
Leland Lazarus
Leland Lazarus is a senior at Brown University studying International Relations. He has studied extensively about the history, culture, and current events in both Latin America and China, and he speaks both Spanish and Mandarin. Upon graduation, Leland hopes to begin a career in international politics. He resides in Long Island, NY.
Advisor: Barbara Stallings
Kristin Purtich
Kirstin Purtich (’12) is a concentrator in the history of art and architecture. In the past year, she has become interested in the museum’s ability to bring an understanding of artworks to a general public, and after graduation she plans to pursue a career in the museum field. During her time at Brown she has also been a frequent costume designer for plays, musicals, and operas.
Advisor: Steven Lubar
Chahney Hinds
Chahney Hinds ’12 is an Education concentrator from the US Virgin Islands interested in curriculum/program formation and education policy. She is a 2011 Royce Fellow, a member of the Brown Women’s Rugby Team, and a member of Word! Poetry Group.
Advisor: Deborah Rivas
Blair McNamara
Blair concentrates in Human Biology and will graduate in ‘12.5.
Advisor: Deborah Fran Weinstein
Natalia Fadul
Natalia is a senior from New Hampshire concentrating in Comparative Literature in English, Spanish, and Italian. Her work looks at how three female authors from England, Chile, and Italy each chose to write female subjectivity over a span of forty years in the mid-1900’s, and how their writing of the female mind complicates or illuminates the often disconnected relationship between mind and body.
Advisor: Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg
Jessica Bendit
Jessica Bendit ’12 is the women’s coordinator of Space in Prisons for the Arts and Creative Expression, a Swearer Center program that facilitates arts workshops at the RI Adult Correctional Institute. After graduation, she hopes to be part of the movement for change in the American criminal justice system.
Advisor: Janet Isserlis
Juan J. Martinez-Hill
Juan José Martinez-Hill is a senior from San Bernardino, California. He has participated in various prison education programs including the Prison Library Project and the Brown Education Link Lecture Series. He currently facilitates a book discussion group at the High-Security prison in Cranston.
Advisor: Alan Flam
Bobby Hunter
Bobby Hunter has taught English for Speakers of Other Languages for 3 1/2 years and has been a Community Fellow for the Olneyville ESOL program for the past two years. He is also interested in youth empowerment, race and mental health, and strives to maintain a mild-mannered demeanor through important life changes.
Advisor: Alan Flam
Catherine Carbone
Ann Crawford-Roberts
Ann is an anthropology and international relations concentrator who likes to study people and places. She’s spending a year before medical school exploring the world and herself, and taking a break from student life by reading and writing (for fun).
Advisor: Bianca Dahl
Catherine Mardula
Catherine Mardula is a senior from Hinsdale, Illinois. Her presentation, which was drawn from her thesis for the Classics department, began with a research project in Paris funded by the Brown International Scholars Program.
Advisor: John Bodel
Gili Kliger
Gili is a Literary Arts and Computer Science double concentrator from Chappaqua, New York with an interest in film, storytelling, and the impact of narrative. In the Fall, she will pursue a Masters in European Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge.
Advisor: Peggy Chang
Nicole Friedman
Nicole Friedman is an English concentrator from Piedmont, California. She plans to pursue journalism after graduation.
Advisor: Peggy Chang
Frank Rinaldi
Frank Rinaldi is graduating this Spring with a double concentration in Africana Studies and Economics.
Advisor: Anthony Bogues
Saskia Brechenmacher
Originally from a small town in Southern Germany, Saskia lived in France for most of her childhood and spent the last two years of high school at the United World College in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. At Brown, she double concentrated in Political Science and Slavic Studies, and spent a semester abroad in Moscow studying Russian language and literature.
Advisor: Linda Cook
Charles Pletcher
Charles Pletcher is a Classics and Comp. Lit. concentrator from New Providence (no joke), Pennsylvania.
Advisor: Pura Nieto-Hernandez
Poster Presenters
Amit Jain
Amit is a senior who is passionate about education, policy, politics, and technology. When he’s not learning from kids half his age, he dances with Brown Badmaash, mentors with the Third World Center, and volunteers with the Obama campaign.
Advisor: Oludurotimi Adetunji
Nabeel Gillani
Advisor: Oludurotimi Adetunji
Annika Finne
Advisor: Evelyn Lincoln
Caitlin Conn
Caitlin’s education in Psychology and Commerce, Organizations, & Entrepreneurship has fueled her work in marketing and interest in human decision-making. She has experience launching an apparel start-up, interning at Google, and promoting green change at Brown, and will be continuing at Google post-graduation.
Advisor: Kai Morrell
Chishio Furukawa
Advisor: Andrew Foster
Frankie Camacho
Frankie Camacho is a senior from New York City concentrating in applied mathematics.
Advisor: Jan Hesthaven
Graciela Kincaid
Graciela Kincaid is an International Relations concentrator from Palo Alto, California. She became fascinated with international environmental politics as a junior, and has focused on climate change policy since summer of 2011. She dances in her free time, and is thrilled to be working at TripAdvisor next year!
Advisor: J. Timmons Roberts
Indu Voruganti
Indu is concentrating in Biology with a focus on Physiology and Biotechnology. Her research with the Darling Lab at Brown examines enriching stem cell populations for the purpose of improving cell-based tissue regenerative therapies. Next year she will be pursuing a Master of Science degree in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. Afterwards Indu hopes to continue her studies at medical school.
Advisor: Minoo Ramanathan
Innessa Colaiacovo
Innessa Colaiacovo is a double concentrator in Economics and French from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Her senior thesis resulted from a 2010 Swearer Center International Fellowship that allowed her to work for the Halifax Refugee Clinic, a pro bono legal clinic specializing in asylum cases. There, she was introduced to the basics of Canadian immigration policy. Her empirical honours thesis analyses over 51,000 refugee claims adjudicated from 2006-2010 and finds that the probably a refugee claim is accepted is correlated with the adjudicator’s observable characteristics.
Advisor: Rachel Friedberg
Jean Hazel B. Mendoza
Jean is a biology and English, nonfiction writing double concentrator from New York. Her photographic essay is a quest for the photographer Jamie Livingston and New York City as well as an inquiry into the meaning of time, memory, and photography.
Jennifer Ju
Jennifer is double concentrating in Neuroscience and History of Art and Architecture. She will be attending medical school next year.
Advisor: Anne Hart
José M. Rodriguez
Advisor: Jose Itzigsohn, Pedro Dal Bo
Kathryn Ries Tringale
Advisor: Leigh Hochberg
MariaLisa S. M. Itzoe
MariaLisa Itzoe will graduate this May with a double concentration in Music and Psychology. In June, she will begin a year-long Post-Baccalaureate Pre-Medical School Program at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD. MariaLisa very much looks forward to continuing on to medical school (perhaps in pursuit of an MD/PhD) the following year.
Advisor: Elena Festa-Martino
Marie DeLuca
Marie DeLuca concentrates in Human Biology: Brain and Behavior and has been involved with research projects on traumatic brain injury, nonepileptic seizures, meditation, epilepsy, and depression. She works for Brown EMS, plays the harp, and is a member of a co-ed literary fraternity in her free time.
Advisor: William Curt LaFrance Jr.
Michael Wagman
Michael Wagman is a math-physics concentrator and will be attending graduate school at the University of Washington for theoretical physics next year. While at Brown he has also been a four year member of the Brown Debating Union.
Advisor: Jan Hesthaven
Nabeel Gillani
Nabeel Gillani is a senior concentrating in Applied Math – Computer Science. He has a growing interest in working with parents, students, and educators to introduce technologies that help students learn and teachers teach.
Advisor: Oludurotimi Adetunji
Amit Jain
Advisor: Oludurotimi Adetunji
Nadejda Drenska
Advisor: Bjorn Sandstede
Sarah Rutherford
Sarah Rutherford is a Political Theory concentrator from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is a passionate advocate for women’s equality and views her senior thesis as a form of activism.
Advisor: Michael Tesler
Theresa Lii
Theresa is a senior completing a Sc.B. degree in Neuroscience with Honors. She is enrolled in the Program for Liberal Medical Education and will be continuing on to Alpert Medical School next fall. Recently, she has started research with Dr. Carl Saab in developing an EEG-based biomarker for chronic pain.
Advisor: Peter A. McNaughton
Thunwa (Nics) Theerakarn
Advisor: Bjorn Sandstede