Some Past Senior Fellows

Project title: The impact of casinos on Native American health in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma

Project description: This project will examine the impact of Choctaw owned casinos and adjacent, casino funded resources on Native American health within the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma reservation. Through the use of surveys, interviews, and additional quantitative health data, this project will explore how one's proximity to casinos and access to additional casino adjacent resources play a role in health outcomes. The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 legalized Class III gaming in all federally recognized tribes in the United States, including the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. These casinos now serve as an important source of revenue for the tribe, but it is unclear the exact impact of these casinos on Choctaw health. This study hypothesizes that close proximity to Choctaw casinos will have a negative impact on Choctaw health but predicts that the casino adjacent resources will have a moderating effect that will result in an overall net positive impact. The primary goal of this study is to gather additional information on how tribal casinos may affect Native American health in a way that the Choctaw Nation, and potentially other tribal nations, can utilize to inform future policies and programs.

Project title: Queer Idyll

Hometown: Greer, South Carolina

Project description: Today's mainstream queer celebrations get taken for granted so much that visibility, access, community, solidarity, and understanding of queer identity easily become overlooked by cisgender and heteronormative audiences. Furthermore, queer history often focuses on metronormativity, neglecting rural queer living and its ability to collectively celebrate. Solely acknowledging queer people through urban perspectives suggests rural queerness cannot thrive in its home communities. To address these concerns, I introduce Queer Idyll: a musical film that envisages a marriage between the sonic and visual worlds to document the Queer Farmer Network's goal of acknowledging, supporting, and building communities among queer, rural communities. To intimately understand queer agriculture, I am visiting various farms run by queer people and working as a farmhand during my stays. I will weave together interviews and sound recordings from these surrounding environments on site to evoke the essence of living queer in rural America. This revelatory project exposes the complicated nature of queer existence and the banality of everyday life through queer, avant-garde methodologies. Juxtaposing joyful tranquility against intrapersonal distress, the film inquires into the affective expressions of idyllic isolation, social deprivation, and the processes of communal renewal to the captured lived realities behind rural queer life. Antinormative art flirts with failure, sometimes even provoking it despite the chance of not being taken seriously. This Senior Fellowship adopts these risks to address the problems of today, in my case: the Queer Idyll.

Project title: The grand restructuring: A historical analysis of private equity's relationship with Japan's corporate renaissance

Project description: In the past twenty years, the synergistic relationship between Japanese private equity (PE) investors and corporate restructurings has evolved rapidly. In 2024, more than half of public Japanese firms are considering divestments from non-core business operations, and annual PE investment activity in Japan has increased twenty-fold as investors purchase divested assets. We argue that this corporate renaissance is best understood as a product of broader, momentous shifts in Japanese capitalism away from the "planned economy" model illustrated by Chalmers Johnson. We hope to provide more cohesive coverage of Japanese PE activity, link the underlying drivers of corporate restructurings to Johnson's model, and evaluate the future of these emerging, critical components of Japan's transition.

Learning the art of film

Project title: 32-33: Transposing the Oral Memory of the Ukrainian Holodomor into a Film Installation

Project description: The project aims to transpose the oral history accounts of the Ukrainian Holodomor (artificial famine of 1932-33) into an emotionally relatable experience of film installation. It aims to demonstrate how immersive media experiences, film in particular, can transpose dry historical accounts into potent emotional narratives that become integral to the audience's core memory. During the fellowship, I will combine my training in filmmaking with historical archival research, genocide and post-colonial studies, and creative curation. The final exhibition will engage with the audience's immersive and active memory through emotive filmmaking and historical contextualization of the genocide through memorabilia. Bringing international attention to the previously censored Holodomor is especially important in light of Russia's present attempts to erase Ukrainian historical and cultural heritage. 

Project title: Role of the heme protein cytochrome c5 in respiration of Pseudomonas bacteria

Project description: Pseudomonas aeruginosa (Pa) infections are challenging to treat because of Pa versatility and proclivity towards antibiotic resistance. The bacterium thrives in a variety of environments due to its highly branched respiratory chain. Cytochrome c5, a previously overlooked component of the Pa electron-transport chain, was recently found as a part of a higher-order redox supercomplex with quinol:cytochrome c oxidoreductase (cyt bc1), a terminal oxidase (cyt cbb3), and cytochrome c4. However, the functional role of this protein in the supercomplex and the Pa respiration network in general was not clear. The goal of this project lies in the characterization of the structure, redox properties, and in vivo interactions of c5. Pseudomonas stutzeri will be utilized as a model bacterium due to similarity of its c5 and other redox components to those of Pa as well as access to purified cbb3 oxidases, which will allow for testing c5 function through enzymatic assays. Multiple biophysical techniques, including circular dichroism, spectroelectrochemistry, and mass-spectrometry, as well as polarographic assays, will be employed to define electron-transfer properties and interactions of c5. More broadly, this project will inform on common protein components of bacterial respiratory chains to assess their potential as targets for antibiotic development.

Project title: Deciphering the epigenetic consequences of SWI/SNF loss via multiomic analysis

Project description: A family of chromatin remodelers, known as SWI/SNF, are responsible for sliding histones in chromatin to determine which genes are accessible at any given time. SWI/SNF mutations are found in 25% of all human cancers, though their mechanisms are not understood. Using a colon cancer model organism, this project seeks to understand the role of SWI/SNF complex in stem cell differentiation and in colon cancer development. I am working with graduate student Luke Deary, who has made colon organoids with SWI/SNF perturbation and subjected them to a variety of genomic assays including CUT&RUN, RNA-Seq, and ATAC-Seq. I will then perform different computational analysis such as motif, GO, and differential binding analysis in order to identify functional regions and pathways significantly changed upon loss of SWI/SNF. I will automate these analyses by developing and maintaining bioinformatic pipelines, and perform higher-level downstream analysis once these preliminary results are interpreted. Because of the novel nature of this project in terms of its scope and scale, the methods underlying these analyses will be made available to the bioinformatics community in the form of an open-source R package.

Project title: Towards the Development of New Methods for Crosslinking Porous Molecular Crystals

Project description: The goal of this project is to study the structure of a previously synthesized covalent organic framework (COF) by synthesizing a hydrogen-bonded crosslinked organic framework (HcOF) analog. I also aim to explore the practical applications of the HcOF analog. COFs are crystalline, porous 2D or 3D polymer networks that have their monomers connected via covalent bonds, and they have many potential uses in energy storage, sensing, and drug delivery. Unfortunately, it is hard to polymerize COFs into continuous, single crystals with long-ranged structure, making it difficult to accurately determine their structures and further predict their applications, so synthesizing and crystallizing similar types of networks as analogs to COFs may be the way to study them. HcOFs are a similar class of porous materials assembled through both hydrogen- and covalent-bonding, for which single, continuous crystals are much easier to obtain. Based on this knowledge, I aim to study the structure of a previously synthesized COF by creating an HcOF analog through the combination of D2h- and C3-symmetric building blocks, analyzing that HCOF analog's structure, and using that knowledge to predict the COF's structure. I also aim to study the practical applications of that HcOF.

Project title: This effeminate stranger: Dionysus' gender in translation and performance

Project description: This Senior Fellowship project is a two-part project that combines my work in the department of Classics with my theater experience as well as my research in translation studies and my lived experience as someone outside of the male-female gender binary. For the first portion of the project, I will translate the full text of Euripides' Bacchae from Ancient Greek into English with a focus on exploring the gendered boundary-crossing of its leads, Dionysus and Pentheus, as well as its Chorus, and on ensuring that my translation is easily performed and understood in a vocal context, rather than being intended primarily for reading. The second portion of the project will be a staged reading of my Bacchae translation which I will direct. The combination of these two parts will allow me to explore the written and spoken language and the physical embodiment of gender and boundary-crossing in the Bacchae through multiple lenses, including translation studies and theatrical direction, in order to gain a better understanding of where the Bacchae is situated in the history of gender and where nonbinary people are situated in the Bacchae.

Project title: Psilocybin, creativity, and latent semantic analysis

Project description: The classic psychedelic psilocybin, when used in the context of psychotherapy to treat drug-resistant cases of depression and addiction, has been shown to produce profound and lasting positive effects, including changes in mood, improved social relationships, and increased overall life satisfaction. I have been working with Dr. Peter Tse and graduate student Nathan Heller of Dartmouth's Psychological and Brain Sciences department now for two years, and our group has formed a partnership with Dr. Roland Griffiths and Dr. Frederick Barrett at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at John Hopkins University (JHU). We are studying three key cognitive mechanisms that are operative in the healing outcomes of psychedelic-assisted therapy: divergent thinking, nostalgia, and meaning-making. This project is already in motion with data collection beginning this Summer and Fall (2021) at JHU and with analysis to take place beginning in the Fall (2021). During the Fellowship, I will be responsible for developing and performing computational linguistic and psycholinguistic analyses of free association responses from the novel Free Association Semantic Task (FAST) using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), which measure the flow of spontaneous thought, collected during three different experimental protocols, and finding correlations between those analyses and simultaneously collected EEG data.

Project title: Structure-based design and conformational stability assessment of full-length and truncated coronavirus spike glycoprotein

Project description: The ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic highlights urgent needs to develop broadly protective therapeutics and vaccines against current and pre-emergent human coronaviruses. A key target of neutralizing antibodies and thus of current research efforts is the viral spike (S) glycoprotein, a large metastable trimer that irreversibly folds, or triggers, from the prefusion to postfusion state upon receptor binding. Many strategies for vaccine development and antibody discovery require use of engineered S antigens that retain biologically relevant conformations, but there is no direct assessment of S triggering to date beyond biophysical characterization and antibody binding. Additionally, receptor-mimicking antibodies that can induce conformational changes of S upon binding has been proposed as a mechanism of antibody-dependent enhancement. Hence, I propose the development of a platform that assesses degree of S triggering via a direct readout of HR2 peptide binding, which theoretically can only occur in the postfusion state. The platform will subsequently be used to guide design of an S2 only antigen, a region conserved across beta-coronaviruses that has the potential to elicit broadly cross-reactive antibodies. Collectively, the system offers unique opportunities to inform S engineering and dissect humoral immune responses to infection and vaccination.

Project title: Hupa language revitalization through alternative education

Project description: Na:tinixwe: mixine:xwe', or Hupa language, is the heritage language of the Hupa and Tsnungwe tribes of Northern California. Currently, there are less than a handful of first language speakers. My language is just one of the many indigenous languages that have and continue to be negatively impacted by globalization and colonization. Fortunately, our community has come together in efforts to create new language learning opportunities for our young people. This fellowship will add to the community's efforts as we conduct a study to determine the feasibility of opening a Hupa language and culture immersion school. Looking to existing indigenous language immersion programs, we hope to gain logistical advice about starting and sustaining a school that will immerse students in the language, that reflects our customs, beliefs, and natural environment, and that will support our students' wellbeing.

Project title: Trust and Believe: The Black Indoors, Popular Skepticism, and the Critical Inheritance of the "House Slave" 

Project description: Merging pop culture criticism with intellectual history, my project Trust and Believe consists of an essay collection and digital exhibition that will explore the use of "house slave" as a pejorative in American speech and narrative, with a focus on how the enduring "slurred" status of this historical figure can be understood as a tradition of criticism within Black American politics, culture, and art.

The term "house slave" is most often employed to insult those with perceived proximities or allegiances to white power structures. With this practice in mind, this project seeks to articulate how this narrative configuration of the "house slave" is deeply problematic—where the historiography of chattel slavery is concerned—yet, extremely powerful as a framework for representing popular ideas about community policing, notions of racial betrayal, and the failures of representation politics. Centering the usage of the term in black political rhetoric and art, my project will explore historic invocations of the "house slave," such as those found in writer Zora Neale Hurston's 1943 essay "The Pet Negro System" and activist Malcolm X's 1963 speech "Message to the Grass Roots." Drawing special attention to the ways this "house slave" insult has been appropriated by non-black figures as well, Trust and Believe will also wrestle with non-black references to the "house slave," looking to figures such as American late-night comedian Bill Maher and Maori member of New Zealand parliament Hone Harawira.

All in all, both the essay collection and the digital exhibition for Trust and Believe set out to illustrate how black American art and popular culture in the late 2010s reveals a mode of skepticism that functions as a rejection of the representation politics that were so adamantly proposed during the Obama-era in particular. My research project will articulate how and why this trope-based critique reemerges in the public zeitgeist—film, media scandals, music videos, and other cultural events—and what impact this has had on leftist political thought and organizing. 

Project title: The Tiger Tool: The Complex Relationship Between Charismatic Megafauna and the Communities Around Them

Project description: For my Senior Fellowship, I will be working on an extension of my Stamps project - The Efficacy of Tiger-centric Ecotourism as a Tool for Sustainable Economic Development. My project seeks to highlight the effectiveness of safari-based tourism as a means to improve regional conservation, promote economic growth, and empower local communities. My work is attempting to deconstruct the narrative that wildlife preservation and economic growth are mutually exclusive, when in many circumstances the two can serve as complements. For my project, I will be focusing on the status and implications of tiger conservation on the Indonesian island of Sumatra as a case study. After carrying out preliminary field research in Indonesia, the vital role of media in tiger conservation became clear - even in a developing country with limited internet access outside major cities. Upon further investigation and interviews with experts in the field, I discovered the shortcomings of social media use as a mechanism for conservation in Southeast Asia. As I continue my research into Southeast Asian tiger-centric ecotourism and conservation, I will add an evolved focus on the growing importance of social media on high impact conservation.

Project title: organic dairyland: pastoral dreams & the geography of milk

Project description: Dairy farms have been hallmarks of the Vermont and New Hampshire landscapes for centuries — and not just in the archetypal red barns and towering silos that are scattered all over the Northeast. The cows, living lawn mowers, return the rolling green pastures we are so familiar with, in an area that would otherwise be densely carpeted with ash and spruce trees. This landscape is balancing on the cusp of erasure. In the last fifty years, small New England dairy farms have shuttered at a precipitous rate due to changing dynamics of food production in the western United States. Meanwhile, farms are growing. The Upper Valley itself is home to some of the largest dairy farms in the two states. In the place of pasture, corn is growing along the Connecticut River to feed hundreds of cows housed in closed quarters.

However, although factory farms in California create downward pressure on milk prices across the country, they supply little to none of the milk we drink; in fact, milk remains one of the most local supermarket staples to date. Through an interdisciplinary mapping and journalism project, I hope to explore these points of disjuncture, or the ways in which our relationships with food at a local scale are hinged upon national or global factors that are often out of our control. I am particularly interested in examining how seemingly non-spatial agents such as food policy and social conventions crystallize into visible spatial patterns like the milksheds in each region of the United States, and more recently, the extinction of small dairy farms in New England. 

In addition to revealing how macro-processes imprint themselves on local landscapes, I take this project as an opportunity to navigate the representational possibilities of cartography. How can mapping, a historically powerful tool for defining fixed territorial boundaries, be used to show how landscapes are always in flux? What are the social implications of telling stories with data? What stories are left out and how can writing come in where mapping falls short? 

Project title: Piloting an At-home Sustained Attention Training to Reduce Attention to Peripheral Food Cues 

Project description: Exposure to environmental food cues increases the likelihood of cued eating, even in absence of hunger, likely contributing to obesity. Cued eating is mediated by the amount of attention paid to food cues. This project will evaluate the effectiveness of attention modification training for sustained attention (AMT-S) to reduce attention to environmental food cues. Attention modification training has been shown to reduce attention to food cues, but previous studies have used training that may not generalize to everyday food cues. AMT-S more robustly alters attention by targeting neural attention networks, but it has not been tested with food cues. We will ask adolescents to complete eight sessions of at-home AMT-S and test their attention to food cues before and after the training. We will also evaluate whether a brief AMT-S flash task immediately before testing reduces attention to food cues over and above the effect of the home intervention. We expect that at-home AMT-S intervention will significantly reduce attention to environmental food cues and that a brief AMT-S flash task will further reduce attention to food cues. This research has implications in addressing a cognitive contributor to obesity. 

Project title: Characterizing the neural circuitry of fear renewal in rats 

Project description: The aim of this project is to determine, evaluate, and characterize the brain region responsible for renewal of extinguished fear. Anxiety disorders are extremely common, with lifetime prevalence of up to 25% in developed countries. Pharmaceutical treatments for these disorders are complicated by many side effects, and hence exposure therapy remains the first-line treatment. Exposure therapy gradually exposes patients to anxiety inducing stimuli to reduce their fear/anxiety response. The challenge here is that fear reduction (i.e., extinction) tends to be specific to the context where it occurred. This means that although fear/anxiety responses to triggering stimuli may effectively be reduced in a certain context (the therapist's office), fear will tend to return if the patient experiences the triggering stimuli in a different context (the zoo). The goals of this project are to (1) identify the brain region responsible for fear renewal using a c-fos activity assay, (2) evaluate the necessary role of this region by performing a lesion study, and (3) characterize the function of the region using fiber photometry technology. It is expected that this will help shed light on a way forward toward a potential treatment approach for anxiety and trauma related disorders.

Project title: Fighting for You: Boards of Directors and the Principle-Agent Problem

Project description: This project seeks to analyze econometrically and through interviews how different corporate board structures affect the performance of publicly-traded companies. Econometric work will be performed in STATA using datasets downloaded from the Wharton Research Data Services; this will be paired with evidence and anecdotes from 20-25 hour-long interviews with current and former public-company CEOs and board members. The current research literature into board governance is remarkably inconclusive and frequently lacking in depth. This is disappointing, given the great influence corporate boards have on the success and failure of major public companies (and how this affects their customers and employees). Professor Levin and I will soon contribute to this literature; we have analyzed a specific aspect of board governance' whether or not the CEO should also be chair of the board' and are publishing our findings later this spring. My proposed project greatly expands upon this previous project's scope and methods. The final product will be a 250-300 page book, targeted towards a well-educated but non-academic audience, that synthesizes the proposed project's key analytical and anecdotal findings.

Project Title: Tribes Within A State: The Jamaican Maroons and Afro-Indigenous Contestation of Slavery and Empire

Description: In blatant demonstrations of agency during the epoch of Atlantic Slavery, Africans throughout the Americas fled captivity and established independent communities. Europeans called these Africans Maroons. My project aims to advance the historical narrative concerning the Maroons of Jamaica during the 17^th and 18^th centuries, which is limited by its rendering of these groups as apolitical and anarchist runaway-slaves. I hold that historians must further examine how these Maroons drew inspiration from their respective polities in Africa for the development of their new societies in the Americas. Jamaica's Maroons are especially renowned for their tenacity in resisting slavery, which resulted in treaties between them and the British empire that recognize their sovereignty. Today, the Jamaican Maroons continue to stand strong in their autonomous existence, with many insisting on the importance of their African cultures in the course of their history.  The final product of my project will be a thesis that incorporates archival research as well as Maroon perspectives gained from interviews and experiences with Maroon people. Studies of maroonage correspond with efforts to encourage states to acknowledge the rights of Maroons as tribal-groups according to international law, allowing for the protection of their lands and the preservation of their cultures.

Project Title: Dora's Room: Digital Dreams

Description: With the information overload of the technological age, it is easy to value knowledge as power and dismiss feelings as weakness. As such, my project explores today's productive possibilities of weakness by way of feeling extreme desire. My project is named after the pseudonym of Freud's most famous hysteric patient, Dora. Freud analyzed her supposed extreme emotional and sensual desire over six months of treatment from 1900-1901 and published the results in "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" in 1905. Dora's Room is a text and physical installation that visualizes a space of the hyper-emotional. A sort of bedroom, the installation contains what a modern-day Dora reads, the music she hears, and the films she watches. The text element of my project is a book-length manuscript that conceptualizes hysteria as a genre and considers its social implications by performing close-readings of a selection of the aforementioned media that Dora consumes. I use Freud's case study as a jumping-off point for an aesthetic framework because of its use in feminist theory, and because of film and new media theorists' use of his cases to contextualize other technologies of the 20th century.

In short, I hope to invert Freud's diagnosis of hysteria and explore what extreme desire might reveal about modernity. In addition to psychoanalysis, I draw heavily from affect and feminist theory, including works by Eve Sedgwick and Heather Love. Because I am particularly interested in the implications of hysteria in the context of digitality, Kittler's new media theory is another guiding framework. Ultimately, my project has three main goals—(1) to consider the blind spots that exist in the focus of modern social feminism on empowerment, (2) understand the influence of psychoanalysis on American aesthetic culture, and (3) destigmatize the open expression of emotion.

Project Title: Time Out of Mind: Reclaiming the Context of Termination of Algonquian Tribes in Southern New England and Wisconsin

Description: My project is an examination of inconsistencies in the application of the laws and criteria of federal recognition and their apparent neglect of tribal historical contexts.  "Time out of Mind" frames the conversation as a case study on termination by contrasting the experiences of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin and the Narragansett Indian Tribe of Rhode Island.  Though both tribes underwent a process of termination in the nineteenth century, the Narragansett were granted recognition, whereas the Brothertown Nation's application was denied due to the severance of the federal relationship. While this is just one example of terminated tribes reaching different recognition outcomes, this case study offers a window into the confusing and inconsistent implementation of recognition laws while sketching a history of tribal termination and federal recognition.  

Project Title: Literary Advocacy: Constructing the Human in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Description: In my senior fellowship project on Frankenstein and the human, I propose to address the grand challenges of personhood, human rights, and environmental destruction.  Using a variety of research methods including archival research, travel, journalistic interviews, and textual analysis, I will build on long critical and artistic traditions of revising and returning to the novel. 

The enduring narrative of Frankenstein addresses many of the political and philosophical questions that confront humanity today, and this project is my chance to really drill deep into romantic history, literature and politics in search of fresh insights for the present.  I am not sure of exactly what I will eventually have to say about all of this, but I love the process of trying to synthesize literature, history, political science, environmental science and women, gender and sexuality, all within the crudely stitched together frames of advocacy and the human. 

Title: The Pharm Project

Description: The Pharm Project aims to develop a streamlined and simplistic extraction process for curcumin from turmeric, so that rural and underserved communities can essentially grow and make their own ibuprofen substitutes. The Pharm Project is grounded on recent clinical trials that have shown the efficacy of curcumin in reducing inflammation and other symptoms, so I myself will not be conducting any clinical aspect. The Pharm Project looks only at the extraction process and explores how it may be redesigned to be put into homes and ultimately change the relationship between patients and medicine. 

Project title: Three Fires Verbal Morphology and Grammatical Description: Implications for Potawatomi Pedagogy

Description: First, I would like to preface my description by saying, this project is not for the consumption of others or working to validate Potawatomi language and epistemology within a western academic framework; it is for my people. My project is rooted in an obligation to help preserve and revitalize my heritage language, Potawatomi. Potawatomi is an endangered Algonquian language in the Great Lakes region, and it is closely related to Ojibwe and Odawa. My project will have two parts: first, a comparative analysis of verbs in Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa and second, an outline of the Potawatomi grammar focusing on verbs. All of my research will transfer to pedagogy and other revitalization efforts as well. I will interact with my tribe's Language and Culture department to help create learning and teaching materials. Wéwéne.

Project title: Revolutionizing Philanthropy: Basil O'Connor's Crusade to End Polio

Description: My proposed Senior Fellowship project is to write a book entitled Revolutionizing Philanthropy: Basil O'Connor's Crusade to End Polio. Indeed, O'Connor, Dartmouth Class of 1912 and FDR's law partner, played a crucial, though forgotten, role in directing the polio elimination effort. As president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, O'Connor organized the first mass philanthropic crusade that relied on contributions from donors from all segments of society. Ultimately, I will argue that O'Connor's polio effort prompted a vast expansion of the federal government's role in providing healthcare and funding scientific research.