- Title of Project: Mapping Jewish Modernism
- Methodology: Archival research (Rare Books materials), the variety of approaches to literary study (mapping authors, mapping objects, mapping within works). The variety of approaches will facilitate the student considering how she/he/they prefer to engage literature and also the variety of ways literature is related to the world.
- Description of Topic: The student will investigate literature, modernism, and art, with a focus on Jewishness. Depending in part on the student's languages and interests, the student will explore the multiple ways that modern Jewish literature maps onto different locations around the world—from traveling characters in novels to migrating authors, international publication and translation practices, and holdings in archives and libraries around the world. With a special focus on items held in Rubenstein library, the student will conduct research and formulate research questions, considering the differences between scholarly work for a broader public, a research paper, and an annotated bibliography.
- In the first decades of the twentieth century, artists and authors reacted to various social, economic, technological, and political changes with new forms of creative expression, a global phenomenon that has been labeled modernism. The Mapping Jewish Modernism exhibit highlights the transnational, cross-cultural, and multilingual dimensions of Jewish modernism, which includes both Jewish authors and the role of Jewishness in modernist works. The exhibit includes some expected figures, such as Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Marc Chagall, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth, some famous but perhaps less expected ones, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Leonora Carrington, Jean Toomer, and Allen Ginsberg, and a range of other artists and authors who emphasize the variety of artistic work and movements — from Austria to Brazil, from Chicago to Birobidzhan, from Kyiv to New York City, from Ethiopia to Israel, from Russia to the United States — of Jewish modernism. Digital storymaps accompany the exhibit. The student’s research will contribute to this digital display.
- Title of Project: Exploring the Contested Terrain of the US National Parks
- Methodology: An introduction to historial method: Identification, assessment, and interpretation of primary and secondary sources, with the goal to analyze cause/consequence, change over time, and significance and meaning.
- Description of Topic: The US National Park Service (NPS) was established by a federal act on August 25, 1916, with the mission to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” The act expressed that people were considered visitors to the national parks and that these iconic places shuld remain pristine and largely devoid of human influence. This legislation blithely ignored the fact that native people had lived on these lands for hundreds, if not, thousands of years. These were not pristine lands, but places that had already been transformed. In the early years, only a few travelers ventured to the parks. In 2022, the NPS boasted that more than 310 million tourists visited US national parks. Tourism has brought much needed economic benefits to the areas around the parks, but has also created controversy and management problems. Critics argue that the original mission of the NPS is no longer valid, and that we are loving our parks to death. The focus of this study is to identify and analyze official NPS sources on annual tourism visits and economic development in order to assess some of the pros and cons of Eco-tourism to the national parks.
- Title of Project: Enduring Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the U.S.
- Methodology: Introduction to longitudinal study empirical methods/Theories on migration and entrepreneurial behavior
- Description of Topic: The new project will explore the experiences and outcomes for U.S. immigrant entrepreneurs in a comparative analysis to native-born U.S. entrepreneurs. While work on immigrant entrepreneurship has been done across other countries, studies have been more qualitative, anecdotal, and limited to small groups within a country. This project is meant to develop a richer empirical understanding of a larger panel based on merged data. The project is meant to offer insight into the contributions and challenges of immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. This project may contribute to developing a stream of works in the subject area.
- Title of Project: Concealed carry permits, gun purchases, and adverse gun outcomes
- Methodology: Conceptual understanding of OLS two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences regression and estimating such models using Stata; the relevant previous academic literature on causal estimates of gun prevalence effects; writing a first draft of an academic paper describing this research
- Description of Topic: While most rigorous empirical analysis finds that gun prevalence increases crimes committed with firearms and deaths caused by firearms, data limitations have forced reseachers to use constructs thought to be related as proxies for gun prevalence. This study is a novel application of recently compiled longitudinal data on concealed carry (CC) permits from 28 states to estimate for the first time, in models controlling for state and year fixed effects, the impact of CC permits, which by definition capture a subset of gun owners, on rates of gun-involved and overall suicide, homicide, and other violent crimes. In addition, relationships will be examined between CC permits and 1) General Social Survey measures of gun ownership at the Census division level, to validate the use of CC permits as a measure of gun prevalence, and 2) federal firearm background checks, to assess implications their relative scales have for previous research using background checks as a proxy for gun demand
- Title of Project: Mapping and Documenting Independent Comics in Durham
- Methodology: Oral history, using visual and/or graphic narrative methods for research
- Description of Topic: The goal of this project is to document the independent comics scene in Durham (moving out to include other areas in the Triangle if time allows). The student researcher will conduct oral history interviews with comics creators who self-publish comics, or publish with small presses, identifying key themes and mapping the creators’ networks of creative support, distribution, and exchange. Durham’s comics scene does not have the national profile of cities such as Chicago or Portland; but it does have a vibrant group of creators, supported by key spaces and institutions such as the Zine Machine printed matter festival (organized by Duke faculty member Bill Fick since 2015) and the Durham Public Libraries. This project feeds into a longer-term effort to create a permanent Graphic Narratives Lab at Duke, which would be committed to community engagement via visual storytelling. It documents Durham’s comics scene at a time when comics are embraced by a greater diversity of readers and creators than ever before; yet as the city grows and gentrifies, many artists are leaving and key venues (such as independent bookstores) are in a precarious state. The project will put special emphasis on having underrepresented comics creators, including Black, LGBTQ+, Latinx, and disabled cartoonists, tell their stories of living and making comics here. In addition to providing support in interview methods and secondary research, Prof. Rosenblatt will help develop creative methods to document the research. These might include creating a comic, zine, or narrative map based on the oral histories and other research.
- Title of Project: Researching Blackness in Art History: Who Were the Formative Black Art Historians?
- Methodology: Archival work including online and in-person. Academic writing. Discussions on shaping research by available information.
- Description of Topic: The Dictionary of Art Historians, www.arthistorians.info, is currently embarked on a project to identify and document early or seminal art historians teaching the history of black art or who mentored future historians in that area. The research timespan is 1900-1970. The student will comb through literature or make contact with archives of relevant institutions. A biographical entry on the historian will be written by the student in the Dictionary. The student's name will be associated with the entry permanently on the open-source website.
- Title of Project: The psychology of religion and compassion for human suffering (Empirical approach)
- Methodology: Empirical methods including surveys and behavioral tasks; Social Psychology
- Description of Topic: Compassion, the ability to comprehend, share, and be concerned about another person’s emotions, is often regarded as a virtue that promotes altruistic behavior and fosters a peaceful society. Nevertheless, experiencing compassion is not a straightforward process. This research project aims to enhance our comprehension of the factors that encourage compassion. We contend that religion provides the teachings and experiences necessary for individuals to overcome typical impediments to compassion. The student will be involved in this ongoing project. We already have collected across multiple studies and will involve the student in new data collection. Student will be involved in brainstorming meetings to discuss the current state of the research and the needed next steps, preparing qualtrics surveys and materials, testing and potentially administering surveys, and light data cleaning work.
- Title of Project: Digital Resource: Science on Stage
- Methodology: Dramaturgy, Historiography, Textual Analysis, Writing for the general public, Disciplinary Writing
- Description of Topic: I'm pulling together bodies of research around plays/theater performances that take medicine and climate change as their key topic. Some of these have been created in collaboration with scientific researchers; some are entirely artist created; some have been created in collaboration with patient communities and communities under specific threat from climate change. The work of the summer is to investigate the playtexts and their reception to then categorize, summarize, and theorize about how they might be kept in a digital repository to be used in both science and theater classrooms for educating on their scientific topics as well as their formal properties and construction.
- Title of Project: Identity, Gesture, and Learning
- Methodology: coding nonverbal and verbal behaviors from children and parents, literature reviews, data cleaning and analysis, oral presentation skills, diverse recruitment approaches
- Description of Topic: We have a few studies broadly focused on identity development pathways in children. Thus, all projects will likely involve training in recruiting diverse and representative families from local community organizations and events (e.g., Museum of Life and Science, Southpoint Mall, etc.). One study will also ask research assistants to code from video recorded sessions for child and parent behaviors that are linked to a museum-based intervention we will run in the spring term to boost "science" identities in children. Another study will ask research assistants to work on literature reviews and data analysis and potential data collection for a project looking at how gesture boosts children's learning. The last study will involve learning to program and run a new study examining how reminding children of their multiple identities boosts flexible thinking outcomes.
- Title of Project: Developing Discreet Muscle Awareness and Control for Singing
- Methodology: Qualitative Analysis
- Description of Topic: This research aims to foster a shift in the training of singing voices. Voice teachers often learned how to sing in a rather subjective way – all instruction had the sole aim of being able to use our own personal instrument more effectively. At some point in graduate school, we learned some basic anatomy and read writings by prominent vocal pedagogues. Perhaps we observed other voice teachers and gained some insight from these experiences. Yet how often did we explore and apply the ideas and understanding generated in other fields that might have a profound impact on our endeavor? The specific umbrella question asked here is what we, as voice teachers, can learn from other disciplines regarding the development of discreet muscle awareness and control. A cross-disciplinary investigation of this larger question will be conducted in the fields of psychology, neurology, vocology, voice pedagogy, sports medicine, speech language pathology and cognitive behavioral therapy. This information will be distilled/ summarized and presented first in terms of general information, and then investigated/applied in detail with a (sample) technical obstacle singers of all levels grapple with: tongue root tension.
- Title of Project: Intervention Study with High School Students At-Risk of Dropout and Mental Health Issues
- Methodology: Basics of Intervention Science (theory and research related to the intervention content; intervention design; various methodologies, such as interviewing, surveys, observations, fMRI brain data, EMA; IRB application; adolescent development; participant recruitment; program facilitator training, including attention to EDI; understanding of underserved populations; program implementation, and evaluation).
- Description of Topic: The student can engage in all aspects of an intervention study for students considered at-risk of dropping out. The program is a 6-week long, goal-setting, metacognitive skills, resilience-building program. Students are typically low-income, under-resourced minority youth. We are interested in the impact of structural racism on mental health and well-being, among other research questions. We collect brain data also, where an undergraduate student can learn about fMRI data collection.
- Title of Project: Structural Racism and Population Health
- Methodology: Data management and theories of racism
- Description of Topic: The student would be working with a group of scholars in sociology, demography, and public health (including faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars) measuring structural racism in different ways and linking to multiple measures of health and well-being in the United States. There is usually a weekly lab meeting on zoom. The student would likely have a choice of project to work on but would likely be working on data gathering and literature reviews related to the topic.
- Title of Project: Increasing access to mental health services: using community-based participatory research (CBPR) to adapt a family-based mental health intervention for Latinx families
- Methodology: Community-based participatory research: to ensure interventions are attuned to individuals and responsive to stressors in their lives and environments, community-based participatory research engages with the target population to center their voices in the research process.
- Description of Topic: Latinx immigrants experience worse mental health and treatment outcomes than white individuals due to myriad stressors they face related to their immigrant experience and structural oppression perpetuated by US systems. The adaptation of Coping Together, an evidence-based family mental health intervention, for Latinx families attempts to address this disparity in mental health outcomes and increase access to mental health services. Through this project, you will learn about methods to design a community-driven and evidence-based intervention adaptation by supporting the cultural adaptation of Coping Together. You will learn how collaborations with local community partners helped inform culturally-relevant adaptations. We will also gather community input about the adapted intervention, and you will have the opportunity to support the analysis of this feedback as well as implement revisions to the adapted intervention. In addition to these components, you will learn how to adapt intervention measurements and outcomes to reflect both evidence-based practices and community-desired outcomes. Towards the end of your fellowship, you will have the opportunity to support preparation for intervention prototyping and delivery. In addition to community-based participatory research (CBPR) practices, other methods used in this project include human-centered design principles, qualitative analysis, measurement and evaluation, and more. Should you have interest in pairing CBPR practices with any of the aforementioned methods, you will be supported in learning about and integrating them into your personal project.
- Title of Project: Memory for Movement: How Dancers Learn & Remember
- Methodology: Conduct memory experiments, code data, graph results. Examine many factors that affect memory for movement in any setting.
- Description of Topic: Dancers have excellent memory -- they can learn and remember long sequences of movement. How do they do it? We will examine several factors, such as the role of naming movements. Do dancers have excellent memory in general, or just for dance? We will conduct experiments with elite dancers at the American Dance Festival -- and ask them to learn sequences of numbers, words, and simple arm gestures, as well as dance movements. We will also examine how members of professional dance companies learn and remember.
- Title of Project: The "Chinese Family Romance" Project
- Methodology: literary studies; archival research; oral history methodology; cultural studies/critical humanities approach to study of Chinese studies
- Description of Topic: In his 1909 essay “Family Romances,” Freud argued for the widespread existence among neurotics of a fable that one’s present-day parents might be imposters, with one’s true parents elsewhere. While Freud’s evidentiary claims might be disputed, "the family romance" as such remains a important provocation to think on how at the very core of family lies an act of the child’s imagination, rather than a priori blood ties or parental authority. This is a book project that builds from both papers produced from both a seminar (Duke Spring 2024) and from an ongoing workshop series (Harvard China Gender Studies Workshop, spring 23, spring 24). Topics of projects: Chinese “familial” genres and forms (memoir, biography, fiction), the Family Saga in Sinophone and world literary traditions (The Dream of the Red Chamber), scientific discourses of genetics and bloodlines, the history of the State as ‘Family,’ queer romance and queer futurities, bio-politics and the global Sinosphere.