Honors in the Arts Cohort 2017-18

SOJOURNER AHEBEE | GET ME BODIED: Shadow-Making, Disembodiment & Black Femme Outlawry

BA Comparative Literature

My poetry collection seeks to explore and re-contextualize the ways in which performances and expressions of black femininity are functioning and responding to the nation's relentless exteriorization and materialization of black women, its violent assertion that black women are indeed the mule of the world.

I'll pay particular attention to Black-American performances of femininity from the 19th century to the contemporary period. The collection is most interested in Sojourner Truth's cartes de visite and the ways in which Truth's project of disembodiment -- namely through the de-materiality and withholding of knitting and labor in her photographs -- mediate and block access to the black, female form. Furthermore, how does her project of disembodiment work to renegotiate the value of black women's labor, de-materializes race while simultaneously using matter to make claims about and act on the black women's desires, which thrive most powerfully when not in view?

My poems will attempt to locate where and how Truth re-materializes or re-embodies when she is not preoccupied with the labor the nation has imagined for her. What does Truth's labor of desire look like, and what becomes possible when she and other black women can name and manifest their deepest desires?

IBRAHIM BHARMAL | If Not Me, Then You

BA Comparative Literature and International Relations, Minor in Human Rights

Project Statement

Creating a double-voiced text of creative nonfiction, my project focuses on Ismael, one of nine children growing up in a household run by older siblings and stretched resources, and Munira, the only child and the jewel of her mother and father's eyes. She dreams of showing the world to her parents and, as her father implores, "to become something." In Karachi, Pakistan they grow up in different worlds yet America brings the two together for one goal: to create a better future for their family. Ismail and Munira also happen to be my parents.

In this story of migration, identity, and race, If Not Me, Then You cracks open the Muslim-American immigrant experience. Readers follow Ismail and Munira as they reconcile their stark backgrounds and attempt to together create a world made new.

MADELYN BOSLOUGH | The Last Place

BS Electrical Engineering

Project Statement

The Last Place is a novel about two young people awakening to the realities of climate change and the tangled ways in which it connects all of humanity. Tommy, a fifteen-year-old from the urban world of San Francisco, finds himself suddenly exiled to a tiny town in northwestern Alaska for the summer to live with his estranged Uncle Zach. A passionate climatologist, Zach's work and intent have always been misunderstood by the local community and his family, and he is eager to prove himself to Tommy and the town.

Tommy slowly comes to terms with his exile as he befriends Tana, a refugee of rising northern seas that forced her even smaller Arctic village to relocate, and her community to scatter. Together they set forth to stop the opening of a mine near the town where Tana and Tommy's uncle live, believing that only they can clearly see its impact.

MEGAN CALFAS | Shelter

BA English - Creative Writing Concentration, Minor in Theater and Performance Studies

Project Statement

After a fire, a New York church opens its doors and houses six people for one night. Over the course of two days, they grapple with their losses and their differences. Shelter is a full-length play tackling the uncertainties and manifestations of belief in everyday life. Within the show, belief takes many different forms: religion, career, tradition, imagination, and identity. Children and adults alike adjust their views and expectations as new perspectives and realities are revealed to them in small, personal moments. Characters in this show have been constructed through personal interviews and academic research in philosophy, English, psychology, religious studies, and history. Shelter will culminate in a staged reading.

TYLER DUNSTON | Greyfriars

BA English, Minor in Art Practice

Project Statement

Last year, I looked at the Rodin sculpture Fallen Caryatid with Urn closely, and it struck me as a visual representation of grief. The figure’s body contorts painfully under the weight of the urn, which rests between her neck and shoulder. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about this sculpture, which has led me to consider grief’s relationship to various art forms, particularly visual art and poetry. Drawing on my skills as an artist and a writer, I am creating an illustrated novel documenting two characters’ experiences of a friend’s death. I have created drawings, paintings, and photographs and interspersed them throughout the novel. I wanted to create a work in which the experience of grief goes beyond a single genre—the work as a result combines prose, poetry, and visual art. By synthesizing these forms within the work, I hope to explore the multivalent layers of the experience of grief, as well as the form of the novel, in a new way.

KENDALL HOFFMAN | Run Home to Me

BA English - Creative Writing Concentration

Project Statement

As a queer person, I grew up under the impression that my history was recent, minimal, and always difficult. This was the narrative reflected in our suspicious absence from textbooks and our ubiquitous tragedy in fiction. My frustration led to my honors project, Run Home to Me, a queer novel set in a small Brooklyn neighborhood between 1929 and 1945. The aim of my novel is to explore aspects of queer life that are rarely depicted in fiction—quieter moments, and hopeful ones. It aims also to show the ways in which queer life was already thriving in New York by the 1920s, through the beginning of the post-war period.

Although Run Home to Me includes a broad cast of queer characters, it focuses most centrally on the love story between two best friends as they meet, grow up together, and fall in love—Teddy Reid, Brooklyn-born to an Italian mother and American Jewish father, and Ben MacNeil, recently immigrated from Ireland with his now-single mother. Run Home to Me explores the ways in which queer people interact with the families into which we are born, as well as the families we choose.

MIA HOOVER | Color in the Lines

BA English - Creative Writing Concentration

Project Statement

My novel explores the complexities of the phenomenon of colorism by weaving together narratives of two black siblings named Joy and Anthony. Joy, 16, is lighter-skinned than Anthony, 13, and together they must confront the consequences of colorism as their mother, Sarah, begins a relationship with Brian, a light-skinned man, after their darker-skinned father's death. Colorism, which emerged from the preferential treatment given to children born of white masters and black slaves, is one of the most enduring legacies of the history of slavery. Through the unique pain and joy of family bonds, my novel grapples with the complex and pervasive role colorism plays in contemporary black life.

SAMUEL MIGNOT | Punc.

BAS Computer Science + English

Project Statement

Punc. is an experimental novel about Aldo Argossé, an author who dismisses punctuation as a fascistic and irritatingly objective system in a world where ambiguity is both beauty and art. He has decided to stop using all of them: ., :, ;, ,, ', --, ", etc..

Aldo writes a book devoid of punctuation called Punc, which follows the development of language in a prehistoric society. When the book is finished Aldo's characters, imbued with freewill by the inherent ambiguity of his text, come to life.

My novel concurrently tells the lives of both Aldo and his characters as they write and rewrite the same story—entangled and disentangled. It captures the correspondence and disagreements that grow between them across the sheets of paper that they share.

The final result will be a bound double-printed, physical book. It will be printed once with regular black ink (representing Aldo’s writings) and once with red photochromatic ink--ink that appears/disappears dependent on exposure to light (representing the edits and narrative that his characters create).

PHOEBE OATHOUT | I'll Be a Better Daughter

BA English - Creative Writing Concentration, Minor in Philosophy

Project Statement

My honors project is a novel about queer motherhood, Silicon Valley, and the stakes surrounding an individual's claim to an identity. The story is voiced by two characters at different times, a transgender woman participating in Stanford's Gender Dysphoria Program in the 1970s and an android in Woodside, California attempting to pass as human in the near-future. Both characters experience a reality where they are dehumanized based on the makeup of their bodies, while the novel is interested in what survival mechanisms they exploit for both their physical and mental well-being. As a transfeminist, the makeup of identity and how we negotiate it with the world around us are issues I am interested in.

TORI TESTA | Bang!

BA English - Creative Writing Concentration

Project Statement

“If you have sex, you will get pregnant and die.” While this Mean Girls quote pokes fun at the extremes of sex ed, the real state of sexual health education in America is no laughing matter. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only half of the fifty states require sex education and even fewer mandate that the information provided be medically accurate. Sexual health curriculum is failing to equip adolescents with appropriate and accurate information about their bodies, their health, and their sexual agency. Bang! is a pseudo-memoir and sexual health comic that hopes to change that. My piece uses the comic form to entertain and educate a young adult audience as they navigate a world of misinformation about this taboo topic. In Bang!, I explore my own experiences with sexual health education and present inclusive frameworks that will serve as a manual for middle and high school students that I wish I had growing up.

RACHEL ZILBERG | The Disorder

BA Psychology, Minor in Creative Writing

Project Statement

An inter-dimensional traveler has careened into a foreign world. The inhabitants of this world believe the traveler is psychologically unsound because they have never encountered anything like a human being before. However, what designates mental illness to this alien world seems to include many natural aspects of healthy human behavior, leaving the traveler unsure how to navigate interactions while maintaining their identity.

And so begins The Disorder, an online roleplaying game. In this interactive textual exploration of psychological diagnoses’ fraught relationship to lived cultural context, the reader plays as the traveler, making choices on how to interact with various alien psychologists and citizens. Through these choices, the reader must try to convince this new world to see outside its own walls, and to recognize that the traveler’s pain might be a product of circumstances instead of pathology.

Team Projects

HANNAH LEVY and MADELEINE WEISS | Being With

Hannah Levy: BA Psychology, Minor in Dance

Madeleine Weiss: BA Human Biology, Minor in Theater and Performance Studies

Project Statement

Being With is a modern dance piece inspired by first-hand interviews with patients and healthcare providers on the role of empathy in the patient-provider relationship. It is the choreography of everyday life and interpersonal relationships that inspired our movement. A handshake. A look. An embrace. Drawing on documentary theater techniques, we created the sound score with the voices of our interviewees who graciously shared their lived experiences. As aspiring clinicians, we have spent quite some time discussing how we can best serve our patients.

Considering how the majority of communication between two individuals in a relationship is non-verbal, we found ourselves at the intersection of our two fields of study: dance and psychology. We both agreed that among the most important factors is the knowledge that clinical encounters are often situations in which people find themselves the most vulnerable. As dancer-choreographers, we empathize with our interviewees as we perform and we, in turn, invite the audience to join us in this empathetic relationship. There are elements in all of us that are patients, providers and dancers. As our audience shares the experience of watching this piece, the boundaries separating each of these three roles begin to blur.

SPENCER SLOVIC and BELLA LEVAGGI | The Ocean + the Avenue

Spencer Slovic: BA Film and Media Studies, Minor in Comparative Literature

Bella Levaggi: BA English, Minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Project Statement

The Ocean + the Avenue is a short film about the city of San Francisco. Told from the point of view of two outsiders to the city in their late teens, the film explores how the symbolic force of the city collides with the reality of a place shaped by immigrant communities, gentrification, and migratory queerness. JJ, a disillusioned young man working at a tech start-up, and Zoe, an impulsive young woman from Nebraska trying to track down her half-sister, are strangers thrown together en route to their respective Pacifics: Pacific Avenue and the Pacific Ocean, both of which are idealized endpoints for these two dreamers. Our film, which draws on the support of other students for acting and music, experiments with imagery, the linearity of narrative, and sonic landscapes in an attempt to make the viewer’s experience mirror that of the film’s meandering, displaced, curious and imaginative characters.