Humanities & Arts

It is an honor to be selected as a Visiting Student Researcher by the France Stanford Center and to carry out my research in technology and music at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustic/Music, the worldʼs largest research center dedicated to both musical expression and scientific research in Paris. This research will allow me the opportunity to acquire real, technical  autonomy with a number of computer programs on IRCAM software such as Max, OpenMusic, Modalys, AudioSculpt, and Spat.

Our project focuses on clerical celibacy in its medieval context—the celibacy rulings of the eleventh century and their Carolingian precedents—examining the implications of celibacy not just for priests (as others have done), but for women, and particularly for priests’ wives. In these linked workshops, we examine the celibacy movement from a gendered standpoint, investigating the effects on medieval communities and families of the movement to eliminate priests’ wives.

In the last century, major breakthroughs in our understanding of ‘identity’ have changed the way that we think about ourselves and the world around us. In the Humanities, fields such as Race and Ethnicity Studies, Gender Studies, History, and Literary Studies have taught us to think of who we are and how we identify ourselves from an intersectional, multicultural, and interspecies viewpoint.

We live in an age of racial, ethnic and religious tension. Our project produces an alternative narrative by asking why people cross religious boundaries, what social and cultural imaginaries make this possible, and what possible futures do these shared spaces suggest?

For this project, I will work on late medieval law in France and in Europe. Part of my time will be spent revising the metadata for a digital map of the dioceses of medieval Europe, to be published in the fall. This will aid the progression of Professor Dorin’s broader project on resistance in medieval canon law, a collaborative effort with French colleagues that has already received support from the France-Stanford Center. I will also carry further the research done for my honors thesis, with an eye to future publication.

I am going to be conducting extensive research across visual culture to identify the principal currents in the visual arts during the 1960s in Paris including French new wave cinema and nouveau réalisme. I will be analyzing the effect the riots of May ’68 and French interest in Indo-China had on visual culture. Questions I will be answering include: how did this compare and contrast with that was happening in New York with the abstract expressionist movement? What was the impact on galleries and the overall market in Paris?

During my research project, I will build a database of all Macron's presidential discourses since May 7th, 2017 for future text mining and political communication analysis. This will include retrieving, cleaning up and indexing texts from various official sources, drafting the metadata of all files and identifying every discourse addressed to the French public, including videos which will be later transcribed into texts.

My research project looks at a new and untapped archive at the Cité internationale Universitaire, an international residential campus in the Parisian outskirts.

This project confronts a collection of untapped sources about Renaissance feasting. Focusing on a banquet that took place in Tours, France in 1457, we want to deepen our understanding of Renaissance cooking techniques while investigating how food and feasting intersected with diplomacy, politics, music, dance, art, theater, religion, science, and medicine. Our focus is a fifteenth-century banquet whose source material is unusually extensive and strangely understudied.