Mike Albertson  L. Clark Seelye Professor, Mathematics & Statistics Examining questions of graph theory flavored with discrete geometry, but instead of looking for patterns or symmetries in families of graphs, seeking efficient ways to break those patterns or symmetries. Also interested in exploring which problems in symmetry breaking the mathematics community should look at next and why.

Lisa Armstrong, Organizing Fellow,  Assistant Professor, Study of Women & Gender
Her project focuses on the orderly disruption of globalization, a process often described in evolutionary terms of progressive development. She draws on extensive interviews she has conducted with members and leaders of the All India Democratic Women's Association, a left wing women's organization in India with over ten million members.  This project asks what a feminist internationalism looks like in our current context, and unearths other economic, social and political possibilities for transnational collaboration of women and men.

Julia Baker ‘09, Biochemistry
Focusing on the role that mathematics has played in the study of cancer, with a particular interest in the use of fractal patterns and chaos theory in the visualization of tumor growth and the understanding of carcinogenesis.

Debra Boutin,  Associate Professor, Mathematics, Hamilton College
I am studying the determining set, a (hopefully small) set of nodes that captures all the symmetries in a network. I then use the determining set to find ways to introduce both order and disorder into the network.

Olivia Cummings ‘09,  American Studies
Studying the mobilization of race in Emma Goldman’s life and work in the context of immigrant anarchism in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Her research will locate Goldman as a Jew, as a working-class Eastern European immigrant, and as an anarchist within the unstable racial order during this historical moment, and explore the ways in which Goldman addresses and avoids race in her autobiography, lectures and speeches. She will discuss the consequential disorder that Goldman’s activism and discourse (as representative of her movement) continues to have on racial solidarity in leftist movements.

Emma Ensign ’10,  Anthropology
Studying the impact of the global arms trade and the policy of disarmament on the Sudanese civil war and the implications of disarmament for the subsequent post-conflict development of Southern Sudan.

Jennifer Guglielmo,  Assistant Professor, History
Studying the lives of women who left a world of disorder in southern Italy (poverty, landlessness, the violence of nation-state building, labor exploitation, sexualized oppression) at the turn of the last century, to enter into a world of even more intense disorder—modern industrializing urban America. Her focus includes the range of activisms they developed in response, including anarchism, fascism, and industrial unionism, all of which grapped with order/disorder.

Molly Hamer ’10,  English
Investigating how the “sensation” novels of British author Wilkie Collins engaged with social questions of the 1860s and 70s, particularly those related to the role of women in Victorian society.

Naho Hashimoto ‘10J, Anthropology
Studying sub-social and sub-cultural groups in Japan, especially hikikomori and ganguro. How does the public perceive these groups? Why are certain groups seen as disorderly while others are not? How do public perceptions influence attitudes toward these groups as well as the public policy making? Based around these questions, I aim to identify particular social and cultural features that affect perceptual categorization of the sub-social and sub-cultural groups in Japan.

Gillian Kendall,  Associate Professor, English Language & Literature
I’m looking at revels, plays, and masques, all contained within Renaissance dramas (especially Shakespeare’s), to examine the ways in which these thoughtful constructs of characters leak radical disorder into the plays they inhabit.  In so doing, these spectacles undermine the dreams of order enfolded in the end of Renaissance dramas—even in Shakespeare’s comedies—and reveal the inherent instability of the human condition.

Reyes Lázaro,  Associate Professor, Spanish & Portuguese
Exploring why an infinite number of versions of Don Juan, a quintessential conqueror and enemy of established orders, were written in post-imperial Spain (after 1898), and how Latin American parodies of the myth contribute to dismantle colonial order.

Hannah Leung ‘09,  American Studies
In lieu of September 11th, how are recent films that represent the destruction of New York City received, by both the general public and critics? What are the effects of seeing repeated images of destruction; does our spectatorship cheapen or enrich our understanding of “the day that changed the world?"

Sandra Matthews,  Associate Professor, Film & Photography, Hampshire College
I am constructing a series of images using photographic collage, a process which involves taking elements out of their contexts and combining them to make a new order.

Albert Mosley,  Professor, Philosophy
Examining epidemiological causation and its relationship to the biomedical sciences through a critical review of John Dupre’s The Disorder of Things, other works by authors from the so-called “Stanford” school of the philosophy of science, and recent literature on epidemiological causation.

Jeanette Quinn AC ‘09,  Anthropology, Psychology
My research is concerned with investigating the effects of medicalizing the traumatic experiences of combat veterans, specifically with regards to the diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  In what ways does medicalizing such responses to traumatic experiences alleviate suffering?  In what ways does this approach alienate those who are in most need of assistance?

Donna Riley,  Associate Professor, Engineering
Linking disruptions of classroom power relations brought about by liberative pedagogies with the disruptions of power brought about by entropy's challenge to the thematic content of science, in order to create a new content and pedagogy in thermodynamics responsive to 21st century energy problems, and challenging both traditional engineering education and current energy technology policy.

Marjorie Senechal, Organizing Fellow, Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita, Mathematics
My Kahn project, a critique of the meaning and role of symmetry in the sciences, is a theme in the book I’m writing about Dorothy Wrinch (1894 – 1976), a controversial British mathematician/scientist whose work knew no boundaries.  Wrinch saw symmetry as a blueprint for mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology. But does symmetry really unify these fields? Or does it divide them? As she discovered, the word means very different things to mathematicians, chemists, physicists, and biologists. One can even ask, and I do, whether it means anything at all.

Anna White-Nockleby ‘09,  History
I’m examining the representations of an incident termed the “Lobo-Cabernite affair.” In this case, a psychoanalyst in Brazil was reported to be a government-employed torturer. Rather than investigating the case, psychoanalytic institutions turned against the informant. Do these narratives challenge the claims of order promulgated by psychoanalytic institutions? Or does the focus on this case actually re-order notions of ethics in psychoanalysis after periods of social trauma?

Lillian Wilson ‘10,  Engineering
Researching the influence of anarchism on hoboes and tramps in the early 20th century and examining whether this connection, if there is one, still exists in some way today.

Emily Wolfe Roubatis ‘09,  Study of Women & Gender A look at how women's bodies have been used for state purposes in three case studies.  The first involves the creation of a family planning program in Tunisia.  The second looks at the US led push for contraceptive pill trials in Puerto Rico. And the Third involves examining the role of women's bodies in war.  I am interested to see how these campaigns, which completely disorder a woman's life, were made to look orderly and "in women's best interests."