Category: Graduate Student Residents 2021Page 1 of 4
For as long as I can remember I have found peace in libraries. Just the idea of them makes me smile. My earliest memory of being in a…
No, it wasn’t the real Magic School Bus from the books and TV. But one of my most poignant humanities moments did happen on a bus. And I…
– Alexis Lygoumenos (PhD student, actress under the stage name Alexis Nichols)
In the final days of 2020 I, like many others, was feeling disconnected. Disconnected from my friends, my passions, and even myself. As a part of my research…
While a double major in Biology and Studio Art at Colgate University, a predominantly-white university in Upstate New York, my coursework provided challenging STEM curricula and liberal arts…
People frequently talk about being haunted. Usually by spirits, both by the friendly Casper types and the decidedly less friendly Poltergeist types. Sometimes people are haunted by bad…
I first encountered Richard Wright’s Native Son from an admittedly privileged point of view. I included it as part of the comprehensive exams required for my PhD in…
As someone with a profound interest in and curiosity about death culture, I was very excited when visiting family last summer I had the opportunity to visit several…
This is an image drawn by an unschooled refugee child living in a camp in the outskirts of Chtoura, Lebanon. She is from Syria but has lived in…
I have always loved space. This love is why I earned an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering. Fittingly, stargazing with friends was one of my favorite, albeit infrequent,…
Late this spring, my foster dog Sally unexpectedly died. I should’ve known she had cancer, but I not a veterinarian, and I didn’t think to apply Occam’s razor…
I rented Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals from the library, at a time in my life when I was searching inwards and exploring my beliefs. I would listen…
In the Fall of 2016, I started putting together application materials to begin my Masters program. I had so much anxiety going into the process and a lot…
My humanities moment happened when I read a book for school written in the form of a diary. Even though it was fiction, it showed me how diaries…
It’s time now My time now Give me my, Give me my, Wings Having grown up in a particularly religious family, one that didn’t encourage listening to rock…
Latinoamerica is a song from Calle 13. When I first heard this song I realized how important music is for identity in the construction of culture itself. Back…
A note I wrote from April 16, 2020 From my dining room table: My two children, ages four and six, have now been at home for 35 days….
There she was. Powerful and maternal, she claimed her place at the head of her family, teaching from an open book while her husbands slept elsewhere. We finally…
In the middle of the Atacama desert there’s a small village called La Tirana, with a regular population of around 1,200 inhabitants. The village has a few streets,…
Sometimes I wish I could say that a great novel or an experience with an especially gifted teacher or professor lit a spark for the humanities in me….