2023 Winners

Winners of the 2023 Library Research Award for Undergraduates

Grand Prize: Upper Division Thesis


Janick Gold

Advisor: Terri DeYoung

Project Title: Marx and Engels on the Procrustean Bed: Translating The Communist Manifesto in 1970s Beirut

Description: Within three years in the early 1970s, two new Arabic translations of The Communist Manifesto appeared in Beirut. The translations were part of a much larger project undertaken by the city’s publishing houses of introducing Marxist modes of analysis to the Arabic public sphere. The result, Ahmad Agbaria writes, was the appearance “of a wholly ‘new Marx.’” Who was this “new Marx”? He represents, I argue, not only a break from the “old Marxes”—of the Soviet and European types—but the renunciation of an “original” Marx altogether. This new Marx was constituted by a “double anchoring” of oppositional or subversive thought developed outside of the Arab world and its mediation with new “Arabic languages of the present.” Finally, while he was perhaps a common dream of the New Arab Left, he was not an uncontested figure. His translators approached him with such urgency because they recognized the stakes involved.

Kaitlyn Laibe

Kaitlyn Laibe

Advisor: Katherine Beckett

Project Title: Hopeful: An examination of incarcerated people's experience learning of unexpected early release

Description: In the wake of federal decisions challenging the constitutionality of life sentences, Washington State enacted a variety of legal pathways towards early release. This study explores how learning of the possibility of early release affected incarcerated individuals who previously did not expect to be released from prison. Qualitative interview data from 12 individuals who secured early release from Washington State prisons resulted in three key findings. First, for every participant, learning of early release created hope. Second, the hope that early release generates is tempered by institutional factors outside of the individual’s control, such as correctional staff intentionally administering infractions to disqualify individuals from early release process(es). Thirdly, although tempered hope results in a “hope for the best, expect the worst” mentality, hope positively impacts an individual’s trajectory, engagement, and behavior in prison. This research illuminates the importance of creating realistic early release mechanisms and allowing hope to flourish.

Teng-Jui Lin

Teng-Jui Lin

Advisor: Elizabeth Nance

Project Title: Quantifying Microglia Morphological Response to Injury and Treatment Across Species with Unsupervised Machine Learning

Description: Microglia, the brain’s immune cells, change morphology in response to neuroinflammation and therapeutics. However, we lack robust and high-throughput software for quantitative morphological analysis to understand microglia’s reactivity to neuroinflammation. I optimized an image-based morphological analysis method based on unsupervised machine learning in Python to cluster microglia into shape modes. I applied the method to images from ex vivo rat and ferret brain slice models that induce neuroinflammation. The determined shape modes capture regional variation and injury and treatment response of microglia morphology in both animal models. By quantifying and linking microglia’s morphological response to neuroinflammation and functional states across conditions, our method enables non-destructive assessment of microglial reactivity to inflammation and therapeutic performance across disease models.


Grand Prize: Upper Division Non-Thesis


Grand Prize: Lower Division


Honorable Mention: Upper Division Thesis

Sarah McDaniel

Sarah McDaniel

Advisor: Margaret O'Mara

Project Title: In the Shadow of the Goddess: The Legacy of Sir Arthur Evans and the Interpretation of Minoan Religion

Description: The work of British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941) has left a lasting impact on modern conceptions of the Minoan civilization. Recent scholarship however has begun to scrutinize the conceptual frameworks and intellectual agendas that drove his work, arguing his interpretations were shaped by his goal of asserting Minoan Crete as ‘European.’ This paper reveals the legacy of Evans’s work through a survey of the scholarship as well as introductory and public works to provide insight into the ways his work continues to impact modern conceptions. Exploring Evans’s background and writings reveals the Eurocentric and imperial narratives that influence his work, and a survey of the historiography in the century that follows reveals the continued legacy of his narratives. Furthermore, an examination of introductory texts and sources, such as those utilized in education and spaces of public history, illuminates the ways sources perpetuate Evans’s narratives and frameworks.

Melinda Whalen

Melinda Whalen

Advisor: Glennys Young

Project Title: Motherhood, Love, and the Self in the Soviet Novel: Religious Reconstructions of Female Young Adult Identity in Postwar Novels (1945-1990)

Description: "This project uses the lens of female young adults in novels to examine the war’s lingering impact and the destabilization of socialist identity conceptions during the postwar period. It pays special attention to women’s identity as explored through their engagement with religious conceptualizations of gender and the family unit. These issues of identity are examined through the young female protagonists in the novels Picture in the Teacup (1986) by Dina Kalinovskaya and Redemption (1984) by Friedrich Gorenstein. Both Kalinovskaya’s Serafima and Gorenstein’s Sashenka confront religious and socialist constructions of female identity during their constant movements between the child and the adult, the woman and the non-woman, and the perceived roles of the mother. This paper analyzes the linguistic nuances in both the translated English and original Russian versions of the texts, emphasizing how these authors used religious-coded language and constructs to implicitly critique the Soviet system and socialist culture."


Honorable Mention: Upper Division Non-Thesis


Honorable Mention: Lower Division


Population Health Award

Kaitlyn Laibe

Kaitlyn Laibe

Advisor: Katherine Beckett

Project Title: Hopeful: An examination of incarcerated people's experience learning of unexpected early release

Description: In the wake of federal decisions challenging the constitutionality of life sentences, Washington State enacted a variety of legal pathways towards early release. This study explores how learning of the possibility of early release affected incarcerated individuals who previously did not expect to be released from prison. Qualitative interview data from 12 individuals who secured early release from Washington State prisons resulted in three key findings. First, for every participant, learning of early release created hope. Second, the hope that early release generates is tempered by institutional factors outside of the individual’s control, such as correctional staff intentionally administering infractions to disqualify individuals from early release process(es). Thirdly, although tempered hope results in a “hope for the best, expect the worst” mentality, hope positively impacts an individual’s trajectory, engagement, and behavior in prison. This research illuminates the importance of creating realistic early release mechanisms and allowing hope to flourish.

Carolina de Barros Antonucci

Carolina de Barros Antonucci

Advisor: Misha Mariam

Project Title: Motivation in Non-Profit Organization Workers

Description: Our topic of evaluating motivation and commitment in non-profit organizations relates to population health because we examine the mental health and general well-being of workers following the pandemic. Many non-profit workers do not receive attractive salaries or in some cases, any salary at all.

The lack of adequate financial compensation despite significant work demands can contribute to employee stress and burnout, which can have a negative impact on mental health. Therefore, it's crucial for non-profit organizations to provide a supportive work environment and address the factors that adversely affect mental health.

Our study focuses on the effects of the pandemic-related pressures on employee behaviors and uncovers that while several forms of negative behaviors remain unchanged, positive behaviors increase. Data from surveys and interviews shed light on the contrasting effects of these negative behaviors such as ostracizing coworkers, and positive behaviors such as helping coworkers with the mental health outcomes of employees.

We discuss the broad impact of a supportive workplace culture on employee mental health, which can further foster employee motivation, commitment, and general well-being. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the impact of the work environment on employee well-being and the need for organizations to address these factors in order to promote a positive and supportive work environment for their workforce.

Rahoul Banerjee Ghosh

Rahoul Banerjee Ghosh

Advisor: LaShawnDa Pittman

Project Title: Drowning Out The Rest: The West’s Dominance of the Climate Crisis

Description: My project was a literature review prepared for HONOR 231: "Western Civilization” and Global Public Policy about inequity in responsibility for, consequences from, and responses to climate change between the developed and developing world, described as the "West" and the "Rest". The three themes discussed are the sharp mismatch in greenhouse gas emissions and the burden of climate change effects observed between these worlds; the historical and current theme of exploitation of “the Rest” by “the West” in ways such as colonialism and resource extraction that has organized the world into regions prepared to deal with environmental disasters and those that are not; and climate imperialism, enabling Western countries to utilize wealth and power, acquired through economies built on fossil fuels and the exploitation of poorer regions, to shape climate policy in their favor, and escape responsibility for their actions.

Hayden Goldberg

Hayden Goldberg

Advisor: Amanda Friz

Project Title: The Rhetorical Implications of Metaphorical Entailments and Terministic Screens: An Analysis of the British Press’ Coverage of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Description: This paper analyzes the rhetoric of British press reports on the COVID-19 pandemic. I combine terministic screens, metaphors, and metaphorical entailments to explicate a new theory on the impacts of metaphor. I argue that the vehicle of metaphor functions as a terministic screen and the impacts can be understood using metaphorical entailments. Under my theory, these entailments can be plotted onto an XY plane and compared with each other. Using this, I analyze the metaphors used by four British newspapers to assess the role of the press in shaping people’s perceptions of the pandemic and its consequences. I identify metaphors that (de)construct borders in order to denote an “other”; economic metaphors mixed with war and natural disaster metaphors to frame the pandemic as an economic, not health, problem; and war metaphors that rhetorically construct plastics and bodyweight as things that should be understood in terms of war.