CICI is proud to introduce the 2025-26 Discovery Research Hub Cohort:
Exploring the Survival of Historically Black Schools Amid New Waves of School Closures, led by Ja'Nya Banks (Education), investigates how in recent years, large urban cities have had an uptick in school closures, disproportionately affecting Black and racially diverse neighborhoods. In an effort to update and expand current literature on school closures, this project explores schools that do survive by analyzing characteristics that contribute to culturally sustaining institutions. Particularly, the project explores the characteristics of the schools that led to their survival along with possible adaptations that contributed to their preservation. How have historically Black communities organized to maintain neighborhood schools, politically and culturally? What types of schools survive and what school or neighborhood features do they have?
Undergraduate Scholars: Kiyomi James, AJ Matthews, Delina Melaku
The Theatre and its Dubber: Accenting Asian America, led by Cheng-Chai Chiang (English), studies recent developments in Asian American theatre under the rubric of “theatrical dubbing,” dramatic experiments in accent work to represent multilingual histories of Asian diasporic migration. These aesthetic strategies span the reversal of ethnolinguistic stereotypes by having racially majoritarian characters speak in “accented” speech in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone (2016); code-switching between standard and non-standard English in an Iranian TOEFL classroom in Sanaz Toossi’s English (2022) to represent respectively the speaking of Farsi and the acquisition of English as a linguistic passport for US immigration; the phenotypical (mis)alignments of body and voice in the ostensibly post-racial politics of Asian American casting and voice acting as explored in David Henry Hwang’s Yellow Face (2007).
Undergraduate Scholars: Ella Kirshbaum, Irem Kurtdemir, Rylie Slaughter, Christine Song, Dominic Vitz
Afghan Migrants and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, led by Britt Dawson (Anthropology), investigates how Afghan migrants stuck at the Mexico-U.S. border navigate life in the borderlands and contend with ever-changing U.S. asylum and refugee policies. Based on ethnographic data and interviews collected, the project explores how Afghan asylum seekers, many of whom worked for the U.S. military in Afghanistan, undergo a transformation and are remade into "objects of suspicion" once they traverse the Americas seeking asylum in the United States. Students assist in a literature review and interview coding on the themes of critical refugee studies, Islamophobia, waiting, and border studies.
Undergraduate Scholars: Medina Danish, Leanna Lam, Eshal Syeda Naqvi, Kaylee Nuño
Italiano di partenza: Reimagining Italian Identity Through Literary Translingualism, led by Mariagrazia De Luca (Italian Studies), explores how translingual writers reimagine Italian identity beyond national borders. Focusing on authors who write in languages other than Italian, the project uses a collaborative mapping tool to trace linguistic and cultural trajectories. Students engage in close reading, research, and discussions to build a theoretical framework for understanding how language challenges narrow notions of national identity.
Undergraduate Scholars: Sung Yoon Kyle Choi, Valentina Alvarez Demalde, Laurie Desiderio-Giampiccolo, Eva Dresden Pullen, Isabella Mae Summers, Sophia Isabella Vannucci
Vernacular Cultural Critique in the Postcolonial Caribbean, led by Leo Dunsker (English), investigates how Caribbean thinkers turned to the vernacular language and culture of the islands to challenge colonial sovereignty and imagine new futures. We frame our investigations with readings and discussions of key works by influential Caribbean writers—figures whose interdisciplinary practice, both creative and critical, is now central to fields such as Black Studies and postcolonial theory. Students engage in archival research, collaborative close reading, and annotation to understand the circulation of ideas and literature in this historical context. The project will culminate in research presentations on their findings.
Undergraduate Scholars: Hanako Hashimoto, Rorie Hayward, Sahana Mahesh, Anjali Pajjuri
Unemployment and the Crisis of Dialectical Representation, led by Andy Haas (English), explores how systemic unemployment is represented in twentieth-century critical theory, aesthetics, and sociology. Building on this theoretical background, students develop, collaborate on, and workshop their own independent research projects, which include studies on Depression-era documentary poetics, representations of unemployment in utopian literature, corporate care in the California tech sector, and oral histories of migrant labor in the Bay Area. The goal is to provide hands-on interdisciplinary research experience, with the option of a final presentation at an international academic conference.
Undergraduate Scholars: Mia Aguilar, Jason Holtz, Ella Platts, Jian Xu
Crafting Magic in Late Imperial Chinese Literature, led by Allyson Kohen (East Asian Languages and Cultures), explores how "magic" (shu術) in late imperial Chinese literature functions as a cultural technique and media operation, not merely as superstition. By analyzing canonical texts and ritual manuals, the research cluster will develop a new methodological model that fuses intellectual history, media theory, and literary analysis. Students participate in close readings, media-archaeological workshops, and a comparative seminar to produce their own research outputs.
Undergraduate Scholars: Esme Chen, Melody Cui, Claire Ko, Nora Yide Lee, Xuan Tang, Xiuwei Zhou, Elaine Zhu
The Aestheticization of Pastness in Postsocialist Chinese Media, led by Yvonne Lin (East Asian Languages and Cultures), theorizes historicity as an aesthetic form in postsocialist Chinese visual culture. Focusing on remakes of the socialist film The Eternal Wave, the cluster explores how technological innovations like A.I. colorization and digital media mediate encounters with the past. Students will develop their own research papers on topics intersecting with postsocialism, digital media, and history, culminating in a presentation at an academic conference.
Undergraduate Scholars: Jax Armstrong, Catherine Tan, Yoga Weng, Yidan Zhu
Repair in the Plantationocene, led by J’Anna-Mare Lue (Civil and Environmental Engineering), examines how historical plantation systems in Jamaica have shaped the current environmental conditions of the Plantain Garden River watershed. Students engage in interdisciplinary research, using archival data, GIS, and hydrological modeling to visualize the environmental history of the region and explore strategies for climate justice and repair. The goal is to contribute to co-authored papers and a literature review.
Undergraduate Scholars: Anette Brecko, Allison Chen, Camille Edwards
Montage as Politics: Yugoslav Avant-garde Cinema, led by Filip Sestan (Slavic Languages and Literatures), explores the political role of montage in Yugoslav avant-garde cinema, focusing on how these films critiqued and engaged with the aesthetic and political promises of socialism. Students participate in a New Yugoslav Studies working group, filmmaking workshops, and film screenings to develop their own research projects. The cluster aims to produce individual conference papers and a collaborative presentation for the end-of-year symposium.
Undergraduate Scholars: Angel Fan, Angel Reyes, Aleksandra Petrovski, Henry Wolverton, Zilan Zhen
Disability Diaries, Mystic Journals: Black Women's Life Writing, Health, and Spirituality, led by José Eduardo Valdivia Heredia (Ethnic Studies), explores the intersections of health, spirituality, and disability in the life writing of Black women cultural producers (artists, musicians, religious leaders, and writers). Students work with oral histories and personal archives to analyze how Black women have used diaries and journals to document their experiences and create alternative healing frameworks. The research aims to develop a comprehensive literature review, qualitative coding in the social sciences, and a culminating project that demonstrates proficiency in a chosen research method.
Undergraduate Scholars: Gabriela Cruz, Julia Miller, Nisa Zamora
Farmworker Justice and Climate Change, led by Alina Leticia Zárate (Energy and Resources Group), analyzes farmworker perspectives on climate change, centering them as climate experts. The project aims to develop a framework of "farmworker justice" that captures the complexity of their experiences and informs future research. Students work with primary data from over 60 interviews with farmworkers across the United States and receive training on coding qualitative data, developing a theoretical framework, as well as summarizing and presenting research findings. Students collaborate with the Social Sciences Matrix Farmworker Justice Research Group.
Undergraduate Scholars: Amber Chen, Brizeida Cruz Hernandez, Karla de la Cruz, Lauren Grace Fredrick, Michael Anthony Martinez, Melissa Roman-Fernandez, Elizabeth Jennifer Torres-Suastegui, Liliana Vasquez