Over the Summer, I worked with Professor Tracey Holland on her project assessing the state of children’s rights and human rights due diligence (HRDD) in the arms industry. 

In recent years, across many industries, companies have adopted voluntary human rights policies intended to protect their employees, and the communities that they affect, in line with international frameworks like the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). The defense industry however has historically been reluctant to enact effective HRDD policies, particularly with regards to the use of their products by state actors, arguing that it is the responsibility of state regulators to protect human rights by imposing export controls on weapons. Increasingly this view has begun to shift, as some defense companies have acknowledged the reputational, and potentially legal risks, posed by their potential complicity in human rights violations. But at the moment the defense sector takes an inconsistent and varied approach to human rights in their corporate policies. 

The part of the project I have been working on has primarily involved analyzing prominent defense firms to create a ranked index assessing firms based on their compliance with HRDD standards, and to identify where the industry is currently falling short, with the ultimate goal of providing a helpful tool for investors. At the start of the Summer, I worked with another student researcher (Lydia Mhando, 2029), building off of research done by previous years’ Ford Scholars, to assess a set of companies by hand. We read companies’ publicly released documents, like annual shareholder reports, codes of conduct, and official human rights policies, to gather evidence and qualitatively assess the strength and extent of their policy commitment and system for mitigating risk, monitoring end-use, and carrying out investigation and remediation in cases of human rights abuse. 

I then built on the work of a previous researcher, Rishika Mamidibathula (2027), who had built a program that uses Claude to pull all available information about companies’ policies online and score them according to set criteria based on UNICEF/UNGPS/other international frameworks. The program also produces separate “reasoning” and “audit” tabs explaining its decision-making and its sources. I discovered that the program was not actually fetching data from the web, but was fabricating company policies based on its training data. Additionally, it was not limited to just analyzing company documents, but would have analyzed news stories and reports by NGOs about companies, somewhat different from the data this part of the project is trying to focus on. I tried to implement a web fetch component, as well as a system to check the fidelity of direct quotes that the program sourced from company documents, and I limited the program to gather evidence from each company’s respective domains. I also attempted to limit the time and cost by using batch processing. I was then able to run the program for the top 100 defense firms globally. 

So far, I have found that the program has been useful for finding a huge amount of evidence on company documents, and is helpful for showcasing some wider trends in the industry, but the fidelity check process has not worked, and on reviewing the output, I have found that it sometimes misses key corporate documents. 

This summer has been a great opportunity for me to gain experience doing research on a fascinating topic. There are still several areas that I would like to pursue in the future, particularly with regards to improving the program, as well as reaching out and having conversations with people who work in the defense industry to understand how their companies have developed HRDD policies. 

Throughout the eight weeks, I worked alongside Professor Osman Nemli to study the concept of sovereignty in its contradictions and examine its manifestations in the US government. We each prepared notes on the readings before our weekly discussions. 

Sovereignty in Theory

In the first part, we focused on philosophico-historico-theoretical texts, reading two per week in a (somewhat) chronological manner. This generated initial contrasts and connections that we expanded upon each subsequent week. We began with Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Hobbes’ Leviathan, forming a basic foundation of some fundamental ideas and terminologies. 

To illustrate some contradictions: Rousseau conceptualizes an indivisible, inalienable sovereignty of the people, in a small direct democracy. Contrastingly, Hobbes locates sovereign authority in the supreme rule of absolute monarchy. 

With sovereignty as the focus, we branched out into related concepts, including theology, states of exception, violence, vulnerability, and the Other. 

Sovereignty in the US Government

The second part focused on the US with theoretical and case-based studies. We covered selections from the Federalist Papers, 2026 executive orders, and contemporary articles on unitary executive theory to analyze the US government as a manifestation of modern sovereignty. In particular, we looked at the executive branch as a representative of modern sovereign power. 

Sovereignty, in the US, appears as a strange, contradictory chimera. It is divided and limited by checks and balances. At the same time, it is sourced in a single entity under the unity of the executive branch. The executive is not quite an absolute authority; but neither is sovereign power shared in an indivisible, inalienable manner. Driesen’s article on unitary executive theory adds additional worries over the possible transition from the executive branch’s centralized head-of-state control into autocracy. 

Future Work

I will continue working out my ideas and questions in a writing sample and in syllabi outlines, intended for implementation in a future course in the Philosophy Department.

Additional Information

Complete Reading List: 

Brief Overview of Concepts: sovereign and sovereignty; state of nature; authority/force/power; social contract; general will and particular will; commonwealth/general body/”the people”; language and definitions; secularized theology; states of exception; possibilities of justice; violence of law; forms of violence, i.e. mythic/divine, law-making/law-preserving, police violence; violence of language; deconstruction; the Other; the animal and the human; transnationalism and globalism; political economy; political sovereignty; co-constituency between subjects and state; decline of nation-state sovereignty; borders and walls; containment/boundedness; phantasmic productions; phenomenological and psychoanalytic frameworks; vulnerability and protection; processes of disavowal; forms of government; separation of powers. 

This summer, research assistants Lily Elliott ‘28 and Madison McCleskey ‘28 worked together with Professor Robert DeMaria Jr. to assist with the editing and commentary of the Cambridge University Press Tatler. The Tatler is a British periodical that ran from 1709-1710 authored by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff. 

The course of the eight weeks may be divided into four sections: overview of scholarly editing, preparing the text, providing commentary, and beginning a bibliography. On June 8, the first day of the project, Professor DeMaria gave us a crash course in the history of scholarly editing. We discussed how its objective, founded by early editing in light of Humanism, preferred “purifying the text.” In the 17th C., the primary scholarly works were editions of Shakespeare and Milton. The literary critic Samuel Johnson, most known for his incredible Dictionary (we owe much to the 1755 edition) rejected the idea of “purifying” the text and the author. He defined the role of the editor as the aim to communicate the author’s original intention. This is the core of our approach as we prepared Nos. 241-270 of The Tatler.

The process of preparing each Tatler entailed referencing 3 texts: the octavo (8vo), which served as our copy-text (the chosen basis for the edited text), the folio (F), and the duodecimo (12mo) to note substantive differences (“changes in wording,” MLA Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions) within the second collected edition (~1710). The Tatler Vol. IV edited by George Aitken (1899) and The Tatler Vol. III edited by Donald F. Bond (1987) served as helpful models.

When collaborating with each other, one of us would read from the 8vo, F, and 12mo while the other typed. This provided great entertainment at times as The Tatler notably used character-types reflective of London circa 1710. Reading each number to each other expanded our understanding of political, religious, and social life during the reign of Queen Anne.

Your most Obedient Servants,

Lily  and Madison Bickerstaff, 

The Nieces of Isaac Bickerstaff.

This summer, I worked alongside research assistant Kelsey Wang ‘28 to rebuild and improve GRST105: Introduction to Greek and Roman Civilizations for Professor Curtis Dozier. Our main goal for the class is to provide a worthwhile learning experience for students who have never interacted with Classics before. This means exposing them to a range of fields within the GRST department: Greek and Roman history, literatures, archaeology, and languages, all to get a meaningful understanding of how ancient Mediterranean peoples lived. We wanted to improve the class by reworking the material, and the presentation of material, to better align with this goal. 

At the beginning of the project, I decided to interview 16 of the students who took the first iteration of the class in the spring semester. This helped me understand why people choose to take an introductory GRST class like this: general interest in Greek mythology, room in their schedule for a 100-level class, recommendations from their GRST friends, etc. Also importantly, students helped me understand what was already working for them in the class. The ‘deeper dive’ assignments allowed for students to participate in their own learning with a topic that interested them. Students also appreciated the lack of weekly readings in this class, because it meant that attending lectures was low-pressure. The students gave helpful feedback about areas of content they struggled with the most (e.g. Roman history), and what they most enjoyed (e.g. lives of Greek women) which helped me understand which areas we needed to focus on in our revision. It was clear that the way content was organized in the previous iteration, with ‘history’ being separated from ‘social history’ themes such as literature, language, politics, and material culture, hindered students from appreciating themes in their context while also making the history lectures dense and confusing. So, from the onset of this project we were aware of a needed integration of so-called ‘history’ and ‘culture’. After all, how could you seperate them when learning about any civilization? 

In its previous iteration, the class was split in half between Greece and Rome. In the first week of the project, Professor Dozier gave us the lectures on Greek history so that we could see the existing content and what needed to be rearranged, removed, and/or added. It was clear that there was enough information on Greek history to fill many more days than the class had given space for. Then, Kelsey and I attempted to restructure the Greek half of the class. I reorganized content from the entire Greek class to fit a chronological order of themes, with politics, literature, and other themes integrated into the time period of history they were in. As shown in Figure 1, the original content was widely scattered into many locations, which needed to be put in a different order. Later in the summer, Kelsey and I also brainstormed the Roman half of the class and reorganised existing content to fit into a chronological story of Roman society.

Once the layout was refined, we created new presentation slides which were mostly based on pre-existing material, but we also needed to fill in some gaps. Here is one example of how I tackled this: before, there was a ‘language’ session and an ‘early Greek history’ session. Since we were now telling the story of the Greek language chronologically as the class progressed through time, there was now space to explicitly talk about the advent of Greek writing in the 8th century BCE. One important facet of this story is the iterations of writing styles during the invention of the Greek alphabet that were used for hundreds of years before the Greeks enforced a standard. I created the lecture slide (Fig. 3) which shows an example of the early Greek alphabet being written right-to-left, rather than our expected left-to-right. The slide also includes a skill that students interested in Classics should be aware of: when you are translating a language like Ancient Greek, there are extra steps that you wouldn’t have to deal with with a language like Latin which uses the same alphabet that we do. Transcription and transliteration are important concepts to be aware of for those interested in Greek, and are helpful to know before you join GRST125: Introduction to Ancient Greek. This example shows the method I took towards course design, where I focused not only on declarative knowledge (knowing ‘what’) but also procedural knowledge (knowing ‘how’). 

The college-level textbooks used last summer to create the course, while often thought-provoking and detailed, had several issues, including never having rigorous citations, and telling imperialist stories uncritically. We wanted to tell critical stories backed up by evidence that challenged stereotypes about ‘barbarians’, enslaved people, and other marginalized groups. This meant we had to re-research topics using other sources that were more up-to-date than the textbooks. Online reference databases, the Oxford Classical Dictionary and Brill’s New Pauly: Encyclopaedia for the Ancient World, were a good first step in grounding myself in relatively up-to-date information about a topic. The next batch of sources that we drew from were several Cambridge Companions to specific topics such as Ancient Slavery and the Aegean Bronze Age. Kelsey and I also went to the Art Library to look at the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (LIMC), a multivolume encyclopaedia which catologues mythological representations in Classical art. The L’Annee Philologique online database was helpful if we were exploring a niche topic, such as the cult of Athena in Sparta, and needed to actually read specialized articles and books.

Working on this project alongside Professor Dozier has been an invaluable experience. As I go into my final year at Vassar I’m contemplating whether or not I want to explore teaching in my future, and this collaborative project on course design showed me a glimpse into professorial teaching and planning. For one, I learned that absolute perfection is unreachable when it comes to planning for a lecture, because there will always be more to learn about a topic, and every model or layout will have its strengths and weaknesses. Even if perfection is unattainable, it’s still important to be intentional about from where information and research is obtained, and record everything you come across. That is a skill which I can apply to other research projects. Conversely, I learned through attempting to teach a model lecture myself to Professor Dozier and Kelsey that there is a higher level of preparation needed than I expected. Preparing for teaching wasn’t like preparing to talk about a reading in class– even if the content itself is for a beginner-level class, there is so much more that goes into an instructor’s understanding behind the scenes. I am grateful for the opportunity I was given to learn these lessons while at the same time delving into Greco-Roman culture with the goal of making other students as excited about the GRST department as I am.

Jasper Selwood ‘27

This summer, I worked with Professor Sarah Pearlman to research how immigrant inflows affect the immigration legislation that is subsequently passed at the state level. I started by reading academic articles on the history and future of immigration in the United States, and refamiliarized myself with the program Stata, which I already had some experience with through my econometrics coursework. I practiced making graphs and maps using IPUMS census data, which also allowed me to understand the strengths and limitations of this dataset. 

Next I studied the existing literature surrounding our research question. A paper by Mayda, Peri, and Steingress showed a correlation between republican vote share at the federal level and the skill levels of immigrants. Specifically, inflows of lower skilled immigrants, meaning those with a high school education or below, led to an increase in republican vote share, while inflows of high skilled immigrants led to a decrease in that vote share. Professor Pearlman and I hypothesized that the same effect exists between immigrant inflows of different skill levels and state legislation. To answer this question, I looked at different legislative databases with different methods for tracking and categorizing bills. I created scatterplots which indeed showed a correlation between the skill levels of immigrant inflows into each state and the inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the legislation those states passed. While not conclusive, the scatterplots showed that inflows of lower skilled immigrants were correlated with more restrictive legislation, while inflows of high skilled immigrants were correlated with more inclusive legislation. 

The questions of what legislation to include, where to draw the lines between inclusive, neutral, and exclusive legislation, and how to score the scope of each bill proved to be some of the biggest challenges of my research. To give a concrete example: In 2016, Maine’s state legislature passed a bill raising crossbow fees by one dollar for non-citizens. How can this extremely narrow restriction be compared to laws like a 2011 omnibus bill passed in Indiana which bars undocumented immigrants from public benefits, heavily restricts their ability to be employed, and creates new crimes for harboring them? These examples give a sense of the massive variety of immigration legislation passed at the state level and the challenges of categorizing them. 

Eventually Professor Pearlman and I decided the existing databases of legislation were inadequate, either because of flawed methodology or because they were too outdated. Since manually coding every bill wasn’t feasible with our timeframe, we decided to have the AI program Claude categorize every bill passed at the state level between 2009-2023 (4404 bills). I drafted a detailed prompt and directed Claude to code them as either inclusive, exclusive, or neutral. I also had it add a scope, other 0 (symbolic), 1 (minor impact), or 2 (major impact). After that I manually checked and corrected half of the bills. It became clear by the end that my prompt left open grey areas which Claude did not code consistently. I think that with a more refined prompt covering more of the many edge cases, it would perform more consistently. I created scatterplots from my constructed dataset, which differed slightly from the scatterplots I created previously, however the general trends remained the same.

This summer ended up being a great opportunity to both design and code my own dataset as well as work with existing datasets. I saw my data analysis skills improve significantly, and made real progress towards answering a research question I find genuinely fascinating. I’m excited to present my work at the Symposium and hopefully see the research pushed forward in the future.

(Positive Y axis is more inclusive legislation, negative Y axis is more exclusive)

(Red is more restrictive, green is more inclusive)

Mayte Segura, Class of 2028

Over the span of eight weeks, I worked with Debra Bucher and Special Collections to research student activism at Vassar College in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly relating to the Black Studies Program (now the Africana Studies Program). This project was created by the Race and Racism in Historical Collections (RRHC) Engaged Pluralism Learning Group with an interest in building a cohesive timeline surrounding the Main Takeover, also known as the 1969 Black Studies Sit-In, using primary documents in Vassar’s collection. The materials reviewed for this project largely come from the Alan Simpson Files held in Vassar College Library’s Special Collections Department, published Alum work, and articles from the Poughkeepsie Journal and the New York Times.

Interest

Throughout this research, I have held a special focus on the forms of student agency showcased during this time; from publishing their own pieces to understanding the administrative meetings students attended. Often when discussing student activism on campus, the narrative begins and ends with the 1969 Black Studies Sit-in. I was interested in learning about and preserving the other smaller forms of resistance, as I knew the fight for change cannot be contained in a single event. There was work that built the community present at the sit-in, and there was work after the demonstration ended to ensure follow-through on promises made. 

Additionally, the history of students of color on campus has been a hazy image during my time at Vassar. Specific landmarks known but not frequently discussed. Daily existence is acknowledged as a byproduct of knowing their attendance but never actually flushed out. I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to show not only myself, but other students of color, that we belong to a larger, less known legacy built through community, determination, and innovation.

Method

Navigating Special Collections: At the beginning of my research, I reviewed a list of folders of interest created by Emma Gronbeck for the RRHC Learning Group. To best ensure efficiency and new discovery, I assessed which items had previously been reviewed on the list. Once left with the unreviewed items, I then selected folders based on their subject.

Findings

Annotation of ‘Educational Fraud at Vassar’ by Maybelle Ann Taylor, African American Teacher’s Forum – Alan Simpson Papers, Box 54, Folder 54.26

Near the end of my research, I discovered an article written by Maybelle Ann Taylor, class of 1970, in box 54, folder 54.26 of the Alan Simpson Papers. The piece is titled “The Educational Fraud at Vassar” and was published in the African American Teachers Forum in their January-February 1970 issue. I found that Taylor perfectly captured the nuance and emotions of the time. I was particularly drawn in by the record this article provided from the student perspective, as most of the documents I reviewed largely stemmed from the administrative point of view. A particular quote that stuck with me was, “Until we have successfully begun to destroy the MAN within us, we cannot begin to educate ourselves to the complexities of this society and its implications for Black people.” (Quote I, pg. 3). In my research, I found Black Studies to be a larger movement focused on carrying the ambition to learn past the classroom. It spoke to a life-long commitment to reflecting on the world around you and how you can positively contribute to it. In carrying out this philosophy, many Vassar students made efforts to find ways to contribute to the community beyond campus, from actions like weekly (and in some cases daily) tutoring sessions for any interested party in the Poughkeepsie community, to speaking at conferences to represent student needs and desire. 

The agency shown off campus embodied the heart of these students’ vision for the Black Studies program as a full-body effort to dissect white supremacy’s influence and learn to build a world centered on Black flourishing, all with an underlying focus on maintaining community. These actions really stuck with me as an Afro Latin student who has attended predominantly white institutions for the last nine years. For nearly a decade, I have had to grapple with the tension that exists between these institutions’ identities, as both business and a place of learning. I have found that these labels often hold a strained relationship with each other. Learning is a messy, unpredictable process of discovery that does not always lend itself to the appeasement of business projections. Learning about these students’ actions to not only call out the tension that has always felt unacknowledged but also fight to ensure the financial need does not outweigh the mission of exploration, has helped connect me to my own membership in the legacy of Black scholars.

Another quote that has stuck with me is, “We had an integrated Black house with which we were satisfied and pacified, where the true efforts of establishing sisterhood was a sham.” (Quote J, p. 3). This line stood out because throughout my research I had seen glimpses of the betrayal and pain Taylor writes about. Dating back to their earliest demands, the Black students at Vassar College always held strong on their need for Black housing. While they received it, leading to the creation of Kendrick House, there was a caveat requiring white students to live there as well to avoid legal concerns. At the time, it was a commonplace fear that providing Black housing would be deemed a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many colleges found that they were able to subvert these worries by not officially declaring dorms as Black only housing, hence the integration at Kendrick House. At the end of the dorm’s inaugural year, two student representatives, Claudia Thomas and Gary Graves, presented the demand to officially make the dorm all Black housing, cosigned by the Black residents of Kendrick House. Their demand was met with hesitation due to legal concerns and the cited fact that there were simply not enough Black students enrolled to fill up the house, making white residents necessary. 

Throughout a lot of my research the question of what constitutes real change kept coming to my mind. Even when establishing a home for Black life on campus, white bodies were still required to be present to legitimize it. I felt like the struggle around Kendrick House reflects the reality of what it means to be Black not only at Vassar but in the US. The battle for housing represents the nuance of reclaiming space. While Blackness does not have to exist in isolation to thrive or legitimize itself, it is expected to make space for the presence and oversight of whiteness to maintain its credibility and existence.

Presentation: Six weeks into my program I led a discussion on my findings, using Taylor’s article as a bridge between artifacts. In preparation, I identified the following themes through colored annotations and a corresponding key given to each attendee (as pictured at the beginning of this section): 

• Philosophy surrounding Black Studies
• Student perspective
• General timeline information
• State of things in 1970

I selected quotes to connect the topics and anchor my findings. The walk through of the article was followed by a guided discussion in which attendees were able to ask follow up questions and explore their own interests from the article.

Moving Forward

This past summer has helped me grow a lot as a scholar. While I was working independently, I remained mindful of the fact that this project was created to assist the RRHC Learning Group in identifying and contextualizing information; as such, I was intentional about providing clean deliverables that could be used beyond my engagement with the program. With the flexibility I was given, I was able to develop my own methods to approach efficiently recording my findings to best ensure future progress. The opportunity to actively put my academic training to use regarding a topic I deeply care about is an honor I will never forget. 

In looking past this summer, I aim to continue preserving the work and dedication exercised by students of the past by sharing the information I found. I hope to conduct a series of discussions modeled after the one I held this summer with different perspectives targeting diverse groups on campus, such as departments and programs. I believe that this will assist with engaging attendees by honing in on their special interests; highlight and honor the complex scenarios that arose; and offer ample opportunities for those interested to attend as it will not be constrained to a specific date.

Anna L. Philippe (‘2027)

This summer, I worked with Dr. Maria Hantzopoulos of the Education and International Studies Departments on a nascent project related to the impact of neoliberal urbanism, gentrification/displacement, and educational policy on schooling in NYC.

Since the project is in its early stages, gathering background information was a priority. I spent time organizing demographic data on NYC public schools over the last 30 years (citywide, along with District 30 in Queens and District 15 in Brooklyn). Data included the racial compositions of schools, along with their proportions of economically disadvantaged students, disabled students, and English language learners. These data will help contextualize more complex observations. I also read Pauline Lipman’s The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City to familiarize myself with how neoliberal policies and logics have shaped systems of education.

An important feature of this project was that it was done in collaboration with a group of students who joined for Independent Study credit. Those collaborators were Heba Elkouraichi (‘2029), Hana Afiz (‘2027), Justine Katimbang (‘2027), and Erika Shiffman (‘2027). Together, we discussed Lipman’s book, engaged with other materials, and brainstormed different directions for continued research. Because we’re all from the NYC metropolitan area, our personal experiences informed our conversations and the directions we hope to take this project.

On July 16, members of the Independent Study group and I attended a virtual meeting hosted by Public Land for Public Good. The meeting featured a group of local organizers resisting the aggressive privatization and commercialization of NYC’s public land. (The moderator, Ron Shiffman, is coincidentally the grandfather of one of our research group members, Erika!) The meeting was a moment of hope for the future of grassroots resistance, community togetherness, and coalition building.

As our project concludes, we’re thinking about areas for future investigation. Part of my proposal is below. Essentially, I am curious about the tension between increased academic agency fostered through the proliferation of progressive, project-based education in the city and decreased agency over city space itself. These competing realities may complicate students’ ability to succeed in project-based learning environments, but they may also create opportunities for meaningful engagement with local communities.

Week of 6/2

On Monday and Tuesday, Professor Means and I, along with the other project staff and community members, participated in an intensive run by Kevin Coleman and Dr. Tori Rhoades. The workshop was called “Teaching With Care: Trauma-Informed Pedagogy.” Over the course of those two days we learned strategies and best practices for teaching theater in a therapeutic manner, by participating in exercises, games, performances, and discussions.

On Friday, I attended the Juvenile Justice Counsel at the Poughkeepsie courthouse with CAAD scholars Zander and Taylor, as well as staff member Brian Robinson. Together, we pitched the prototype program to stakeholders, including probation officers, police officers, judges, social workers, and representatives of community organizations.

Week of 6/9

On Monday and Tuesday, I researched and compiled peer reviewed methodologies for similar research projects and experiments in published scholarly articles. I then used what I found to inform and draft an original methodology to be used in our work and future publications.

For the remainder of the week, I drafted the necessary data collection materials to be used in our research. These included intake and exit surveys, intake and exit interviews for students and parents, teacher evaluations, self evaluations, parental consent and minor assent forms. I created these forms based on my previous research into data collection for the parameters the project methodology focuses on, and adapted commonly used questionnaires.

Week of 6/16

Professor Means and I spent this week finalizing the data collection forms. We also wrote and submitted our research proposal to the Institutional Review Board.

On Friday, we attended “Voices of Youth: Educational Justice From Our Youths’ Perspective” at Marist University, which was part of the “Promoting Partnerships to Advance Educational Justice in Poughkeepsie” series. We heard from a panel of seven high school students from Poughkeepsie and Arlington about where they identify needs for students and young people in the community, and their suggestions for improvements. The event affirmed the need for our youth theater program, and further informed the way we plan to run the space.

Week of 6/23

This week, I worked with program administrators Professor Taneisha Means, Brian Robinson, and Tom Pacio, as well as CAAD Scholars Zander and Taylor, to build our program cohort. We received 44 applications and 7 referrals in total. In the end, we built a diverse cohort of 11 students, representing five districts in Dutchess County and a broad array of races, ethnicities, gender identities, and backgrounds.

Additionally, Zander, Taylor, and I spent time working with the program teaching artist Amara James Aja to clarify our respective roles in the rehearsal space and solidify program plans and logistics.

Week of 7/7

After coming back from our Independence Day break, it was time for the program to begin!

As the students ate lunch each day, I administered intake surveys measuring their baseline levels of self esteem, resistance to peer pressure, and mental health. I also conducted one-on-one interviews with each student over Zoom to get to know them better, as well as to qualitatively assess their baseline levels of communication skills, socialization, and self-confidence. Finally, I participated and sat in on programming each day to build trust and connections with the students, as well as to take ethnographic field notes.

On Friday, we took the students to the greenhouse at Vassar, where they had the opportunity to tour the facilities and feed the resident carnivorous plants. We then discussed the college admissions process and our personal experiences with the students, answering any questions they had about their options and giving advice. That evening, we offered an optional field trip to Powerhouse Theater’s performance of The Comedy of Errors. Four students attended, and all enjoyed!

Week of 7/14

During the second week of programming, I continued to attend rehearsals to record field notes. Students started working directly with the text of Romeo and Juliet. They constructed tableaus, performed scenes, and began analyzing themes of power. On the Thursday session, Amara taught a swordfighting lesson (using pool noodles), an exercise I was able to participate in as well. We choreographed fight scenes and practiced safe expressions of violence and nonverbal communication.

On Friday, the students had the opportunity to tour the Loeb and learn more about visual representations scenes through art. They also put their acting skills to use by constructing tableaus to mirror paintings, and were given art supplies to make their own creations. Zander and Taylor then split the students up and held workshops on the performing arts industry and college social life, respectively.

Week of 7/21

In our third week of the program, we saw a lot of major breakthroughs for individual students and the group as a whole! The participants continued to get deeper into scene work and built towards performing a longer scene from Romeo and Juliet. They synthesized what they have been learning about tableaus, power, performing lines, sword choreography, and staging. Their final product was extremely impressive considering the amount of rehearsal time they’d had.

On Tuesday evening, we hosted a dinner for students, their families, donors, and community supporters of the program on the second floor of Gordon Commons. Students were presented with personalized midpoint letters of appreciation from Amara, Zander, Taylor, and myself.

On Friday, the students split into two rotating groups. I took participants down to the Innovation Lab, where they had the opportunity to make buttons, create using the 3D pen and visualizers, and design lithographs and wood burnings. Meanwhile Taylor ran workshops on feelings, needs, empathy, and healthy conflict resolution. At both stations students really got to know one another on a deeper level and found the experience valuable.

Week of 7/28

In our final week of programming, I administered exit surveys to measure changes in their self-esteem and resistance to peer influence from the beginning of the program. I also conducted in person exit interviews with each student to measure changes in their communication skills, socialization, and self-confidence, as well as to hear their thoughts on the program itself as a whole.

Kimaya Saijpal Class of 2027

This summer, I worked as a research assistant for Professor Kirsten Wesselhoeft in Vassar’s Religion Department, who is currently developing a book on a surprisingly underexplored topic: a cultural introduction to Ramadan. While there are countless works on the other pillars of Islam, Ramadan has received comparatively little sustained cultural study, and that gap shaped much of my work. I shared the position with another Ford Scholar, Felix, and our collaboration became an important part of the experience. We regularly exchanged ideas, shared readings, and offered suggestions for further inquiries, making the research process all the more generative. I think we often imagine academic work as a solitary pursuit, but this summer reminded me how collaborative it can be. 

My primary focus was twofold. First, I developed an archive of creative works related to Ramadan, including poetry, visual art, music, theater, and architecture. I also identified contemporary Muslim artists whose work could contribute to a 2027 Loeb Art Center exhibition on Ramadan. The envisioned exhibition will be interactive and designed to welcome both the Hudson Valley Muslim community and broader public audiences into a multidimensional exploration of the month. I compiled this research into a detailed exhibition proposal and artist roster for the Loeb’s review.

Second, I worked with Felix on the reading list for Professor Wesselhoeft’s upcoming fall course, Religion, Violence, and Peacebuilding. This involved reviewing a wide range of literature in religious studies and peace studies, assessing both foundational and emerging works, and curating selections that aligned with the course’s pedagogical goals. We often discussed which texts best fit the course objectives and which ones—despite their reputations—were not worth including. I also integrated South Asian perspectives throughout, reflecting my own research interests. As an outcome of this collaboration, I will be teaching a week of the course in the fall on the Bhagavad Gita and Gandhi. I will be responsible for lesson planning, designing activities, and setting learning objectives, which will be an exciting early step into teaching.

Alongside these projects, I conducted more tangential research on pre-modern Ramadan writings, including instructional fasting manuals, mystical interpretations, and culinary texts. I also visited the Schomburg Center to explore the Larry Neal archives for Ramadan-related creative works. While his film treatment Ramadan Lovers unfortunately did not connect directly to my research, the process of looking through his manuscripts revealed other compelling engagements with Muslim themes in Black creative expression.

This summer was a rare chance to move between curatorial planning, archival research, and course design, all in a deeply collaborative setting. It gave me a glimpse of how ideas grow and transform—not just in classrooms or archives, but also in conversations, shared projects, and the spaces where academic work meets the public.