Akshaya Raghavan

This summer, I worked with Professor Jannay Morrow of the Psychological Science Department to conduct research in social psychology. Professor Morrow was also simultaneously working on a few URSI projects with Professor Baird, so we all met as a group and discussed our areas of interest in psychology and helped each other brainstorm regarding our research.

Professor Morrow allowed me to choose the direction of our research, which led me to be even more passionate about the project. I began short-listing certain topics that piqued my interest and reviewed articles published in Social Psychological journals to understand the scope of previous research and look for areas that are under-studied.

The topic I landed on was a sociological concept called “Marketized Mentality,” which we wanted to study in a psychological manner. A Marketized Mentality, or MM, is a value system in which one sees wealth as the ultimate indicator of success and may even resort to crime or unethical behavior to achieve it. One with an MM puts the economy over all other institutions such as family, polity, or education. We were interested in studying the relationship MM had with prejudice, particularly toward supposedly “unprofitable” groups of people like the disabled, homeless, or unemployed. We also were curious to see whether those with a MM dehumanized these groups.

Next, I worked on writing down my predictions for the results of our research and fine-tuning all our questionnaires. It was a lengthy process, but I learnt a lot about creating a study. Once we finalized our design, Professor Morrow launched the study online and we finally began collecting data! Unfortunately, 8 weeks had already passed by then, but I look forward to analyzing the results when I am back at Vassar.

This summer I worked with Professor Hite on a book she is in the process of writing, titled, at the moment, Encountering Texas: White Supremacy and Remembrance in the Lone Star State.

It was an absolutely amazing experience to work with Professor Hite over the summer! Her book focuses on Texan ideas of relational encounters, violent white supremacy, frontier masculinity, trans-racial solidarity, collective political memory, and individual and communal identity, among a plethora of other supporting facets and perspectives.

It was so unique to read books diving into the ontology of seemingly innocuous social identifiers, like the collection of essays, On Whiteness: The Racial Imaginary Institute, in tandem with books like Seeds of Empire, by Andrew Torget, which uncovered Texas memories which implicate and imagine these social identifiers as large players in the formation of the State’s history.

It was a very special experience to grapple with these ideas, ever present in the current political landscape, with Professor Hite, and see how her book has shifted, and will continue to shift bit by bit, with every new article and book she reads. It was empowering and unique to be treated as an equal, in many ways, by Professor Hite as we discussed readings and bounced ideas off of one other. To rant for multiple minutes, spewing all my thoughts about a reading and more at Professor Hite as soon as we sat down to meet, and to watch her sit silently and carefully chew on and consider every word I said, was a very powerful experience. It is easy in a classroom of brilliant peers to shrink into one’s own thoughts, and going into my final year at Vassar, I will be ever grateful to have had this chance to re-orient myself in relation to what, and how, I learn.

Ashleigh McDermott, Class of 2026

This summer I worked for John Murphy and Ian Shelley at the Loeb, conducting research and preparing an exhibit for the Frederic Church 200, a celebration which many museums are participating in next year. Church belonged to the Hudson River School, the first national school whose work laid the underpinning for an American imagery or imaginary and also, for the founding collection of our college museum. Painting during the antebellum period when the introduction of western territories meant aggravated separation of interests between the slave economies of the South and the industrial economies of the North, Church found national images through natural formations. 

Most of the summer I took to familiarizing myself with Church’s way of thinking: how were these neutered scenes to be public instruments of manifest destiny? Uncovering his ideology through his fascination with Humboldt’s Cosmos, a publication which detailed the naturalist’s journey through South America in search for god’s interrelation of all through natural observation of minerals, plants, and animals, I unravelled how his replicated journey to Colombia and Ecuador was subsequently a search for god, unification, and truth during a time lacking in harmony. Due to the degradation of North America through deforestation, overcultivation, and exploitation, the unspoiled continental Southern landscapes were to reinstate god as sovereign over the Edenic Americas while still maintaining distance from the nationalistic tensions that came with depicting a scene local to the United States. 

The two paintings I was assigned were Autumn in North America and Summer in South America, where continental differences speak to the complications of representing an American identity. His Autumn, a New England forest interior, references the North-South jockeying for national representation, resolved by his Summer, a divine image of fraternal land that emits American exceptionalism while remaining unspecific to how the land is to be controlled. This is something I found interesting in conjunction with Church’s mentor and founder of the school, Thomas Cole, who critiqued man’s dedication to progress and advocated for a ‘juste milieu,’ a pastoral middle ground between man and nature. By neutrally representing territories while doubly formulating a kaleidoscopic land of god, Church was able to reach a large audience, but most times, failed to procure a unified message or image for the nation. 

The theme of sacred geographies stood out to me during my research as they are the physical arrivals to an ever-receeding immateriality, whether that be a national identity, the American West, or the passage into god’s domain. While in the New World, Church used nature as scientific proof of the divine; however, after Darwin’s theory of evolution and the outbreak of the Civil War, Church’s search for god and unification pulled him backwards to the Old World, particularly the Middle East, where biblical sites, ruins, and temples could materially prove god’s sovereignty. How did the shift from finding god in nature to proving divine existence through architecture affect modern conceptions of national identity and religious justifications of territorial expansion?

Curious about Church’s recession from westward expansion, I found interest in Tanner’s View of Palestine, an elevated view of the sprawling holy land with irrigation features and dotted people in the distance. Known as a biblical scene painter and member of the AME Church, Tanner was one of the first prominent black artists in the Western canon and held a complicated relationship with nationality as he indefinitely left America for Paris in order to gain access to civil rights. With works such as Tanner’s, I want to complicate the ways Church naturalizes manifest destiny and nationalism through uprooting contrasting beliefs and representations among similar practices or subject areas. This fall, I will continue the work of researching objects in the collection, producing labels, and writing a brochure to culminate in an exhibition which will doubly honor the role Church plays in the founding collection while also critiquing his use of the genre to convert public spectators into divine speculators. Thank you John and Ian!

It was a wonderful summer working with Prof. Sarah Pearlman as her Ford Scholar. Her research explores migration and its influence on voting behavior in the United States. Thus, our project’s focus was to create a comprehensive dataset of U.S. population demographics and state legislatures; using this dataset, we made it our objective to draw correlations between the fluctuations in migration and electoral outcomes across states. 

Collating the master dataset was no simple task, however: it necessitated weeks’ worth of searching for data, coding, and literature review to get to the right sources. The first couple of weeks I spent reading publications from peer-reviewed journals in Economics, think tanks, and legal reports. These sources commented on the most recent trends in immigration and the role of naturalized citizens on electoral outcomes. Moving forward, I began with preliminary cleaning of Census Bureau data (derived mostly from the American Community Survey) to visualize demographic trends of naturalized citizens across the past twenty years. Furthermore, I was able to pull more data and model the voter registration and turnout rates for naturalized citizens and link my findings to federal and state electoral outcomes. Once I gained more exposure to handling large data, I proceeded to work with a dataset containing information on state legislative election returns and their party composition. 

In the end, I successfully created a master dataset and ran several regressions. While some of our findings were inconclusive due to inconsistent availability of most recent data, working on this project was greatly rewarding for me. I am incredibly glad that I got the opportunity to improve several crucial skills such as coding, handling large datasets, and combining literature review with quantitative research. It was truly a transformative experience. 

For my summer project, I worked with Nikolai Firtich to translate the works of four Russian Futurist poets: Elena Guro, David Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh, and Vasily Kamensky. The purpose of our translation work was to focus on translating the untranslated works of the above poets, for the purposes of publishing an annotated bilingual collection of their work. The four poets we translated represent something of a gap in current literature in translation – while the two highest-profile of the Russian futurists, Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky are well-translated at this point, their compatriots in the movement have gone ignored by English language translators. Our hope is that our bilingual collection will serve as an important teaching aid and tool in the classroom, in addition to expanding the amount of excellent Russian poetry available to an English readership. In total, with Firtich’s help and careful review I translated approximately 150 pages of previously untranslated poetry from Russian into English.

I originally applied for this project due to my love of Russian verse and my love of writing poetry. I am a poet in my own time, and write and read equally voraciously. I believe that this is, frankly, a prerequisite for proper verse translation; a poetic translation requires a poet’s touch, and while translation is not the same as creative writing, nearly all skills transfer. I also came to this project with some experience in translation – I had for credit translated the entirety of Russian Symbolist poet Mikhail Kuzmin’s multi-part epic/collection Форель разбивает лед (The Trout Breaks the Ice) the previous summer – and found that both the most interesting aspect of the process was deciding what methods were best to translate each poem individually. While the four poets were part of a shared poetic movement – the Russian Futurist movement, and even more specifically, the Hylean Group of the Futurists – and did share some similarities in style or subject matter, their respective oeuvres were very evidently different. A greater puzzle came from how commonly there were significant stylistic differences within a single poet’s work. The Futurists were in part defined by their experimentation with language; how was a translator to approach the variety of their work?

I took my cues in the process of translation ultimately from a favorite translator of mine, Paul Schmitt, who translated an excellent collection of fellow futurist Velimir Khlebnikov’s poems many years ago. Schmitt’s approach to translation is purposefully anti-dogmatic – in translation, Schmitt argues, one should approach each poem as itself, and pick the style of translation based on what the poem is able to accomodate. The process of translation is always somewhat of a compromise; no language is ever fully intelligible with another, and as a result all good translation requires many intentional decisions carefully made, in the attempt to both preserve the content of the poem, its form, and its original quality. Sometimes one of these things must be sacrificed: the majority of my translations are in free verse, that is, unrhymed and with no standard meter, which is not true of the poems in the original Russian. This is ultimately because, in all but a few cases, I felt that fully preserving the content of the poet’s work was more important than attempting to emulate the poem’s form, when said attempts would already lead to a compromise of sorts.

A simple example of how I applied Schmitt’s advise, and made it my own, was in attempts to translate zaum language throughout the poets’ works. Zaum, or “beyond-mind” language was a Futurist technique where neologisms were derived from Russian roots. While many of the Futurists dabbled with it, Kruchenykh was its master and primary theoretician (alongside perhaps Khlebnikov). In translating zaum, I used a variety of techniques: while in many cases I simply transliterated it to preserve the original sound, in cases where I felt the etymological origin of a particulaer neologism was more important I constructed English language neologisms from English, Old English, and Latinate roots.

Professor Firtich was an enormous wealth of information on Futurism and the Russian language, and was absolutely vital in providing me with knowledge on the meaning or tone of specific diction, and with decyphering the etymology of many of the complicated neologisms the Futurists utilized. It was truly wonderful to partner with him on this project, and I look forward to continuing to collaborate on this project and further polish our translations as we approach publication.

What I hope to have effectively communicated here is that translation requires a series of complicated choices that are both analytic and artistic. With the advent of artificial intelligences that compete with existing translators, and a movement against the humanities in favor of academic disciplines that can drive greater short-term returns on investment, there are significant forces from both within and outside the American Academy that seek to automate away the very thing that has made the Humanities possible for centuries: thought. The Ford program, which supports projects like ours, serve to ensure that the loss of one of the key engines of human art and knowledge does not occur.

This summer, I worked with Professor Dozier and three other research assistants to design an introductory course for the Greek and Roman Studies Department. This introductory class will make students feel more comfortable taking higher level classes in the department by providing them with basic knowledge of Greek and Roman civilization. I felt particularly drawn to this project because I have had many people tell me that they want to take a GRST class, but don’t know where to begin. Many people feel like they would be overwhelmed in a higher level class. So, the ultimate goal of this project is to make the Greek and Roman Studies Department and its courses more accessible.

Creating this introductory class was a significant undertaking, since we hoped to give students a comprehensive overview of both Greek and Roman civilization in one semester. Professor Dozier chose to divide the class sessions into chronological history, social history, language, literature, and material culture. Our first step was to look through Greek and Roman civilization textbooks and decide which specific topics to cover during those class sessions.

We used Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times by Thomas Martin, Ancient Greece: A New History by Jeremy McInerney, The Greeks: History, Culture, and Society by Ian Morris and Barry Powell, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History by Sarah Pomeroy, and Ancient Greek Civilization by David Sansone.

We used The Romans: From Village to Empire by Mary Boatwright, A History of Rome by Marcel Le Glay, Ancient Roman Civilization: History and Sources by Ralph Mathisen, Ancient Rome: A New History by David Potter, and A History of the Roman People by Celia Schultz and Allen Ward.

Once we had decided which topics to cover, Professor Dozier tasked us with creating an outline for each of the social history classes. Social history is a field of history that explores people’s lived reality, rather than strict political and economic history. So, our social history classes covered topics such as enslavement, religion, and leisure. We organized these outlines into questions, content, and takeaways. The questions frame the structure of each class session. The takeaways indicate what we want students to remember from the class session. The content supports the takeaways. Brainstorming and developing the questions, content, and takeaways was a very collaborative process. The other research assistants and I broke into pairs to develop them, then each pair presented their outline to the other pair and incorporated their feedback.

Once we had created outlines for each class session, we began going through the textbooks and highlighting sections that corresponded with the content we wanted to teach. At this point, Professor Dozier wanted to deliver a test lecture to determine if our process was effective. He used the outline and textbook sections we designated to develop a lecture for our first Greek chronological history day. After watching and discussing his test lecture, we realized that we needed to be more involved in the lecture-making process. 

So, we began creating lecture slides and slide narratives for Professor Dozier to develop his lectures from. These lecture slides and narratives followed the same outline of questions, content, and takeaways. We synthesized information from the textbooks to create the slides and the slide narratives. The slide narratives were the most important part, because they became the basis for Professor Dozier’s lectures. We made sure to indicate where in the textbooks we got the information in the slide narratives, so that Professor Dozier could always go learn more about the material. Once we finished our slide narratives, Professor Dozier went through and left comments where he needed more clarification or more information. He also commented when he disagreed with the information, or thought we needed to go a different direction. These slide narratives and comments made the process more collaborative and ensured that we were on the same page as Professor Dozier. After Professor Dozier left these comments, we went through and incorporated his feedback to complete the slides and slide narratives.

This project had a very positive impact on me personally. First of all, it taught me how to work with and lead a team of research assistants. The four of us met over Zoom almost everyday, sometimes multiple times a day. I led these daily meetings and assigned each of us tasks in order to meet the goals Professor Dozier set for us. Leading and working with a team is a valuable skill that I will take with me far beyond this project. Designing this introductory class also gave me a better idea of what being a professor would be like and affirmed my instinct to pursue an academic career. I found the process to be challenging, but fulfilling. The most challenging part was choosing which topics to cover and narrowing down which information to include. The most fulfilling part was thinking about how to communicate the information to students in the most effective way. I am really looking forward to hearing students’ feedback in the spring!

This summer, I worked with Professor Alicia Atwood to study the long-run impacts of the measles vaccine in Mexico and explore the best ways to accessibly communicate health and economic data to broad audiences. Prior economic research has linked the measles vaccine to positive effects on schooling, employment, and income. As measles threatens its return across North America, this project presents a timely reminder of the importance of vaccination against measles. Our time was split between researching and modeling the effects of measles in Mexico and researching and implementing evidence-based approaches to data visualization.

The first half of our work began with reviewing relevant economic and health literature. From these sources and further historical documentation, we collected information to gain a clearer understanding of measles in Mexico, both before and after the introduction of the vaccine. We used these pivotal steps to inform our decisions regarding data and modeling. With strong justification, we carefully cleaned and prepared our 50 million observation dataset. Although these steps were time-consuming, they were fruitful. Once we were able to apply our model, we found significant effects on education, employment, and relationship status, all of which were consistent with previous literature.

With a strong set of results established, we asked a difficult question: how can visuals help synthesize dense information into a digestible message for a broad audience? We began by revisiting previous economic and health publications to look for particularly effective and creative visuals. Then, we explored across psychology, sociology, and other sciences for visualization best practices–what graphs are most effective, which colors best tell our story, and what’s the right amount of detail for a chart. Afterwards, I spent a lot of time learning new and complex coding techniques and applying our new visualization toolkit to our data.

My time working on this project was incredibly rewarding. In an increasingly vaccine-hesitant world, I had the opportunity to contribute to the struggle against vaccine misinformation, all while improving as a researcher under Professor Atwood’s guidance. I learned so much while studying how to effectively communicate our work through visuals. Our project forced me to draw a connection between our work in an academic setting and the valuable information it has to offer the general public. For me, this unique experience drove home the crucial humanistic aspect of social science research.

This summer, under the guidance of Professor Arpitha Kodiveri, Sahaj Sharma, and I worked to develop a legal framework and synthesis report to assist climate lawyers in quantifying climate-induced loss and damage, with a focus on Indigenous communities in the Global South. This topic is tremendously important and under-researched in the space of climate law, and is becoming one of the most impactful legal concepts in all of climate litigation. Specifically for Indigenous communities who feel the brunt of the increasingly dire effects of climate change, loss and damage litigation could be one of the most useful ways for individuals/communities to get compensated for both economic and non-economic (cultural erosions, loss of traditional ways of life, e.g.) damages.

To begin our research, we started by reading and analyzing almost every climate-related case that has been brought to a court in legal jurisdictions across the entire world, and found around 21 that involved loss and damage compensation/reparation claims. After going through all 21 in detail, we decided on 10 that would be relevant and meaningful to our research within jurisdictions such as Ecuador, Uganda, Indonesia, Switzerland (transnational), etc. Then, we began the long and intellectually stimulating process of developing an expansive literature review that encompassed all aspects of loss and damage research, with a specific focus on the non-economic aspects of L&D (NELD). This research helped us fully contextualize this complex issue and provided us with the necessary tools to find real solutions that would be impactful for litigators in the space.

After refining our literature review, we began reaching out to and interviewing experts in the field, aiming to gain further insight into how these frameworks and methodologies are actually applied in legal argumentation. Some of our most notable interviewees include Johanna Gusman, a Senior Attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law; Sara Seck, a Professor of Law at the Schulich School of Law; and Robin Gregory, a Senior Scientist and Professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, University of British Columbia. These conversations provided us with invaluable insight into what challenges litigators have faced within differing court jurisdictions, and both their optimism and pessimism towards the current global climate legal regime.

Although this project will be extended into the upcoming academic year, the research and effort invested in building the foundation for the report this summer have been incredibly rewarding. Additionally, along with the report, Professor Kodivieri, Sahaj, and I are in the process of publishing a three-part paper discussing tort law, insurance mechanisms, and the recent International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion in relation to L&D litigation. Altogether, we are all hopeful our work will have an immense impact in developing L&D cases all over the globe.

This summer, I worked with Professor Paravisini-Gerbert and Professor Aronna on the first and second volumes of Historia General y Natural de las Indias (General and Natural History of the Indies) by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. This was an extremely exciting time to be working with The Oviedo Translation Project because I came in during the final editing and wrapping up stage(s) of pre-publication and publication of Volume I.

I began my summer editing the annotations of Volume I of the Oviedo project. I read all the footnotes in the 19 Books to ensure the new annotations were cited as English Edition [EE] and fixed grammar/typos to ensure that the footnotes read well. Additionally, I worked on other small tasks: fixing formatting, erasing class years from student translators’ names, and checking that certain dates were listed as BC and AD (in place of BCE and CE).

I was also tasked with combining all of the previous bibliographies into a final collective bibliography. Additionally, I searched Vassar’s database for any additional publications that had been missed in past years when researching Oviedo’s work and for any recent publications that could be added.

In addition to editing the bibliography, I helped fix and complete the Table of Contents. A table of contents had been started but didn’t include many of the later books, and there had been edits to the prefaces and chapter headings that had not been corrected in the contents. After corrections, I began the methodical job of copying over the book and chapter numbers along with their descriptions. Through this process, I edited any awkward phrasing and identified the discrepancies in spelling or references.

After editing, completing notes from the copyeditor, and finalizing the bibliography and table of contents, Volume I was officially sent to Brill Publishers! To have Volume I published, we needed to send publication contracts to all the student translators in the volume. While this initially seemed straightforward, getting in contact with all of the previous students ended up being one of the hardest tasks. I began by collecting the names of the student translators from the manuscript and the Oviedo Project’s website, then researching each former student: gathering personal, public, or work emails, LinkedIn contacts, or social media tags. Then Professor Paravisini-Gerbert and I reached out to the translators through email, LinkedIn, text, and social media so they could send us their contact information for the publishers. We ended up with a long list of contacts of 49 translators. Unfortunately, we were never able to contact one translator, so Professor Paravisini-Gerbert is re-translating their work.

In my last week and a half, I began work on Volume II. I identified words, places, and people mentioned in three books of the second Volume. I also created a spreadsheet to organize all of the words identified for annotation and began researching and writing the footnotes.

Professor Paravisini-Gerbert is an incredible force, and it has been a pleasure to work with her and Professor Aronna on a project that they are both passionate about and that they bring their heart and soul into. I would love to continue contributing to the Oviedo project in the future and see the progression of publications! Congratulations on the first publication!