Humanities

Eli Abernethy

Faculty Sponsor: Shaw Smith, Naila Mamoon

Luke Gray

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Amanda Martinez

Derian Cespedes Vega

Faculty Sponsor: Florin

Faculty Sponsor: Denham, Kelly, Mortensen, Multhaup, Parker

All students in the five-course interlinked memory studies course project have been given a copy of On Collective Memory by Maurice Halbwachs, the foundational text in the field of memory studies. Each week, they have carried out a creative destruction the book by conversing, interacting, and responding to the text physically, in the book itself. They have marked up the text, redacted words for effect, painted and inked and drawn in and on the pages; they have made collages, weavings, and prints in their books; stained, torn, stressed, and inscribed their ideas into and onto their books.
Students present their destroyed (or remade, or deconstructed, etc.) copies of On Collective Memory and explain their semester-long relationship with the book at the Case Symposium.

Rebecca Cobo

Faculty Sponsor: Shaw Smith, Naila Mamoon

Luke Gray

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Smith and Dr. Mamoon

Severine Stier, Dahlia Krutkovich, EJ Canny, Brodi Madison, Cathy Xu, Taylor Drake, Emmitt Sklar

Faculty Sponsor: Denham

In this tutorial students have researched and written a history of Jews and Jewishness at Davidson College. The history explores the experiences of Jewish students, faculty, and staff at Davidson; a history of campus speakers, programming, and organizations pertaining to Judaism, Jewishness and/or anti-Semitism (this includes the history of Hillel, for example); the cultural and historical context of being Jewish at Davidson, which includes coverage of Jews in the American South, the relationship over time between the Presbyterian Church and Judaism specifically, as well as that between the Reformed tradition and Jews and Judaism more broadly; the history of Jewish people in higher education in the US; and also a history of American anti-Semitism, through several relevant case studies, including the recent experience of anti-Semitic hate speech and threats on Davidson’s campus. The history is housed on a website and includes oral histories (video and audio).

Jonathan Phillips

Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Suzanne Churchill, Sundi Richards

Due to Vargas Llosa’s complex prose style and the specifically Peruvian language used in Conversación en la catedral, the English translation inevitably misses on several words relating to power, class, and ethnicity. With the added contextualization of certain words and phrases on this site, the English reader will unlock many of the brilliant nuances of Vargas Llosa’s great novel.