NPR's Today In 1968 Project
Having witnessed the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, student protests across the country, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, 1968 was undoubtedly a historic moment in U.S. history.
With this highly collaborative team which comprised of Code Switch reporters, social media producers, and RAD librarians, I worked on NPR's Today In 1968 project which sought to tweet out the news and events of 1968 day by day, as if they were happening now. As part of this team I combed through historic newspaper archives, evaluated headlines and noteworthy events, and curated this content for our social media account.
NPR's Source of the Week
Source of the Week is a database of diverse experts designed to connect audio journalists with radio-quality sources in order to make reporting that looks and sounds like America. The initiative was created by and is maintained by NPR's diversity team.
While a diversity intern, and later assistant, at NPR, I researched potential experts, conducted pre-interviews, and wrote copy for the Source of the Week newsletter, database, and social media accounts. I connected with journalists with the network in order to better understand the needs of their stories and anticipate the sources they might need. I also cultivated and expanded our social media following through engagement with our online community.
CESTA Research Assistant Showcase, August 2016. Photo by Celena Allen.
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis
I was a research assistant for Stanford digital humanities lab, CESTA. During my two years with the lab, I was fortunate to have assisted in several projects which ranged from my utilizing my ancient language training to cull data from Greek and Latin source material about archaeological place-names in ancient Cyprus, to learning ArcGIS software in order to show how 20th century unrealized maps of San Francisco underscore the city's current socioeconomic and political disparities.
Former projects include:
The Archaeology of Place in Ancient Cyprus (Project Lead: Dr. Stuart Dunn, King's College London)
CESTA Communications (Project Lead: Celena Allen, Stanford CESTA)
Forma Urbis Romae (Project Lead: Dr. Jim Tice, University of Oregon)
The Grand Tour (Project Lead: Dr. Giovanna Ceserani, Stanford University)
Imagined San Francisco (Project Lead: Dr. Ocean Howell, University of Oregon)
Mapping Ottoman Epirus: Region, Power and Empire (Project Lead: Dr. Ali Yaycioglu, Stanford University)
Antinous, Bas-relief found at Hadrian's Villa, now in the Villa Albani
Front view of the Colonna Venus, modeled after Praxiteles’ fourth century BCE sculpture of the Aphrodite of Knidos, marble, first or second century C.E. Musei Vaticani, Museo Pio-Clementino.
Rear view of the Borghese Hermaphroditus, marble, c. second century C.E. (figure). c. 1620 (mattress). Paris, Musée du Louvre.
Ancient Skins: Changing Bodies and Changing Genders In Roman Sculpture
My master's thesis is an examination of Roman sculpture. It deploys contemporary understandings of gender, taken up together with trans-feminist critiques of Butler on embodiment, on three different case studies of Roman sculpture in an effort to better understand the construction and function of gender in the ancient world.
More specifically, my project asks these questions: what insights can we glean about how gender operates in antiquity by employing modern conceptualizations of gendered performativity and embodiment through recent revelations in gender and queer theories? Further, given that the materiality of the body underpins these theoretical frameworks, how do sculptures of bodies become inscribed with, and later exhibit, gender? What role do viewers play in creating or shaping a gendered viewing context?