2023-2024 Amelia A. Gould Undergraduate Research Assistantship Awardees
Mary J. Duffy
Dyson | Writing and Rhetoric
Faculty Mentor: Dana J. Cadman
Project Title: Pace Poetry Festival
Mary Jane Duffy will be working as a Creative Assistant to work alongside faculty in the development of the programming, execution, branding, and execution of the Pace Poetry Festival, a cross-campus and wider community offering which integrates learning with experience and features workshops, readings, salons, and awards events to celebrate poetry and writing. Her work will be fundamental in providing access to students, alumni, faculty, staff, and the larger New York writing community as Pace endeavors to contribute uniquely and powerfully to the thriving writing world.
Anna C. Hilbun
Dyson | English Language and Literature
Faculty Mentor: Emilie D. Zaslow
Project Title: Making Moments Matter
In 2019, Sears, the iconic retailer, rebranded their logo to Making Moments Matter. This creative non-fiction essay which meshes history, theory, and memoir explores moments in Sears’ history alongside moments in my own life. Rarely do we consider our relationship to the spaces where we shop. They are spaces of mundane exchange – money for objects – but also where we engage in hushed conversations, with family, friends, and ourselves about how to weigh the costs of needs, values, and desires. But the spaces in which we conduct our consumptive exchanges are also where our lives are made.
Gina M. Marcinkowski
Sands College of Performing Arts | Commercial Dance
Faculty Mentor: Lauren R. Gaul
Project Title: The Jazz Dance Pedagogy Manual: Guidelines for Teaching a Comprehensive Jazz Class Ages Primary to Pre-Professional
We will continue to explore and analyze the mental and anatomical development of a dancer through the holistic lens of jazz pedagogy. With this insight, we will begin the process of editing the existing manuscript, “The Jazz Dance Pedagogy Manual…” through both traditional means of articulation and through the developing conversations within the dance industry subsequently aiming to reach completion and publication.
Jordan E. Naidoo
Dyson | Sociology/Anthropology
Faculty Mentor: Sarah B. Cunningham
Project Title: Summer 2024 Exhibit at Pace University Art Gallery
Prof. Cunningham will work with student researchers, Jordan Naidoo and Kassandra Schengili, to plan an exhibit featuring contemporary artists from New York State for the Pace University Art Gallery slated to open May 31, 2024. Titled, “We’re Home,” this small group show will feature 5-6 artists who explore relationships within the domestic sphere.
Home is often thought of as simply the house or apartment in which we dwell, but home is more accurately the people who surround us and hold us dear. The “We’re Home” exhibit will navigate the gentler intricacies of human connection, capturing the essence of home through the lens of shared experiences and precious–though sometimes difficult–memories. Home can be in the embrace of a lover, a waft of your caregiver’s perfume, or the sound of your child’s cry. The exhibit will delve into the enduring ties that bind us together within the sanctuary of the homes we are born into and those we build for ourselves.
Kassandra Schengili
Dyson | Psychology
Faculty Mentor: Sarah B. Cunningham
Benjamin E. Pfeifer
Dyson | Film and Screen Studies
Faculty Mentor: Jillian McDonald
Project Title: Video Artworks, “Tunnel and the Radio Skies” and “The Chandelier”
To complete two video artworks that are currently in progress, “Tunnel and the Radio Skies” and “The Chandelier”. In Tunnel and the Radio Skies, a hole dug in an urban backyard leads to other locations while the skies and vegetation pulsate with radio signals. The work combines video footage and animated images generated by artificial intelligence models based on text from an amateur radio manual. The Chandelier features numerous short scenes from horror films in which chandeliers shatter, fall, or burst into flame. The scenes will be rotoscoped, morphed, and animated so that one flows into the next.