Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research

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This annual prize recognizes undergraduate students who demonstrate exceptional sophistication and originality in research initiatives.

In partnership with the Office of the Dean of the College, the Brown University Library sponsors the Undergraduate Research Prize. The purpose of the prize is to recognize excellence in undergraduate research projects that make creative and extensive use of the Brown University Library's collections, including, but not limited to, print resources, databases, primary resources, and materials in all media. The project may take the form of a traditional paper, a database, a website, or other digital project.

Up to two prizes of $1000 each may be given. Prize recipients will be honored at a Library reception and will be asked to give a short presentation on their research projects.

Prize-winning projects will be honored on the Brown University Library website and added to the Brown University Archives.

Eligibility

Applicants must be current full-time students working toward a Brown University undergraduate degree. Eligible projects include any paper or project submitted by an individual for a Brown class in the 2024 calendar year.

Application

Applications for the 2025 Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research are now open.

Applications should include the project itself, a statement on your research process (500 - 750 words), a list of sources used, and a letter of support from the faculty member who taught your class.

The letter of support should include information about the course and context in which the paper or project was written; the student's research process; the quality and unique contribution of the work; and anything else that will help the prize committee assess the significance of the work as a product of undergraduate research.

Submit your application materials via the online form.

Applications are due April 1, 2025. Winning projects will be announced in late April.

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2024 Winning Projects

Stephen Ololade Ogunbiyi, ‘26

Stephen Ololade Ogunbiyi’s research project “Neighbors in Lexicon: Tracing Loan Words and Linguistic Ties Between the Bariba and Yoruba languages of Nigeria'' presents a rigorous and critical exploration of the intertwined linguistic and cultural histories of two pre-colonial Nigerian kingdoms, the Oyo and Borgu kingdoms, from the 15th through the 19th centuries. Completed as a final project in a Fall 2023 independent study in Advanced Yoruba under the guidance of Victor Temitope Alabi, Stephen’s project reframes traditional scholarly historiographies of Bariba and Yoruba-speaking people away a focus on warring tension and towards a focus on linguistic exchange and interdependence. “As an African linguist,” Victor Temitope Alabi notes, “this study is the first of its kind. The paper is an excellent contribution to Yoruba historical linguistics.”

The methodology for Stephen’s project drew extensively on Library resources, including the use of Interlibrary Loan to track down copies of dictionaries and other key texts in the linguistic history of West Africa, such as Samuel Johnson’s 1921 “The History of the Yorubas: From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate.” Applying a critical lens to the history of language transmission and to sources written from within a colonial context, Stephen also utilized Interlibrary Loan to locate and access more modern sources that offered other historiographies of language and culture in the region based on oral history and oral poetry, a traditional method of Yoruba record-keeping. Library databases such as JSTOR also made it possible to locate new and emerging scholarship in these areas. Stephen’s project was successful through his engagement with Library collections that are less used and in some cases marginalized entirely. The emerging project is an incredibly strong and original contribution to research in the linguistics discipline. Stephen’s careful and creative research methodologies, combined with his clear articulation of the personal stakes of this project, invites new readers into the field of linguistics and shows us the joy of discovering deeper connections between culturally significant words like “banana” and “chameleon.”

Camille Blanco, ‘26

Camille Blanco’s research project “Beyond the Wax: The Imagines Maiorum Revisited,” explores the scholarly history and visual significance of the “imagines maiorum,” ancient Roman artifacts thought, perhaps, to represent wax likenesses of Roman ancestors within funerary practices and of which we have very little surviving archaeological or visual evidence. Targeting legacies of dissenting scholarly opinions about the imagines maiorum and the abundance of non-critical studies about them that exist within academic discourse, Camille’s work simultaneously raises and addresses questions about viewership, spectacle, scholarly voice, and source provenance within both the world of the imagines maiorum, as well as within the disciplines of Classics, Art History, and Architecture more broadly. The project was completed for Gretel Rodríguez’s Fall 2023 seminar, Politics and Spectacle in the Arts of Ancient Rome. One of only two undergraduate students enrolled in a graduate seminar, Camille, a sophomore, “excelled in all aspects of the seminar, quickly becoming one of the most active participants,” and in her final project she “took the task to read carefully the many arguments proposed against the available visual, archaeological, and textual evidence, offering a more nuanced perspective of these enigmatic artifacts.”

Camille’s research mobilized an impressive array of print and digital Library resources towards the creation of this original and deeply contextualized project. Utilizing a blend of targeted source discovery in BruKnow alongside chance encounters with new materials in the Library’s stacks (especially those 1-Size art books!) Camille read a tremendous range of scholarly works within and through visual mediums. The result is an intense and inspired conversation between primary sources, often read in Latin, Greek, and French, and secondary literatures generated across a wide range of time periods and scholarly disciplines. Camille also drew on the expertise of Brown’s subject librarians, especially the expertise of Karen Bouchard, who guided Camille in multiple instances on building Library research skills and accessing harder-to-find sources, as well as on locating and accessing fair use images to illustrate emerging arguments. Camille weaves these Library resources elegantly, concealing the labor it takes to surface these materials and perform in-depth, critical readings that lead to the creation of unique arguments and interventions. In the process, Camille’s project raises larger questions about agency, gender, academic lineage, and partial perspective in knowledge production about the ancient world.

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2023 Winning Projects

Eric Gottlieb, ‘25

Eric Gottlieb’s research project, “Comparing the Decipherments of Three Cuneiform Scripts: Old Persian, Urartian, and Ugaritic,” presents a carefully considered story about how philologists, or historians of written languages, worked across the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries to decode cuneiform scripts from three key periods of ancient Assyrian history. The project mobilizes theoretical frameworks developed by linguists, historians, and archaeologists to systematically explore and compare these histories of decipherment, asking how they shifted and expanded as the field of Assyriology itself matured. The project was completed for Felipe Rojas’ Fall 2022 course “The Ancient Near East: Early Modern Intellectual Histories,” which asked students to write a final paper that explored some aspect of the historiography of Assyria. Felipe Rojas noted that Eric, an undergraduate student, completed this research for a graduate-level class in Egyptology and Assyriology.

Eric began this work by identifying three scripts representative of different eras of Assyriological study. Using ProQuest, JSTOR, HathiTrust, and Project Muse via BruKnow, he created an extensive base of secondary sources from multiple centuries and fields of study. These sources documented both the evolution of decipherment theory more generally and the historical details of decipherment for these sample scripts specifically. Drawing on these sources, Eric then developed and honed a complex set of metrics, which he used to undertake a methodical analysis of the historical and intellectual processes that contributed to the complete decipherment of each of the three scripts. As the metrics were applied to each script’s unique history, Eric tabulated the data and used it to build historiographical narratives that became the outline for the final essay. The ethical dimensions of this research work were guided by Eric’s reading of the essay “Untold Tales of Mesopotamian Discovery” by Zainab Bahrani, a scholar who delivered a guest lecture in Eric’s class about dynamics of fetishization within this field of study. Deploying a highly technical methodology, Eric’s project produces for his readers a clear picture of the intellectual labor, scholarly collaboration, and independent discovery that contributed to deciphering ancient forms of written communication.

Eric’s project demonstrates a skillful and methodical engagement with Library research tools and sources at every moment. It highlights the creative undercurrents of research methodology and reminds us that research is above all an iterative process that requires a continuous refinement of our reading and analytic practices, as well as continuous reflection about the stakes of our claims. In bringing to life these stories of decipherment, Eric’s work invites us into a potentially unfamiliar critical landscape, all the while maintaining clear commitments to scholarly rigor and the methods and sources that shape his field of study.

Juliana Merullo, ‘24

Juliana Merullo’s essay “Killing Time Waiting in Line: Food Acquisition and Women’s Production in 1970s and 80s Cuba” uncovers the uneven history of Cuba’s food rationing program in the three decades following the 1958 Revolution. Reading primary and secondary sources from multiple perspectives, including state-level discourse and popular ethnography, Juliana’s essay considers the political, social, and ethical dimensions of both food policy and food acquisition in a time and place marked by a growing tension between egalitarian ideals and material disparities on the ground. Juliana’s essay was completed for Jennifer Lambe’s Fall 2022 History course, Rebel Island: Cuba, 1492- present. Dr. Lambe noted that Juliana’s arguments were “persuasive and nuanced,” and that the essay was, “particularly successful at surveying an often confusing economic landscape, while also exploring how ordinary Cubans, and especially women, experienced the whiplash that came with policy changes.”

Juliana’s research process mobilized an impressive and truly interdisciplinary array of Library tools and resources. These included print books from the Rockefeller Library stacks, such as Medea Benjamin’s 1989 ethnography No Free Lunch: Food & Revolution in Cuba Today, and unique primary sources accessed via Interlibrary Loan, such as historical articles published in Granma, the official state journal of the Cuban Communist Party and Bohemia, a popular Cuban newspaper. Working skillfully with materials in both English and Spanish, Juliana utilized critical translation skills and applied a discerning eye to the narratives presented within her sources. These close readings of key texts reveal how bias and power shape stories about Cuban food distribution in different moments and from different perspectives. Reading Castro’s media interviews alongside accounts of ordinary womens’ experiences shopping for food, Juliana demonstrates that primary source materials are always deeply embedded within specific historical contexts, and that the best research practices seek to uncover and make explicit those contexts for the reader without getting bogged down by detail.

Weaving together theory, ethnography, and archival trace, Juliana’s project draws significantly on Library collections and centers “from the ground up” perspectives on Cuban history and food policy in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. It reveals what else we might glean from careful translations of both popular and “official” sources. And, her work reminds us that research can and should be an act of care that returns to the past in order to amplify marginalized experiences and call out uneven structures of power and dispossession from the vantage point of the present moment.

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2022 Winning Projects

Brian Thompson, ‘24

Brian Thompson’s research project, “Remembering Benefit Street: Black Heritage and Displacement in College Hill,” recounts a chapter in the history of urban renewal in College Hill, with special focus on the Black residents who were displaced from their homes and communities. The research is presented as a digital project in the form of a story map, which combines narrative description with historical images and maps to provide an interactive, visual account of the transformation of Benefit Street. The project was completed for Lauren Yapp’s Fall 2021 Urban Studies course, “Heritage in the Metropolis: Remembering and Preserving the Urban Past.” Dr. Yapp commended Brian for the “zeal and focus” he brought to his research, and noted that the story map “created a clear and compelling experience for the viewer, giving a glimpse into the history of the neighborhood and the changes it underwent.”

Brian’s research started with “College Hill: A Demonstration Study for Urban Area Renewal,” an influential report conducted by the Providence Preservation Society, which he found in Rockefeller Library. Drawing on the collections of Brown University Library, the Providence Public Library, and the Providence Preservation Society, Brian employed archival research methods to locate photographs, oral histories, and a range of other primary source materials that document the history of urban renewal in College Hill, as well as the lives of former residents. Brian also made excellent use of the relevant secondary literature in heritage and urban studies, strengthening his primary source research by making strong connections to academic work in this field.

The resulting project distills this research into an engaging, clearly documented visual story that enables the reader to see Benefit Street through a new lens. “Remembering Benefit Street” is an outstanding example of the value of exploring new formats for presenting academic research.

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2021 Winning Projects

Cal Turner '21

Cal Turner's paper, "Finance and the Other in the Merchant of Venice," written for Professor Connie Scozzaro's ENGL1361P Shakespeare's Girls, pulled together a variety of research threads to explore the interactions between the economics of early capitalism and the language of exchange in Shakespeare's play. Contributing to Cal’s interest in the topic was the Pembroke seminar Narrating Debt, on theoretical frameworks for understanding the role of finance in literature, which he was also taking.

The paper is a wide-ranging and well researched analysis, based on primary and secondary sources that explain and support one another. Cal was able to discuss the rise of finance and its justification for members of the dominant culture as lottery and fortune, and its negative role as debt and usury, when practiced by racial others and foreigners. His research ultimately connects the financial language of Shakespeare's play to the financing of colonial expansion in the Americas.

Olivia Golubowski '23

Olivia Golubowski's paper, "Neanderthal Dietary Reconstruction Via Analysis of Microremains in Dental Calculus," written for Zachary Dunsett's ARCH1774 Microarchaeology, details a research proposal to investigate Neanderthal dental calculus for food microremains, so as to support or revise theories about the Neanderthal diet.

In order to develop her proposal, Olivia demonstrated thoughtful and creative use of Library resources: She surveyed different topics in a general way. After she identified a domain of interest, she grounded her hypothesis and methodology by researching Homo Neanderthalensis and the relevant scholarship, then reading dental journals, to learn about the study of dentition and, specifically, dental calculus. She then identified locations and condition of Neanderthal skulls to figure out where she would perform the analysis.

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2020 Winning Projects

Abby Wells '21

Abby Wells' paper, "दे वि!मा#हा#त्म्य, Δούργα Μεταφρασθεῖσα ἐκ τοῦ Βραχμάνικου, and Devimahatmyam, Markandeyi Purani Sectio Edidit Latinam Interpretationem: A Comparative Analysis of Greek and Latin Translations of the Devīmāhātmya," compares translations of the Devīmāhātmya, a Hindu religious text, to offer a unique analysis of grammar, content, and interpretation across three languages, including Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.

Wells made creative and extensive use of the Library’s collection by locating the Greek and Latin translations of the Devīmāhātmya in the John Hay Library and Google Books, respectively. The award committee was especially impressed by the project's use of materials made available through the John Hay Library, Google Books, and the Hathi Trust. This project truly spans the full use of library holdings and digital collections available within and beyond Brown University.

Sicheng Luo '20

Sicheng Luo was selected for her fascinating project, "The Symbol of the Pineapple Used for Clocks," which explores the symbolism of pineapples in art and artifacts based on a mutual misunderstanding between China and the West. The project leaned heavily on a variety of Library resources and in-depth research consultations with Brown librarians.

Luo’s project, which was initially inspired by a popular television show in China called "National Treasures," offers the reader an intensive explanation of the history of the pineapple symbol found on a clock made in the Qing Dynasty in China, which is currently on reserve in the Imperial Museum in Beijing.

Luo credits the availability of artist books, scanners, and in-person research consultations at the Library as the foundation of this incredible art history project.

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2019 Winning Projects

Maya Omori '19 created "Hidden Portraits at Brown," a Brown-focused walking tour for the statewide Rhode Tour mobile app for Professor Holly Shaffer's The Art of Portraiture: Pre-Histories of the Selfie (HIAA 1720) and for a subsequent independent study the following semester. Maya's project examines overlooked or underrepresented people associated with Brown, and looks closer at some of Brown's famous landmarks and traditions. Maya incorporated interviews with Brown faculty, curators, and staff with extensive research using our online databases and primary sources. Maya is concentrating in Cognitive Neuroscience.

Using primary sources from the Hay, as well as numerous secondary sources from Brown's physical and online collections, Gabriela Gil '20 wrote a 20-page research paper, "First Aid in South African Gold Mines," which explored the rationale for European mining corporations to create first aid programs specific to black laborers. For the project, Gabriela provided an in-depth discussion of a first aid manual (“Ikusiza Aba Limele”) in order to better understand how mining officials understood the roles and responsibilities in the provision of first aid in these settings, and evaluated the significance of these attitudes and policies for black labor. Gabriela is a Health and Human Biology concentrator; she created this project for Jennifer Johnson's Medicine and Public Health in Africa course (HIST 1960Q).

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2018 Winning Project

The winner of the 2018 Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research was Charlie Steinman ’20, concentrating in history and medieval studies.

Charlie submitted a paper entitled, “’Martin Luther’s whore more than a pope’: Annotation, Disgust, and Materiality in the Reformation Reception of the Pope Joan Myth.” The paper was written for History 1964A: “Age of Impostors: Fraud, Identity, and the Self in Early Modern Europe,” taught by Professor Tara Nummedal.

Charlie’s paper examined the myth of Pope Joan as it was received in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe, especially as revealed in printed books of the period. He had discovered that the image of Pope Joan in Brown’s copy of the Nuremburg Chronicle was scratched out, and further searching revealed many copies of this and other printed chronicles with similar effacements, sometimes with marginal notes. He determined that these effacements were the work of Catholic readers, who were responding to Protestant uses of the Pope Joan myth to discredit the papacy and its purported apostolic succession. Catholic readers wished to show that Pope Joan did not exist and sought to remove her from the histories.

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2017 Winning Project

The winner of the 2017 Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research was Vaughn Campbell ’18, an International Relations Concentrator.

Vaughn submitted a paper entitled, “Brown ­in­ China: Brown’s Role in the American Missionary Project of the Early Twentieth Century,” written in the spring of 2016 for Naoko Shibusawa’s course “HIST1554: History of American Empire.” The paper describes a collaboration between Brown University and Shanghai College in 1920. Vaughn says:

I did the bulk of my research in the Hay Archives, paging through thick files of personal articles, searching for documents relating to these individuals’ time and ambitions in China. I supplemented this with both broad contemporary accounts and secondary historical works found in the stacks of the Rock or through the Library’s online resources. Having never been able to work in the Hay before, or really with any archival resources, I thoroughly enjoyed having such a close connection to the original, 100-­year-­old documents of these three professors, as well as working with the Hay librarians to discover and locate these rare documents.

Professor Shibusawa wrote, “What I appreciated about Vaughn’s paper is that every year when I lecture on Chinese student missionaries to China, I ask the 80-120 students in the class, ‘Does anybody want to research what Brown students were doing?’ Nobody took me up on it except Vaughn when he did so last year.”

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2016 Winning Projects

Rachel Gold '19 wrote a paper on “The Education of John Hay,” for which she used a wide variety of contemporary sources, including John Hay’s own letters and papers, archival records, and other students’ diaries to describe John Hay’s experience at Brown and in Providence. She worked her way into these sources by first reading, chronologically, a series of biographies of Hay from 1905 through 2014. The result is an evocative portrait of the Midwesterner who found himself at Brown University in 1855.

Halley McArn '19 created a website that explores the issue of presidential pardons, with special reference to pardons issued by Lincoln during the Civil War, as well as a discussion of the issue in the Obama presidency. The website begins with the origins of the presidential pardon, then proceeds to Lincoln’s pardons and the special issues he had to consider, especially in the midst of a war that had torn the country apart. It ends with an overview of the presidential pardon up to and including Obama, with special reference to the context of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, issues raised by this year’s First Readings choice: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

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2015 Winning Project

Read "A Providence Affair" (PDF) by Beatrice Senocak ’15, the 2015 Undergraduate Prize Winner.

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2014 Winning Projects

Read "Soldiers of Solidarity: The Boston Committee for Health Rights in Central America" (PDF), by Leah Jones '17, and "Clocks and Empire: an Indian Case Study" (PDF), by Richard Salamé '16, the 2014 UGRA Prize Winners.