Brown University Library is pleased to announce that Paulina Gąsiorowska and Amira Haileab are the recipients of the 20th annual Undergraduate Prize for Excellence in Library Research, supported through the Center for Library Exploration and Research. This award, established in partnership with the Office of the Dean of the College, recognizes undergraduate projects that make extensive and creative use of Brown University Library’s collections, including print and primary resources, databases, and special collections.

The winning projects are honored with a $1,000 prize each and will be recognized at an awards ceremony on Wednesday, April 29 at 3 p.m. in the Racial Justice Resource Center on the second floor of the Rockefeller Library.

Winners

Paulina Gąsiorowska ’27

“On Re-Painting and (Self-) Primitivizing in Mela Muter’s Maternity Cycle” 

Paulina Gąsiorowska’s research project, “On Re-Painting and (Self-)Primitivizing in Mela Muter’s Maternity Cycle,” takes up the life and work of early 20th century Polish-Jewish painter Mela Muter, who made her mark on French modernism by painting and re-painting maternity scenes across the aesthetic modes associated with the great (male) artists of the Western European avant-garde. Turning to exhibition catalogs and artist emigration archives, as well as frameworks of feminist, cultural, and art historians and theorists, the project posits a critical recognition of Muter’s pictorial surfaces as not constituting sites of pure radical subjectivity, but rather as staging dynamic negotiations of her ambivalent positionalities and complicities in modernist discourses of repetition and derivation, cosmopolitanism and primitivism, origin and originality.

Amira Haileab ’26

 “A Black Red Sea: Understanding the Red Sea in Black Geography through the Conscript”

This paper is the introduction to Amira Haileab’s larger honors thesis project for AFRI 1970 with the supervision of Professors Kim Gallon and Jennifer Johnson. The project seeks to answer how The Conscript: A Novel of Libya’s Anticolonial War, by Dr. Abba Gebreyesus Hailu, understands and reimagines the Red Sea as a racialized space, and the significance of Black geography, the study of the relationship between Blackness and space, for understanding the role that the Red Sea plays in the novel. Written in 1927, published in 1950, and translated from Tigrinya to English in 2013, The Conscript is a fictional retelling of the experiences of Eritrean soldiers, known as the ascari. From 1889 to 1941, the ascari were conscripted by Italy to battle anti-colonial nationalist forces across African countries, including Sudan, Ethiopia, and Libya. The fraught journey of the ascari in The Conscript locates the region’s geography as a site of transformation, remembrance, and grief, highlighting the role that geography plays in informing identity. By analyzing two critical geographies in The Conscript — the coast and the desert — Amira’s paper works toward classifying the Red Sea as a particular lens through which the characters begin to understand their conscription and subjugation in relation to other African people.