Textual and Digital Studies teamed up with French and Italian Studies to award 9 students on their impressive projects throughout the 2022-2023 academic year. 5 students from FIS and 4 students from TXTDS were selected for their hard work, creativity, and innovation. Their projects are worth a closer look, see below:
1st Place, French and Italian Studies: Evelyn Mason. Evelyn’s translation project of “Balance ton quoi” by Angèle is an unapologetic stance against sexism. Consent is incredibly important, and irreplaceable, it is symbolic to breach language barriers with art on the topic.
1st Place, Undergraduate Textual and Digital Studies: Sadie Quimby. Starting with uncut pages, through bookbinding, illuminated lettering, and hand writing, Sadie truly builds this magnificent book from scratch. “A Retelling of the Tale of Ghismonda” is underselling the project, it is a revitalization.
1st Place, Graduate Textual and Digital Studies: Molly Porter. Molly’s “Poetry of the Puget Sound” project is more than a compilation, it’s a curation. 4 pieces intertwined. Anaesthesia’s eerie asphyxiation only exacerbated by the rhyming relentless hum of The Klondiker’s Dream.
2nd Place, French and Italian Studies: Amy Harris. Amy’s podcast, “Hemming and Hoeing: the relation between sex work and needlework” is a deep dive, with historical references across the issues and without trepidation commonly seen in conversations on sex work.
3rd Place, French and Italian Studies: Sonja Kjelstrup. With a beautiful and sensitive graphic novel (or bande dessinée in French) Sonja tells the story of Nore, a 10-year-old girl and her mysterious encounters in “L’Araignée, le rat, et le corbeau.”
Runner Up, French and Italian Studies: Amanda Song. Verlan can be a delicate topic in French lingual history. It brings conversations of immigration, colonialism, and injustice, which are hot-button issue in contemporary study. Amanda’s essay “Verlan and French Universalism” doesn’t shy away, and identifies the power countercultural language can have.
Runner Up, French and Italian Studies: Eva-Grace Petrie. Everyone knows who Marco Polo is, but do they understand the implications of his work? To open that discussion across the world, Eva-Grace’s “Racial and Religious Proximities in Marco Polo” project has to dig past the myth and into intersectionality.
Runner Up, Undergraduate Textual and Digital Studies: Jason Grossman-Ferris. To acknowledge that the bible has been translated imperfectly, or to seek new translations as a way to reach closer to original text strays dangerously close to blasphemy for some. Jason braves this, and brings in the 1950 vulgata Bible in his project, “Bible Bifolium: Ecclesiasticus 35:14-20 (Beals 16, Folio 1, verso).”
Runner Up, Graduate Textual and Digital Studies: Amanda Marie Rogus. Tackling Shakespeare’s legacy and persona with a critical eye is no easy feat. Amanda Marie Rogus does so with exceptional panache in her video entitled “Make Distinction of our Hands.”