Derik Cool is a senior at Lebanon Valley College majoring in English literature and minoring in music and French.  When not working as a stagehand and projectionist at a theater, he enjoys watching and discussing films.

 

Mara Dauphin is a senior at Yale University, majoring in history. Her interests include history of sexualities and cultures of performance, and her senior thesis charts the evolution of American transgender periodicals through the sexual revolution and the gay liberation movement. She is also the editor-in-chief of Q, Yale's LGBTQ magazine, and she hopes to enroll in a related doctorate program in the fall.

 

Michael Da Silva is in his final year of studies at the University of Toronto. He will next pursue graduate studies at Rutgers University. His primary research interests include philosophy of law, social and political philosophy and ethics (including applied ethics).

 

Eric Gonzaba is a senior completing his Bachelor of Arts in History and Political Science at Indiana University. He serves as editorial assistant at the Indiana Magazine of History, one of the nation's oldest historical journals. He previously authored "Stayin Alive in the Cold War" for Indiana University's Undergraduate Journal of History, where he investigated disco's manipulation as a political tool in the 1970s and 1980s.  He hopes to continue his studies of popular culture and integration in graduate school. 

 

Theodora Hermes is currently a senior at Lebanon Valley College, double majoring in English literature and sociology. Her interests include contemporary women's literature, African American literature, and feminist theory. In the fall of 2012, she will begin work on her MA in Literature, with the ultimate goal of obtaining a PhD. 

 

Sean Guynes is an undergraduate in linguistic anthropology at Western Washington University, where he also pursues minors in Spanish, history, and Russian. He wrote this paper while attending the 30th International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature, and Culture, at the University of Prishtina, Kosova. He has also published a paper on the origin of right-headed noun phrases in the Balkan Linguistic Area, and has a forthcoming article which proposes a new model for studying linguistic areas. Sean has a broad interest in linguistic anthropology (sociolinguistics), diachronic linguistics, oral tradition, and language documentation and revitalization, and his focus is on Amerindian languages. He plans on pursuing a PhD in Linguistics, specializing in language documentation.

 

Aleksander Klibisz, the winner of the VHR's high school scholarship contest, is a high school senior at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Tennessee and originally comes from Warsaw, Poland. He will attend the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the fall of 2012 and will double-major in linguistics and computer science with a minor in German. After completing his undergraduate classes, Alex plans to pursue graduate studies in Europe.

 

Marissa Sabbath attained a BA in philosophy with a minor in English from Georgia State University in 2011. She is now working toward a BA in literature, and hopes to continue on to graduate school. Her interests include ethics, epistemology, comparative literature and cultural studies.