Rediscovering the New York Harp Ensemble

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Laura Allen and Professor David A. Day, Harold B. Lee Library Music Special Collections Almost forty years ago, a Hungarian immigrant named Aristid von Wurtzler created a quartet of harpists known as the New York Harp Ensemble. Throughout the Ensemble’s career, they played in over 60 countries, performed at the White House on many occasions over […]

Wives of Rural Mexican Migrants: Gender Roles and Mental Health?

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Jared Wilkerson and Dr. Niwako Yamawaki, Psychology Rural Mexican communities near Irapuato, Guanajuato are an ideal place to discover the effects of migration on a population. This area of Mexico contains many villages known as “sending communities” due to a high number of migrants who mostly travel to and from the United States. These sending […]

Changing Legislative Voting Behavior as Evidence of Vote Buying

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Taft Foster and Dr. Eric Eide, Economics Department Within the economic and political science literatures, a variety of theoretical models have been developed which attempt to describe the role of campaign contributions in the political process. These models can be separated into two groups, those which employ the assumption that campaign contributions can purchase legislative […]

The Volunteer Slaves Indentured Servants in the French Caribbean

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Robert D. Taber and Dr. Brett Rushforth, History The last forty years have seen an unprecedented expansion in the study of African slavery and the impact this “peculiar institution” had on the creation of colonies throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In the last twenty years, historians of North America have increasingly examined the development […]

Blood Brothers: Nixon, Bangladesh, and the Rise of Radical Islam in the Asian Subcontinent

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Russell Stevenson and Dr. Andrew Johns, Department of History The research on the Indo-Pakistani war as conducted at the Nixon Presidential Materials project in Baltimore, Maryland yielded excellent fruits for groundbreaking research in the future. Given the relatively recent release of Nixon-era documents to the public, the conclusions to be gleaned from them have the […]

Self-Determination and Independence Movements in Europe: The European Union’s Role

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Jeannine Plamondon and Dr. Danny Damron, Kennedy Center for International Studies The European Union (EU) was created to bring European countries together, but could it also have the effect of breaking countries apart? This was the question I chose to evaluate for my research. I worked as an intern with the Scottish National Party (SNP), […]

An Analysis of the Impact of Higher Education on Likelihood of Employment in Armenia

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Christopher Palmer and Dr. Frank McIntyre, Economics Department This paper employs microdata from the 2001 Armenian National Census to consider how varying levels of higher education affect the likelihood that an individual is employed in Armenia. The analysis concludes that the effect of incomplete undergraduate education on employment status is not statistically different from the […]

Substance Abuse Treatment Programs: What Works and Why

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Jonathan Oliver and Dr. Stephen J. Bahr, Family, Home and Social Sciences Substance Abuse has been a problem for several generations and is a major contributor to mental health problems. To address the issue of substance abuse, many treatment programs have been established with intentions to offer guidance and support to those individuals seeking relief […]

Inventing Tradition: Changes in Local Basket-Making in Two Guatemalan Towns

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Amy Maxwell and Dr. Ruth Toulson, Anthropology Guatemala has a rich indigenous heritage which has attracted the attention of researchers for over 75 years. This culture includes 21 indigenous Maya language groups scattered throughout the country. The civil war ended ten years ago and since then, the country has been healing. As the country has […]