Two ICLS students are 2024 IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship Winners
We are thrilled to announce that two ICLS students are winners of the 2024 IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship. Each year, IRCPL supports a cohort of Columbia University graduate and undergraduate students conducting research on the intersection of religion, culture, and public life.
Ana-Luiza de A. Claudio is a 2nd year PhD student in cultural studies in the Latin American and Iberian Cultures Department at Columbia University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Amazonian Audio-Visual Poetics in Extractive Realities: Indigenous Artistic Influence on Contemporary South America,” examines the role of Indigenous artistic expressions in shaping narratives about Amazonian territory and its identities. The research spans the period marked by two waves of left-wing government ascension in South America, from the early 2000s to the 2020s, specifically in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. In particular, she analyzes how Indigenous audio-visual artists and performers from Amazonian territory interpret the idea of spiritual and physical Amazonian landscapes and soundscapes in an extractive time. She aims to investigate how contemporary artists address themes of identity, activism, and environmental relationships through their art and their cosmologies.
Julie Xinzhu Chen is a rising junior majoring in Comparative Literature & Society. Her summer project supported by the IRCPL fellowship focuses on the emergence of Chinese modernity that is entangled with religious narratives in Qing Chinese literature. By tracing the “precarious” boundaries between the religious and the literary, she plans to investigate the evolving tension between religiosity and secularism in anticipating Chinese modernity and its transnational context. Her project considers the interconnectedness between textual visuality, the presence and flow of material objects, and the active role religion played in complicating the dynamics of gender and sexuality through heightened attention to materiality in/of texts.
