Daniel F. '65 & Ann H. Sullivan Endowment for Student/Faculty Research

Social and political progress in the 21st century has been closely tied to the successes and failures of mass mobilizations that effectively utilized the internet during the 2010s yet faced increasing control over traffic online in the aftermath of global uprisings. Several nation-states, threatened by country-wide movements and the 2013 NSA revelations, directed their efforts towards implementing new policies and regulations to control the local Internet. This set a precedent for many others to adopt new methods and metrics of control.

Social and political progress in the 21st century has been closely tied to the successes and failures of mass mobilizations that effectively utilized the internet during the 2010s yet faced increasing control over traffic online in the aftermath of global uprisings. Several nation-states, threatened by country-wide movements and the 2013 NSA revelations, directed their efforts towards implementing new policies and regulations to control the local Internet. This set a precedent for many others to adopt new methods and metrics of control.

This summer I explored and researched the relief printing technique of woodcuts through experimentation under the mentorship of Professor Melissa Schulenberg, a renowned master Mokuhanga printer and one of my Senior Honors Project academic advisors. This opportunity allowed me to focus on the development, brainstorming, and artistic process of essential pieces for my Senior Project.

What is meaning, and how is it communicated? Paul Grice’s formulations of speaker meaning (Grice, 1957) and conversational implicature (1975) pave the way to answer those questions. In a nutshell, Grice demonstrates that our intuitions about the distinction between what is said and what is communicated can be explained in terms of communicative intentions. Unfortunately, his theory lacks psychological plausibility, and it fails to give an adequate explanation of how hearers comprehend a speaker’s communicative intention.

What is the role of natural world in times of chaos? When, if ever, do we shed the trivialities of human behavior? In the beginning of a parodic post-apocalyptic fiction piece, characters explore what it means to be part of a community after losing everything and how far one can exploit others before compromising their integrity. This project attempts to push the boundaries of conventional fiction forms and investigate the creative process of writing long form fiction compared to short form fiction, and will be presented during the Festival of Scholarship in April 2025. 

During the start of the American Civil War, in 1861, the Sea Islands off the coast of Port Royal in South Carolina were soon re-taken by the Union Army. The islands contained large plantations growing corn and cotton, sprawled with fine mansions with colorful and exotic flowers. As the plantation owners saw the Union Navy arrive on their shores, they evacuated. During this haste evacuation, the owners of the fields and enslaved African Americans left behind everything they owned. This event created a truly unique moment for the United States Government. 

My research explored different therapeutic models of addiction from a philosophy lens, evaluating the role agency and self-identity play in addiction. Using the widely known 12-step model, this paper discusses the moral model, genetic model, brain disease model, and existential model of addiction. Ultimately, I conclude that addiction needs to be approached from a more individualistic model that acknowledges the variety of factors that play a role in the disorder.

Encouraging a zero-waste framework in the fashion industry by reinventing thrifting as it exists. Looking at the problem of fast fashion from a business perspective and reinventing a sector of sustainable fashion to make sustainable clothing the preferred choice for the shopper. Empowering the shopper to feel their best in their custom fit and designed clothing.

Given the intricate interplay between the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid (HPT) and hypothalamic-pituitary-interrenal (HPI) axes in young tadpoles, the release of triiodothyronine (T3), an active thyroid hormone, is dependent on the body's need for corticosterone (CORT).

Helen “Tommie” Whalen had a palpable presence during her time at St. Lawrence University, where she served as the school’s registrar from 1930 to 1968 and acted as communications officer between the institution and enlisted students during WWII. Helen Whalen’s importance to St. Lawrence is reflected by the fact that she is in the athletic hall of fame and her work is mentioned in Candle in the Wilderness.

In 1987, St. Lawrence University’s then annual David B. Steinman Festival of the Arts was entitled “Art and the Vietnam Era: The Politics of Memory.” One element of the festival elicited over 140 veterans from around the country to send in hundreds of poems to a group of SLU faculty who selected and arranged them into a printed anthology. Along with their poetry submissions, veterans sent notes of gratitude, descriptions of their service, catalogues of awards and decorations they had received, and various other documents.

My summer research project aimed to analyze the enduring impact of Eve Ensler's 1996 play, 'The Vagina Monologues,' across four distinct eras: the Early Era (1996-2004), Middle Era (2004-2015), Pre-Covid Era (2015-2020), and Post-Covid Era (2020-2023). By delving into the popular discourse surrounding the play during each period, I sought to trace its historical trajectory and identify shifts in societal perceptions. This project served as a platform for honing my skills in historical research.

Urban art has dramatically blossomed from classic graffiti scattered across cities to a new dimension; street art stickers, or simply stickers. Stickers that litter pedestrian signals, electrical boxes, or just about any accessible surface found in cities allow for self-expression and engage passersby with their message. Street art stickers, when analyzed in connection with specific locations and times in history, provide an in-depth look into the cultures in which they were born.

My project was a pilot study exploring the possible relationship between worsened depressive symptoms and poor dental health decisions and how best to sample this data for my upcoming SYE project. With our own questions being added to the questionnaire, it was integral for future research that we investigate what works and what doesn't for proper sampling. 

Everyone experiences life through a different lens. While we value a constant and universal factor when analyzing data, identity is fluid and ever-changing.

The goal of my project was to write short stories serving as psychological portraits of individuals coming of age, with a thematic focus on familial independence and socioeconomic mobility. Throughout this project, I gained insight on the drafting process and how to use such processes to produce psychologically rich characters. For each of the two stories produced, I wrote three separate drafts, each with a distinct title and focus.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, conversational AI systems like Chat GPT have emerged as powerful tools for natural language processing and human-computer interactions. My research aims to provide a thorough examination of the strengths and weaknesses of Chat GPT, while also delving into the pervasive issue of biases inherent in various AI models.

The purpose of this project was to analyze and digitize information pertaining to the collection of Mesopotamian burials held at St. Lawrence University under Dr. Mindy Pitre, excavated from Tell Leilan, Syria between 1979 and 1991 under the direction of Yale professor Dr. Harvey Weiss.

It is common to ask what something means, or what someone means by something, but rare to ask what it means for something to mean something. What does ‘meaning’ mean? This is arguably the most fundamental question a human enquirer can ask, and it is quite difficult to answer. The prevailing view in the philosophy of language is that a sentence's meaning is defined by its truth-conditions, or the conditions under which it would be true.

St. Lawrence University is a private institution located in Canton, NY. With around 2,250 students enrolled on campus each year, there are many disciplines, course options, and routes to take for new students. Students may meet with their advisers to help guide them on the correct path of courses, or they may choose to guide themselves. Every student goes through the registration process themselves, however. And every professor is on the receiving end of that registration process. At St. Lawrence there are three days of registration for students.

Archiving the Dub is a project that seeks to historicize and memorialize a theme cottage in St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, called ‘The Dub’, which houses a group of students who engage with feminist activism. Through this project, an attempt is made to trace a genealogy of its members’ missions, interests and activities through the digitization of documents dating back to the 1990s, as well as discussing the significance and contribution of these materials to the identity-building of the group.

Research Question: Can populist political parties in countries with relatively low levels of corruption gain public support using anti-corruption platforms? If so, why does this campaign tactic work? 

In my research fellowship, I looked at the Constructed Language, or "Conlang" Toki Pona, and its popularity in online fandom communities. I discussed how Toki Pona is a a language that strongly adheres to the philosophy that there are no “incorrect” ways to use their language through its linguistic structure, as well as how the speech community surrounding Toki Pona speakers is organized almost entirely online, and how that modifies the traditional understanding of what a speech community is, and how it operates less like a speech community, and more like an online "Fandom".

By conducting in-depth interviews with US college students studying abroad and taking medical courses while abroad, our research team worked to analyze their experiences, including their perceived advantages of the opportunity, disadvantages, and barriers to accessing the opportunity. Additionally, we analyze how the experiences abroad benefit these students in their pathway to achieving post-grad success (specifically within the medical field) compared to students who didn't get to study abroad.  

Sports analytics are a constantly growing field, but little work has been done to incorporate analytics to video games. This summer through my project, I wanted to see if similar tools that are used in professional sports could be applied to sports video games, specifically to predict Rocket League game outcome. I utilized a variety of statistical learning methods to investigate which statistics were most positively or negatively associated with winning, and built a random forest model that classified games as wins/losses correctly with almost 90% accuracy.