Student Standouts USC’s history honors thesis students have brought new scholarship and insight into our not-so-recent past. Here are just a few standouts: William Orr ’16 Orr won a 2016 Discovery Scholar prize for his work “From Condemnation to Celebration: Changing American Representations of the Bombing of Cities and Civilians in East Asia, 1937-1945,” a research project that revealed a double standard in World War II-era attitudes toward bombings of civilian population centers in East Asia. Katherine McCormick A senior, McCormick was named a Discovery Scholar for her historical study of how depictions of the rake through British popular culture changed. McCormick traced the 17th-century stock character’s evolution into the present day, shedding new light on changing views of male and female sexuality. Thomas Armstrong ’15 Armstrong was awarded a USC Global Scholar prize in recognition of his travels in China and Belgium. His honors thesis explored why the geopolitical maneuverings of Franklin Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek failed to produce postwar cooperative security between their two nations. Jasneet Aulakh ’13 Aulakh’s honors thesis addressed India’s anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984; then she turned her attention to the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act of 1993, which mandated that village governments reserve one-third of seats for women. The Fulbright scholar’s research revealed that in most cases, an elected woman is a front for her husband’s proxy vote. Vivian Yan ’14 Yan spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Hong Kong documenting how British and Chinese rule shaped the racial discourse between residents and South Asian immigrants and foreign domestic workers.
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Adams is enrolled in History 492, the intensive scholarly writing class at the heart of the Department of History’s highly regarded honors thesis track. Taught last fall by Perl-Rosenthal, it consisted of six students. By graduation in May, each will have completed a capstone project of publishable quality and length, constituting an original contribution to the field of history. And based on the program’s track record, at least one of these projects will earn its author $10,000 from USC. “We really love and are very proud of our senior thesis program,” Ethington says. “Its success is evident in the prizes these people are winning. Several have won the $10,000 Discovery Scholar prize, including my own advisees.” The coveted Discovery prize recognizes outstanding USC seniors for original scholarship that makes a significant contribution to their field. TIME TRAVELERS It’s a Wednesday afternoon on the University Park Campus and six honors thesis writers are sitting around a table in the basement of the Social Sciences Building. Perl-Rosenthal has a few suggestions for them about how to create a strong thesis introduction. “You’ve read a ton of literature, thought about it, developed your own interpretation,” he tells them. “This is the moment to say: ‘There is a thing I know that other historians don’t know.’ You should feel confident about your argument, and I will continue to push you to express yourself in a confident way.” The emotional, intellectual and writing help comes on the heels of significant financial support. Half the class traveled to far-flung places last summer thanks to the history department: USC history students can receive travel grants of as much as $5,000 through an endowment created by history alumna Roberta Persinger Foulke ’36, MA ’36. That’s enough to cover transportation, lodgings and living expenses while sifting through archives abroad. “It’s hard to do serious historical research without doing archival research at some stage of the project, so having travel funds is a condition of possibility for doing serious work,” Perl-Rosenthal says. “In that regard, we are on par with Ivy League schools. The kind of funding our senior thesis writers get is at the same level.” Some students’ academic curiosity kept them close to home. Krystal Cervantes, for one, has focused on how Chicano youth
borrowed from the Civil Rights movement during the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts, which protested unequal educational opportunities for Mexican-American youth in L.A. classrooms. For her research, Cervantes camped out in the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Library—the first in the U.S. to focus on people of Mexican descent—poring through box after box filled with hidden history: dusty periodicals, original prints, videos, slides and Englishand Spanish-language newspapers. She grew giddy with excitement, “like a kid in a candy store,” says the senior from Whittier, California. “You just open a box. You have no idea what you’re going to find!” Classmate Zachary Larkin didn’t need to leave campus to study World War II-era Jewish resistance to fascism in Budapest. He found an abundance of primary-source materials through the extensive genocide survivor testimonies housed at USC Shoah Foundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education. Founded by USC Trustee Steven Spielberg, the archive has been housed at USC since 2013 and has more than 54,000 audiovisual eyewitness testimonies catalogued online and accessible from anywhere in the world. Bethany Balchunas wanted to study race and French colonial policy in West Africa. Her honors thesis contrasts official records of the tirailleurs—more than 100,000 indigenous African infantrymen who fought for France during World War I—with fictional representations from period novels. So Balchunas traveled to Paris to consult colonial administrative records in the labyrinthine archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale, the national library of France. “Having access to the documents was so exciting,” she says, “and the archival staff were so kind. They searched through a billion different rooms to hunt down a document I needed on microfiche.” As for Anthony Garciano, he is a recipient of a McNair Scholarship, which provides support to promising first-generation and traditionally underrepresented minorities preparing for doctoral education. For his thesis, he wanted to study the formation of Filipino national identity viewed through the eyes of gifted teenagers attending the Philippine Science High School. Launched in 1964, this government-run boarding school brought together gifted youth from across the newly independent Philippines. Far from their homes and families, the teenagers formed an academic spring 2017
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