Virtual Graduate Research Fair
PAST EVENT | 19 November 2020 18:00
This year's Graduate Research Fair will be taking place virtually for donors to Pembroke College, using the platform Zoom. Similarly to the traditional format, you will be able to vote for your favourite presentation during the event, with the winner receiving a £100 prize. Pembroke's Strategic Development Director, Alice Gosling, will also provide you with an update on the College.
Register your place at this event now
About The Presenters:
Olivia Durand (2016, History)
"Imagined communities and settler colonialism: South Russia and Louisiana in the 19th century"
My doctoral thesis stems from my interest for questions of cosmopolitanism, bilingual cultures and immigration and a desire to understand how multiculturalism had been accommodated – or not – historically. I am curious to understand how historical cases could tie into more contemporary debates surrounding immigration, national identity(ies), bilingual heritage and the tension between integration and assimilation. New Orleans had always been a place that I found fascinating, because of its complex colonial history, its linguistically Francophone roots, and its originality in 21st century America. What was more surprising to me were the multiple commonalities that I found in Odessa, a Black sea harbour in modern-day Ukraine, previously one of the main ports of the Russian empire. The unique histories of both Odessa and New Orleans, being recent creations in an age of territorial expansion, raised questions of identity formation and cultural survival in settler urban contexts. My research aims to understand the dynamics of cultural survival in booming settler context, therefore going against narratives of melting-pot as an essential tool for integration.
Julia Huentemann (2019, Modern South Asian Studies)
"Setting Sun on India‘s Solar Dreams? Incompatible objectives in India‘s National Solar Mission"
Taking a ‘global leadership role’ in solar cell and module manufacturing was one of the declared targets of India’s National Solar Mission (NSM). However, with India importing between 80-90% of their required solar equipment, the reality looks much bleaker. Therefore, the question is not, whether India has failed to meet the manufacturing targets enshrined in her NSM, but why. Identifying India as a ‘latecomer’ to an extremely globalised and well-established Solar Value Chain, this presentation will zoom in on the factors that have impeded the effective imposition of Trade Defence Instruments to shield India’s solar manufacturers from international competition. Thus, accounting for India’s ever-increasing dependence on solar imports - especially from China – this presentation enjoys high relevance in the wake of India’s emphasis on self-sufficiency inspired by supply shocks ensued by Covid-19, and renewed border tensions with China.
Melissa Alexander (2017, English)
"It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at’: Virginia Woolf, loneliness, and shared attention to objects"
In this time of COVID-19 lockdowns, the theme of loneliness has gathered widespread attention. In this presentation, I illuminate a specific species of loneliness in Virginia Woolf’s work that is not, as many theorists suggest, simply a failure of interpersonal relations or a deficit in meaningful communication. Rather, this loneliness emerges out of a troubled rapport with things. It can be traced back to the eighteenth-century empiricist legacy Woolf inherits from her father, Leslie Stephen, which radically claimed that one’s experience of objects is just as private, idiosyncratic and incommunicable as one’s innermost thoughts. Empiricism suggested that ‘every glance is an act of necromancy;’ our experience of objects is ineluctably subjective, and we can never be sure of “seeing together” or seeing anything save the reflections of ‘my own soul’ (Proust 137). Pondering this problem, many modernists asked, ‘how can we yoke our divers worlds to draw together? How can we issue from the circle [in]scribed about each point of view?’ (Eliot 141). In Woolf’s works, the problem of loneliness is repeatedly resolved through shared attention to an object. These seemingly trivial scenes are charged with a strange pathos that can only be understood in the context of modernism’s emotional response to empiricism. Woolf’s characters are typically unable to coordinate attention and consequently, synchronising attention through the simple gesture of pointing becomes an act loaded with existential concerns, ethical responsibilities, and dilemmas. In response to the “loneliness that is the truth about things” (Woolf To the Lighthouse 165), looking together at objects brings about a ‘vast alleviation’ through the promise of community (Woolf The Waves 105).
Virtual Graduate Research Fair
PAST EVENT | 19 November 2020 18:00
This year's Graduate Research Fair will be taking place virtually for donors to Pembroke College, using the platform Zoom. Similarly to the traditional format, you will be able to vote for your favourite presentation during the event, with the winner receiving a £100 prize. Pembroke's Strategic Development Director, Alice Gosling, will also provide you with an update on the College.
Register your place at this event now
About The Presenters:
Olivia Durand (2016, History)
"Imagined communities and settler colonialism: South Russia and Louisiana in the 19th century"
My doctoral thesis stems from my interest for questions of cosmopolitanism, bilingual cultures and immigration and a desire to understand how multiculturalism had been accommodated – or not – historically. I am curious to understand how historical cases could tie into more contemporary debates surrounding immigration, national identity(ies), bilingual heritage and the tension between integration and assimilation. New Orleans had always been a place that I found fascinating, because of its complex colonial history, its linguistically Francophone roots, and its originality in 21st century America. What was more surprising to me were the multiple commonalities that I found in Odessa, a Black sea harbour in modern-day Ukraine, previously one of the main ports of the Russian empire. The unique histories of both Odessa and New Orleans, being recent creations in an age of territorial expansion, raised questions of identity formation and cultural survival in settler urban contexts. My research aims to understand the dynamics of cultural survival in booming settler context, therefore going against narratives of melting-pot as an essential tool for integration.
Julia Huentemann (2019, Modern South Asian Studies)
"Setting Sun on India‘s Solar Dreams? Incompatible objectives in India‘s National Solar Mission"
Taking a ‘global leadership role’ in solar cell and module manufacturing was one of the declared targets of India’s National Solar Mission (NSM). However, with India importing between 80-90% of their required solar equipment, the reality looks much bleaker. Therefore, the question is not, whether India has failed to meet the manufacturing targets enshrined in her NSM, but why. Identifying India as a ‘latecomer’ to an extremely globalised and well-established Solar Value Chain, this presentation will zoom in on the factors that have impeded the effective imposition of Trade Defence Instruments to shield India’s solar manufacturers from international competition. Thus, accounting for India’s ever-increasing dependence on solar imports - especially from China – this presentation enjoys high relevance in the wake of India’s emphasis on self-sufficiency inspired by supply shocks ensued by Covid-19, and renewed border tensions with China.
Melissa Alexander (2017, English)
"It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at’: Virginia Woolf, loneliness, and shared attention to objects"
In this time of COVID-19 lockdowns, the theme of loneliness has gathered widespread attention. In this presentation, I illuminate a specific species of loneliness in Virginia Woolf’s work that is not, as many theorists suggest, simply a failure of interpersonal relations or a deficit in meaningful communication. Rather, this loneliness emerges out of a troubled rapport with things. It can be traced back to the eighteenth-century empiricist legacy Woolf inherits from her father, Leslie Stephen, which radically claimed that one’s experience of objects is just as private, idiosyncratic and incommunicable as one’s innermost thoughts. Empiricism suggested that ‘every glance is an act of necromancy;’ our experience of objects is ineluctably subjective, and we can never be sure of “seeing together” or seeing anything save the reflections of ‘my own soul’ (Proust 137). Pondering this problem, many modernists asked, ‘how can we yoke our divers worlds to draw together? How can we issue from the circle [in]scribed about each point of view?’ (Eliot 141). In Woolf’s works, the problem of loneliness is repeatedly resolved through shared attention to an object. These seemingly trivial scenes are charged with a strange pathos that can only be understood in the context of modernism’s emotional response to empiricism. Woolf’s characters are typically unable to coordinate attention and consequently, synchronising attention through the simple gesture of pointing becomes an act loaded with existential concerns, ethical responsibilities, and dilemmas. In response to the “loneliness that is the truth about things” (Woolf To the Lighthouse 165), looking together at objects brings about a ‘vast alleviation’ through the promise of community (Woolf The Waves 105).