Friends of Fondren Library Research Awards
Launched in 2008 and funded by the Friends of Fondren Library, the Fondren Library Research Awards program recognizes students who demonstrate extraordinary skill and creativity in the application of library and information resources to original research and scholarship. Students submitted their research project and an essay outlining how they used specific library tools and resources to do their research. For more information about the awards, see here
Recent Submissions
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Organized Labor and Faction in the United States, 1930s and 1940s
(2020)During the New Deal in the United States (US), labor unions began to accrue substantial membership and stepped, for the first time, into the realm of political activism. Key arenas of involvement included Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s multiple re-election campaigns, the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the passage of the National ... -
Literary Landscapes: A Future for Post-Frontier Regionalism in Literature of the American West
(2020)Landscape portrayals—literary, visual, or otherwise—serve as recognizable features at the core of American Western iconography and aesthetics. Renderings of landscape point to an implicit gaze appraising the land—a gaze which often communicates its idealization, condemnation, or contemplation of the American West through physical and metaphorical ... -
Re-membering Veracruz: A Decolonial Reading of Regional Colonial Cartography
(2020)Upon the so-called discovery of the American continent, the Spanish crown wanted the means to document and surveil its new lands from afar. For this reason, the Relaciones Geográficas—questionnaires about the physical description of each colonial settlement in New Spain—were distributed, filled out, and sent back to the crown with the purpose of ... -
Exchanges: Artistic Dialogues Between Tibet and China
(2019)In a dynamic exhibition, Exchanges: Artistic Dialogues Between Tibet and China explores hybridized Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Chinese styles from the Tang to the Qing Dynasty. China and Tibet have engaged in an iconographic dialogue, facilitated through Buddhism, for a period of over a thousand years, and a survey of this convergence of styles will ... -
Middle-Class Culture in Cairo Under Ottoman Rule – Perceptions of Power and Knowledge
(2019)This paper focuses on the emergence of a middle-class culture in Cairo under the Ottomans from the 16th to the 18th century… -
Disability, Love, And Limitation: A Response To The Mere-Difference View
(2019)Elizabeth Barnes’ argues that physical disabilities have no impact on how well someone’s life goes since disabilities are not negative difference makers to one’s life. I analyze Barnes’ position and tease out three background theses she utilizes in order to argue her position. The most significant of these theses (I call T2) suggests that the kinds ... -
Acknowledging Impostor Phenomenon: How Does It Affect and Individual's Likability?
(2019)The impostor phenomenon (IP) is the feeling of being an intellectual fraud regardless of any external evidence of incompetency. Research on the effects of IP on mental health is important in understanding how to nurture positive experiences through the duration of undergraduate life. However, the social interactions of individuals who experience IP ... -
Houston 311: An Analysis of Citizen Satisfaction and Engagement
(2019)Houston, like any other metropolitan area, has thousands of public issues that affect its economy and citizens each year. In 2001, a program named Houston 311 was developed to aid the city’s customer service. It allows Houston citizens to report non-emergency issues easily via telephone, email, smart phone app, or the 311 website. Most importantly, ... -
Josquin des Prez’s Motet Qui velatus facie and the Canonization of St. Bonaventure in 1482
(2018)On the basis of historical and stylistic evidence, I argue that Josquin des Prez’s motet Qui velatus facie was a response to St. Bonaventure’s canonization in 1482. In fact, my research supports the claims of Andrea Adami that Josquin was in the service of the Franciscan Pope Sixtus IV at the time he composed the motet, and that either Sixtus or a ... -
Harry Clay Hanszen
(2018) -
Passing Prerogative: The Elizabethan Marriage Negotiations
(2018)Queen Elizabeth I is popularly remembered as one of the most powerful monarchs in English history, especially as the Virgin Queen. While she did have some control over her marital fate, Elizabeth’s decision to remain unmarried was not solely her own. Rather, the political and religious interests of her counsel paved Elizabeth’s path to celibacy. ... -
Seeing opposite: The Battle of Algiers and “colonial analogy” in the “Panther 21”
(2018)The People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur et al (1970)—as of 1972, the longest and costliest Supreme Court case in New York State history—concerned the indictment of twenty-two members of the Black Panther Party. Charged with “an over-all plan to harass and destroy [the] elements of society which the defendants regarded as part of the ... -
Adaptation of the Samson Narrative in The Simpsons
(2018)Samson, the Nazarite Judge of the Judahites, is a character who has been widely discussed among biblical scholars. Scholars’ conclusions range from Samson as a hero, to Samson as a moral lesson, from Samson as a tragic character, to Samson as a literary device. There is no one view of Samson that is overwhelmingly more popular among scholars. ... -
Developing Messianism from the Old Testament, to Qumran, to Jesus
(2018)Studying messianism, one encounters a bottomless array of written work all of which are meant to clarify, elaborate, or identify the origins of Christian and Jewish beliefs in a Messiah. The abundance of work done in this field are evidence of the complex nature of the topic, and make it irrefutably clear that emphasis on a different set of primary ... -
John Saunders Chase: The Politics of a Black Architect in Postwar Houston
(2018)John Saunders Chase (1925-2012) was an African American architect in Houston, Texas. As a student and architect, he broke a color line, becoming the first black graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and later to become the first black registered architect in Texas. Chase went on to establish a career of distinction and to lead an office of ...