Katie O’Connor and Olivia O’Neill Receive the Roger S. Smith Undergraduate Researcher Award

Roger S. Smith Undergraduate Researcher Award Recipients Katie O'Connor (left) and Olivia O'Neill (right)

We are pleased to announce that Katie O’Connor and Olivia O’Neill have been awarded the Roger S. Smith Undergraduate Researcher Award. Each student will receive $5,000 to support their research projects over the summer.

Katie O’Connor’s (BA Hons – Fine Arts & English and Film Studies) project is entitled Embodying the Monstrous Feminine: Analyzing Transformation in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Cindy Sherman’s Fairy Tales and will be supervised by Professor Corrinne Harol. The primary goal of this project is to draw meaningful connections between Angela Carter’s highly visual and physical feminist writing and Cindy Sherman’s visual art that provides an alternative take on similar themes through a different medium. The nuanced critiques of fairy tales that Sherman and Carter provide are still important to consider, as the stories they evoke, like Beauty and the Beast, are continuously reproduced in modern media and influence contemporary culture.

Olivia O’Neill’s (BA - English and Film Studies) project is entitled Bon Appétit! Understanding the Social Media Presence of the New Celebrity Chef and will be supervised by Professor Danielle Fuller. O'Neill notes that while much has been written about traditional celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Emeril Lagasse, less has been written about chefs like Claire Saffitz and Molly Baz, both published cookbook authors, who interact directly with their fans on social media. This project will explore this increasingly intimate parasocial dynamic in order to understand how Saffitz and Baz use social media to promote their cookbooks and build relationships with their fans.