Course Projects

Hanna Ranis ’27
Memories from the Space Race

Course: EUS 317/GSS 317/RUSS 317 “Beyond Human: Cyborgs and Technology” (Fall 2024)

For her final project, “Memories from the Space Race,” Hanna Ranis interviewed her father, who was nine years old during the Moon landing, and analyzed his earliest memories of the historical and technological narratives surrounding the Apollo 11 mission. Hanna’s project weaves together oral histories, including a family-narrated account of her great-grandmother, a twelve-year-old Romanian girl who immigrated alone to the U.S. in the early 1900s, and her distinctive reactions to the televised Moon landing. Through these personal stories, Hanna looks at the portrayal of astronauts as cyborgs, examines broader narratives of space exploration and contrasts them with the Soviet space “conquering” (osvoenie kosmosa). She also analyzes the media coverage of Apollo 11 and its lasting impact on both personal and collective memories.

Link to the project: https://sites.google.com/bates.edu/moonlandingmemories/home

Instructor: Marina Filipovic

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Summer Research Projects

Kate Blandford ’18
Berlin and the Urban Landscape in Graphic Narratives

 Kate embarked on his project with the initial question, “How does Berlin operate in the graphic novel?” Specifically, how does the setting of Berlin create a graphic atmosphere of collective memory, monument, and void in Sebastiano and Lorenzo Toma’s graphic novel adaptation of Der Himmel über Berlin (originally a film by Wim Wenders)? During her research apprenticeship with Professor Kazecki, Kate studied basic graphic novel theory for context, and hunted for annotated graphic novels set in Berlin (and which she believed to be thematically similar to Der Himmel über Berlin) both in/around the city itself and online, and compiled an extensive bibliography of secondary source material relevant to his project (on graphic novels, on Berlin, and on urban landscapes, for example). The result is a substantial annotated collection of both primary and secondary sources.

Project Advisor: Jakub Kazecki, German

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Gregory Fitzgerald ’17
Discovering German Culture: City Treasure Hunts in Berlin

Can the scavenger hunt format be used to teach a sufficiently rigorous undergraduate course on Berlin’s history, culture, and urban landscape? For ten predetermined historical and cultural themes, Greg set out to create a scavenger hunt in Berlin, which, paired with discussion sessions, would build an undergraduate course for English-speaking students in Berlin. Greg proceeded systematically by collecting data on site (GPS coordinates, photos, notes), drafting logistically sound routes, testing the directions, conducting in-depth research on each topic, and finally by creating specific on-site tasks aimed at effectively communicating the desired learning outcomes for students. He completed five of these routes. Five additional routes remain in the research stage. In their completed form, the routes offer a progressive, hands-on format to teach students about Berlin’s cityscape.

Project Advisor: Jakub Kazecki, German

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Conference Presentations

Ollie Russell ’21
“Mitsuko Yamato as the National Socialist Ideal”
10th Undergraduate Research Conference in German Studies, Lafayette College and Moravian College, April 10, 2021.

Greg Fitzgerald ’17
“Looking for Clues About German Culture: A Model Scavenger Hunt for Teaching Cultural Courses in Berlin”
Undergraduate European Studies Conference, University of Guelph, November 26, 2016.

Eric Adamson ’15
“The German ‘PISA-shock’ and Changing Attitudes Towards Comprehensive Schooling”
Undergraduate European Studies Conference, University of Guelph, March 21, 2015 (The presentation was awarded the Certificate of Merit).