Symposium presentation by Mariagrazia De Luca’s research cluster. Photo credit: Berkeley Discovery.
Seven Critical Theory Designated Emphasis (CT DE) students participated in the inaugural 2025-2026 cohort of the CICI Discovery Research Hub. These Graduate Fellows assembled small clusters of Undergraduate Scholars to assist them in dissertation research over the course of the year. In addition to receiving research support, graduates honed mentorship skills, while undergraduates gained experience in advanced interdisciplinary investigation and worked towards individual academic and professional goals, including senior honors theses and graduate school applications.
In total, the program awarded $59,500 to the CT DE student Fellows, from the departments of Anthropology, East Asian Languages and Cultures, English, Italian Studies, and Slavic Languages and Literatures. A total of 32 undergraduates worked with the various graduate students, and the program provided a combined total of $20,000 work-study income to undergraduates through the Learning-Aligned Employment Program, which provides research experience for underrepresented students.
The cohort’s interdisciplinary projects brought together a wide range of themes, methodologies, and areas of study—a representative model of CICI engagement. A number of clusters considered questions of representation and media across sociocultural contexts and histories. “Unemployment and the Crisis of Dialectical Representation,” led by Andy Haas, explored how systemic unemployment is represented in twentieth-century critical theory, aesthetics, and sociology. Filip Sestan’s “Montage as Politics: Yugoslav Avant-garde Cinema” explored the political role of montage in Yugoslav avant-garde cinema, focusing on how these films critiqued and engaged with the aesthetic and political promises of socialism. “The Aestheticization of Pastness in Postsocialist Chinese Media,” led by Yvonne Lin, theorized historicity as an aesthetic form in postsocialist Chinese visual culture and explored how technological innovations like A.I. colorization and digital media mediate encounters with the past.
Lin, a CT DE student, shared: “Participating in the Discovery program has been a wonderful opportunity for me to work closely with a small group of driven, intellectually curious undergrads. I really valued the way that our discussions on my dissertation project and their own, related research papers helped me refine and clarify my own thinking about my research. I was so impressed by what they were able to do with this project while juggling full course loads, job applications, work, and more. My mentees shared with me their appreciation for the opportunity to conceptualize and develop a self-directed humanities research project, and I am grateful that I could be a part of their intellectual journeys!”
Yet other clusters focused on questions of borders, migration, and geographies. Cheng-Chai Chiang’s “The Theatre and its Dubber: Accenting Asian America,” studied recent developments in Asian American theatre under the rubric of “theatrical dubbing,” dramatic experiments in accent work to represent multilingual histories of Asian diasporic migration. “Italiano di partenza: Reimagining Italian Identity Through Literary Translingualism,” led by Mariagrazia De Luca, explored how translingual writers reimagine Italian identity beyond national borders. “Afghan Migrants and the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” led by Britt Dawson, investigated how Afghan migrants stuck at the Mexico-U.S. border navigate life in the borderlands and contend with ever-changing U.S. asylum and refugee policies. Leo Dunsker’s “Vernacular Cultural Critique in the Postcolonial Caribbean” investigated how Caribbean thinkers turned to the vernacular language and culture of the islands to challenge colonial sovereignty and imagine new futures.
The program culminated in May with the Discovery Symposium, where the clusters presented their work. The 2026-2027 CICI Discovery Research Cohort will once again include participants from the CT DE.
Marlena Gittleman is a Future of Higher Education Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry.