The CESTA Summer 2020 Research Anthology is online!
It is our pleasure to announce that the 2020 CESTA Anthology, designed and prepared by Krain Chen and Lily Nilipour, is ready for publication.
The Summer Undergraduate Research Program is one of the activities I most looked forward to when I became CESTA’s faculty director last November. In a typical summer, the Program fills the fourth floor of Wallenberg Hall with day-long energy for ten special weeks, as undergraduates work together and with their project leaders on a variety of DH research. The summer of 2020, however, would be a summer like no other — for CESTA as for everybody else. With COVID-19 closing down campus, we had to adjust by moving to a remote format. It is with great pride and admiration that we share in this volume the work that students completed under these challenging circumstances and at a very trying time.
In the following pages, students describe their participation in the 2020 Summer Research Program. It is humbling to encounter here — in their own words, and in a publication itself designed by a team of students — the fruits of their hard work, achieved while simultaneously gaining experience in cutting-edge digital humanities research across a variety of fields.
None of this could have been possible without the inspiring scholars, students, senior researchers, staff, and faculty who make CESTA such a supportive and productive community. I want particularly to thank our extraordinary Graduate Mentors, Rachel Dubit and Erik Fredner, and our tremendous CESTA staff, Amanda Wilson-Bergado and Erik Steiner, who managed to keep things going and to hold everyone together under difficult conditions. We are all grateful to Stanford’s Dean of Research, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, H&S Dean’s office, the Stanford Humanities Center and our generous donors, whose support is essential to the running of our programs. Please enjoy the accounts of CESTA research that follow, as told from the perspective of the students who helped keep that research moving in the summer of 2020.
FACULTY DIRECTOR
Giovanna Ceserani