The Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research honors students whose work embodies the highest standards of academic excellence, and relies upon the UC Berkeley Library and its wealth of resources. This year’s award-winning projects are rooted in rigor and passion, examining xenophobia, the struggle to belong, and the power of words and stories.
Alice Lin
Lower Division winner
Alice Lin explores words as resistance in “Friends or Foes: 19th Century Chinese American Writers Against Nativist Sentiment.” By studying texts across genres, Lin found that Chinese Americans pushed back against xenophobia and exclusion by addressing stereotypes, normalizing their culture, highlighting their contributions, and exposing injustices. But in attempting to uplift Chinese Americans, writers would at times lean on stereotypes about other communities and perpetuate the model minority myth. “The Library resources taught me how to research and provided me with the opportunity to interact with a greater amount of primary and secondary sources, which I may have otherwise not had access to,” Lin said.
Sora Thomas
Lower Division winner
Sora Thomas’ project, titled “Wake up Aframerica!: The Shift in Black American Perspectives on Japan,” tells a story of solidarity unfulfilled. In the 1930s, a delegation of Black Americans who had planned to travel to Japan faced a challenge when hotels hesitated to host them, citing concerns for their white guests. Thomas situates the episode in the context of the early decades of the 20th century, tracing Black Americans’ changing views of Japan from idealization to disillusionment. Thomas relied on information provided by the Library, but also on practical advice and words of encouragement from librarians. “With this project, I learned that although you do spend … time by yourself when researching, the help of librarians is always there when you need it,” Thomas said.
Frida Calvo Huerta
Upper Division winner
Empathy and insights abound in Frida Calvo Huerta’s “Positive coping strategies and resilience to undocumented status: Evaluating the mental health effects of a peer mentoring program on undocumented young adults in the San Francisco Bay Area, California.” The project examines the impact of the UndocuScholars Program, founded by Calvo Huerta, and draws upon original interviews with undocumented students to explore the constellation of challenges they face when navigating school and life. “When I started this project, I thought research was about finding answers,” Calvo Huerta said. “Now I know it’s about learning how to ask better questions.”
Isabella Je-Bin Lake
Upper Division winner
In the paper “Ruler of the World, Ruler of Peace: Exploring Rhetorical Framings of Land and Conquest in the Russo-Ukrainian War,” Isabella Je-Bin Lake examines and contextualizes Western media narratives about the armed conflict in Eastern Europe. Lake argues that some of these stories stand to serve the economic interests of foreign actors engaging in a wartime land grab, dispossessing Ukrainians and threatening their way of life and identity. “This is the most interdisciplinary project I have ever attempted, and my access to the UC Berkeley Library’s boundless breadth of resources was essential for it to take shape,” Lake said.
Emily Elizabeth Lindsay
Upper Division winner
Emily Elizabeth Lindsay braids together anthropological acumen and care for community in “The Johnson Collection and Phoebe Maddux: Translating, Researching, Preserving, and Honoring Basketweaving Heritage among Karuk.” Lindsay’s work included painstakingly parsing the Karuk words used on tags associated with baskets in a collection held by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The project contributes to the revitalization of an Indigenous language by helping reconnect the Karuk community with terminology related to a long-held cultural practice. “I … believe that I have grown as a researcher,” Lindsay said. “With the background of what community work looks like, I have become better equipped to conduct my research in a respectful manner fitting the culture I am observing and documenting.”
Lara Öge
Upper Division winner
In the continent-spanning research for “Vienna 18832 and Duo Music in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Lara Öge visited UC Berkeley’s Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library as well as libraries in Vienna and Munich. Drawing on an array of materials, including original manuscripts, Öge casts new light on an unconventional and little-understood pair of Renaissance-era partbooks, demonstrating the power of primary sources and the libraries that hold them. “I … came to see libraries as far more than repositories of information — they are spaces intended to be engaged with,” Öge said.
Honorable mentions
Ella Liu
Lower Division
“Suzume: Fantasy as a Platform for Queer Assimilation”
Tulsi Prabhakaran
Lower Division
“Algorithms of Injustice: How Bias in Medical Data and Technology Exacerbates Racism in American Healthcare”
Antonin Gaddini
Upper Division
“Körper an Körper: Dialectics of the Body(ies) under Nazism: Sculpting or Erasing”