Student Research

As a Haas Scholar, Sam will complete his ISF Creative Honors Thesis in the spring of 2008. Through his area of concentration in The Depiction of Identity, Sam has engaged in research on the creative manifestations of race, gender, class, and sexuality in contemporary self-representations. As an outgrowth of this research, Sam is creating an autobiographical installation that explores his childhood and his difficulty in both recalling and expressing any clear narrative of this time period. Inspired by artists and writers who have created self-narrations that deliberately thwart the conventions of autobiography and question even the most contemporary conceptions of the self and self-representation, Sam's project combines poetry, prose, photography, and picture frames. While using these media to address the poverty, neglect, and extensive abuse he experienced during childhood, Sam will creatively complicate the strict binary divisions between childhood and adulthood, memory and fantasy, poetry and prose, and text and image.

 

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Hilary Briscoe, an ISF and French double major, is in her final semester and writing her thesis on European Intellectual Property Law and the fashion industry in France. With the increase in "fast fashion" brands such as H&M and Zara taking inspiration from century-old houses of fashion, Hilary is interested in the extent to which legal protections of design are impacting both the high and low echelons of the industry. Having first discovered this emerging issue in intellectual property law when studying at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) in Paris, the campus located next door to such fashion institutions as Yves Saint Laurent and Prada, Hilary was fascinated by the dynamic between frenzied reinvention and controlled development, represented in the relationship of fashion and law.

Hilary hopes to return to Europe to continue studying European and Intellectual Property Law through enrollment in a Masters in Law (LLM) program, with the aim to not only enrich her past studies but to further develop her overall interests in international affairs and comparative law.