Capstone Spotlight: Senior Projects Take Center Stage
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By Julia Wojcik
On Sunday, the usually quiet halls of the Humanities building buzzed with energy, nerves and last-minute note checks during the 7th annual Humanities Symposium. The event served as a grand finale for graduating seniors, a moment where years of reading, writing and critical thinking came together in a public showcase of their work.
Students, faculty and guests filled the building early in the morning, moving between rooms and scanning programs as the day’s presentations got underway. What might typically be a quiet academic space instead felt active and expectant. Unlike a traditional lecture setting, the symposium moved at a steady pace. The program featured three sessions made up of four panels each, with students delivering concise presentations of their senior projects. In total, faculty and staff selected 35 seniors to present at this semester’s event.
Each panel brought together students with related themes, allowing audiences to engage with multiple perspectives in a single session. Participants represented a wide range of disciplines, including art history, creative writing, history, journalism, literature, communications, philosophy, language and culture and Latin American, Caribbean and LatinX studies. The variety of fields contributed to a diverse program that explored both historical and contemporary issues through multiple perspectives.
Opening the event, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Earnest Lamb, spoke about the students’ journey.
“Today is about celebration. It’s about the remarkable work of our students; work that reflects curiosity, courage, and a willingness to take intellectual and creative risks,” he said. “[These] projects ask difficult questions, challenge assumptions, and imagine new possibilities. That is the essence of the humanities, and it is alive and well here today.”
Director of Humanities, Dr. Aviva Taubenfeld, continued the remarks by emphasizing the depth of work behind each presentation.
“Each presentation is the result of a year or a very intensive semester, or much more, of work that our students have undertaken with passion, intelligence, creativity, and joy—and sometimes, if we’re being honest, a few tears along the way,” she said. “They have been motivated by the desire to understand and better both themselves and the world, and they have been supported in their endeavors by an incredibly devoted faculty.”
Her remarks set the tone for the day, highlighting both the academic rigor and personal investment behind the projects. She also pointed to patterns that emerged across the presentations.
“It was striking to me in putting together the panels how many of today’s presentations deal with man-made monsters and artificial intelligence, abuses of labor and truth, facing grief, and creating art and community as a means of coping and finding joy,” she said. “These are difficult and sometimes painful topics, but incredibly important.”
As the sessions progressed, students presented work that reflected both academic research and personal exploration.
Among them was senior English and global literature major and museum studies minor Melina Wojcik, whose project, Literary Techniques Used to Depict War as Moral Injury, examined how literature conveys the emotional realities of combat. Her presentation drew attention to the role of storytelling in shaping understanding of complex experiences.
"This project came to me because the experience of war and combat has always intrigued me, but it was so far outside my own lived experience that I thought the only way I could truly understand what it might have been like is to turn to literature,” Wojcik said. “War literature is inherently empathetic, and it preserves the emotional truth rather than the happening truth of war.”
Another presenter, a senior double major in English and global literatures and creative writing, Zoey Hawkins, drew on personal history for her project, Brooklyn Blues, a work of literary fiction inspired by events from her father’s life.
“It follows Seth, a young Black boy with a learning disability through his upbringing in New York in the ’60s and ’70s,” Hawkins explained. “The framework for this project is greatly inspired by Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye,' which is the novel that I examined for the literature portion of my senior project.”
She added, “Brooklyn Blues starts with a prologue that reveals that the narrative is going to be Seth’s testimony, and this allowed me the freedom to reflect on his experiences with more depth than an eight- or 12-year-old would actually have.” The mix of scholarly analysis and creative work highlighted the range of approaches students took in their projects.
The symposium attracted students from outside the humanities, offering a broader campus perspective on the event. Senior Eamonn Doherty, a natural science student majoring in environmental studies, attended the symposium and noted the value of engaging with disciplines beyond his own.
“I usually don’t interact with the humanities like that, and it was interesting to see the things that they’re working on because it’s so different from what I usually do,” he said. “I think it’s really important to attend these sorts of things right now, when people sometimes discount the significance of humanities or social science studies. The work they’re doing follows a similar kind of process to what I’m doing.”
By the end of the day, the atmosphere had shifted from anticipation to accomplishment. The event highlighted not only the range of academic work within the humanities but also the role these disciplines play in examining complex social, cultural and personal issues. For the seniors who presented, the symposium served as both a conclusion and a beginning—an opportunity to share their work and a final moment in the spotlight before graduation.
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