Kayleigh Danowski ’25 is an undergraduate concentrating in history of art and architecture and psychology. A Resumed Undergraduate Education (RUE) student, she was a professional ballet dancer before retiring to pursue life beyond the stage at Brown. She is broadly interested in understanding the social underpinnings of society through the lens of art and material culture. Her project, tentatively titled “Domestic Labor and Artistic Pursuits: Finding Female Agency in the Early 20th-Century United States,” examines how women used decorative art and traditional craft in the home as both a site of domestic reproduction and as a source of agency, particularly at the intersection of race and class. She locates her research in a time where decorative arts rapidly became accessible due to mass production, and in an area — the Northeastern U.S. — that saw shifting racial demographics and major developments in decorative arts theory, consumerism, and gender activism. She is intent on shifting focus beyond the canon of fine arts to unravel the complex relationship between women, art, and everyday life.

Eric Gottlieb ’25 is an undergraduate concentrating in history, Egyptology, and applied mathematics. Broadly speaking, he is interested in ancient religious transformation. His thesis, entitled “Egyptian Christianization from the Manichaean Perspective: Evidence from Medinet Madi, 300–599 CE,” attempts to excavate lived experience by reading for the “hidden transcript” embedded in Medinet Madi’s extant textual record. Joining a growing corpus of archaeological and exegetical scholarship on the “quotidian turn,” his thesis draws from an array of postcolonial, sociological, and post-structural theory, in order to understand what it meant to be a “Manichaean” in Medinet Madi. Ultimately, the project hopes to complicate the prevailing theory of Late Antique Egyptian Christianization by introducing new Manichaean evidence from Medinet Madi, and new “bottom up” methods of approaching that evidence. Gottlieb’s other academic interests include Coptic philology, Middle Egyptian epigraphy, and apocryphal exegesis. Outside of school, he is involved in fair housing advocacy and policy analysis.

Daniel Newgarden ’25 is a senior undergraduate student concentrating in archaeology and the ancient world as well as Egyptology and Assyriology. His project, tentatively titled “(Re)Constructing the Past: Archaeophilia and Dynastic Aggrandizement in Late Hellenistic North Syria,” consists of an investigation into how the rulers of the Late Hellenistic polities of North Syria and Southeastern Anatolia — most notably Antiochos I of Commagene — used material remains of the Iron Age past to construct monumental architectural and artistic programs, glorifying themselves and their dynasties through an allusion to Asianic pasts. Though this project sits within the domains of archaeology and art history, Newgarden's research interests are diverse. He is especially interested in archaeological, philological, and art historical approaches to the Ancient Near East, but he frequently incorporates anthropological theory into his work and is especially excited by comparative approaches to the study of writing and image. In addition to his research on campus, he is a member of the S'Urachi Project — supported by Brown’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World — and has excavated with them in San Vero Milis, Sardinia for three seasons.

Samuel Schwartz ’25 is a senior undergraduate student concentrating in Slavic studies and history with a specialty in the early Stalinist period of the Soviet Union. He is also a passionate creative writer who is looking to combine all three of these disciplines in his work at the Cogut Institute by writing a novel based on the life and death of Nikolai Bukharin, on whose carceral manuscripts he’s written an academic article. Right now, he is also translating a novel by Yuri Olesha called Зависть (Envy), considered one of the foremost novels of the Soviet period and an outstanding exemplar of 20th-century literary aesthetics.

Amir Tamaddon ’25 is an undergraduate concentrating in history. He investigates “modernity” as a set of interconnected conditions of being and attempts to explain their intellectual genealogies. In his thesis, titled “Political Theology of ‘Authenticity’: Messianic Self-Craft and Identity-Formation in Revolutionary Iranian Thought,” he studies the genealogy of the question of authenticity, a discourse that permeated the thought of major Iranian intellectuals such as Ali Shari’ati, Darioush Shayegan, and Ahmad Fardid in the years preceding the Iranian Revolution (1979). His thesis breaks from political-economy and culturalist perspectives on the Iranian Revolution, questioning and complicating “the triumph of nativism” as an explanation for the preoccupation with authenticity. It then moves beyond the field of history to rethink the (ir)relevances of the question of authenticity and (secularized) messianic thinking for Iranian political thought today. He reads mystical Sufi poetry, especially Rumi’s. He finds the role of education in human and child development fascinating and in need of more philosophical exploration. His historical interests include occasionalism, neoplatonism, pragmatism, psychoanalysis, the nexus of politics and spirituality, contemporary right-wing politics, and the history of capitalism. He regularly contemplates the nature of historical knowledge and wonders about the possibility of new “big histories.”