Lance Brightmire ’27 is an undergraduate concentrating in Anthropology. His thesis, tentatively titled “Unsettling the Heartland(s): Performativity, Narration, and the Politics of Racio-Juridical World-Making in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” is an ethnographic and archival inquiry into the discursive practices of civic actors in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Specifically, it asks how public discourses mobilize ideologies of race and law to navigate questions of land, memory, and power in Tulsa, the largest American city situated entirely on tribal nation land and the site of the 1921 Greenwood Race Massacre. The project focuses on three case studies: an assemblage of colonial monuments in the city’s oldest park, the city’s repatriation of the Creek Council Oak Tree, and a co-jurisdictional policing agreement between the city and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Brightmire considers how civic actors draw on history to contest and reshape the political landscape of a changing city inflected by deep anxieties over questions of race and law. His broader interests include theories of linguistic performativity, practice, and the semiotics of place. A native of Tulsa, Brightmire’s connection to the city’s civic life began as a campaign staffer for a Tulsa city councilor and as the field organizer for the mayor’s 2024 general election campaign. 

Benjamin Flaumenhaft ’27 is an undergraduate concentrating in Comparative Literature. His thesis, tentatively titled “Jean Genet’s Antisocial Theater,” thinks about social negativity by way of theatrical form, and vice versa. The thesis will trace a convergence of antirelational sentiment and staginess as it plays out across Genet’s murderous and relentlessly metatheatrical scenes. Reading the work of Genet alongside queer theoretical writings of an antisocial bent and theories of theater that privilege writing and non-presence, the project ultimately seeks to work out connections between terms like betrayal, antagonism, and failure, and formal mechanisms like script, staging, and gesture. Flaumenhaft’s intellectual interests include French modernisms, theater history, the Frankfurt School, and poetic coteries like the New York School and New Narrative. 

Paulina Gąsiorowska ’27 is an undergraduate concentrating in Comparative Literature and History of Art and Architecture. Her thesis, tentatively titled “The Matter of Translation: On the First Printed Vernacular Editions of Aesop’s Fables, and How to Carry Them Across to the Present,” juxtaposes three late medieval/early modern printed translations of the ancient short story collection known as Aesop’s Fables: the 1477 Latin-German edition, the 1484 English edition, and the 1510 Polish edition. Attending to their respective narratives, paratexts, illustrative programmes, and intended audiences, she will produce literary translations of these texts accountable to the needs of modern readers, ultimately arguing that literature survives — and, indeed, thrives — thanks to the innumerable forms and re-forms it assumes across history.Her academic interests also include the gendered metaphorics of translation theory as well as the fraught border between reading and seeing as experiences and as critical instruments. In April, she presented her paper “The Printer’s Widow: Recovering An (Arche)Type Across Mid-16th Century Europe” at the University of Cambridge during the annual conference of the Association for Art History. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Prospector, the departmental journal of Comparative Literature at Brown, and serves as the Student Assistant Director of the Writing Fellows Program.

Cate Gutowski ’27 is an undergraduate concentrating in English and Political Science. Bridging her studies in English literature and political theory, her thesis is tentatively titled “The King’s Prerogative: Mysteries of State in Jacobean Law and Drama.” It draws on British historical definitions of the terms “prerogative” and “mysteries of state” to question how these concepts influenced dramaturgical representations of the law in the early 17th century, concentrating on plays that respond to James I’s efforts to assert the prerogative authority of kings over written law. Outside of the Cogut Institute, she is a Laidlaw Scholar through the Swearer Center for Public Service, a French Teaching Assistant, and a Teaching Fellow for the National Education Opportunity Network, a role in which she has helped bring two Brown University English courses to high-school students.

Breyten Neill ’27.5 is an undergraduate pursuing an independent concentration in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. He is interested in how alternative forms of collective life and economic organization give rise to distinct possibilities for freedom and forms of collective meaning. His work engages debates about liberalism, communitarianism, alienation, and the tension between individual autonomy and communal obligation. His thesis, provisionally titled “The Shape of the Good Life: Freedom, Community, and the Liberal Imagination,” investigates concerns surrounding the erosion of collective life and a shared epistemology. It turns to intentional communities as sites for examining whether these conditions, often treated as constitutive features of liberal-capitalist modernity, are in fact contingent and capable of transformation. Informed by his time spent with the Bruderhof, Catholic Worker communities, and intentional communes in Spain, the project explores whether such alternative forms of social organization sacrifice ideals of individual freedom or reflect an expansion of the liberal imagination. Outside of his thesis work, he is a Writing Fellow and a Fellow with Brown’s Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.