Effron Center Director and Professor of American Studies Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, noting that the audience was gathered on Memorial Day, invited remembrance of Frederick Douglass’s work, from the Civil War through the rest of his life, to ensure that the United States would never forget why the war was fought.

“We can learn a lot from Douglass’ call to memorialize, today,” Beliso De-Jesús said. “Our nation is once again at a historical crossroads. We can choose to assert our highest purpose of freedom and equality or regress into racial separatism and legal discrimination.”

The ceremony marked the conclusion of the Effron Center’s first complete academic year. The center was established in 2021 through a major gift to the University’s Venture Forward campaign from Blair Effron ’84 and Cheryl Effron. This year’s certificate students constituted the largest graduating class to date of the programs in American studies, Latino studies and Asian American studies.

Princeton Prize in Race Relations Senior Thesis Prize

Payton Croskey, Department of African American Studies
“Fashioning New Worlds: Weaving Alternate Futures through Fashion Technology and Black Ingenuity”

Advisor: Ruha Benjamin
Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies.

In nominating Croskey, Ruha Benjamin calls her thesis “a stellar work of scholarship and praxis, blending a capacious engagement with thinkers who take imagination seriously as a site of political and social struggle and a critical examination of fashion scientists and designers who are materializing their visions of environmentally sustainable and climate responsive garments.”

“These two elements alone would make for an original paper with theoretical import that far exceeds the usual ambition of a senior project,” Benjamin notes. “But Payton went on to create her own experimental designs that culminated in an extraordinary public exhibition, the first of its kind in the Department of African American Studies.”

“‘Fashioning New Worlds’ surpasses any metric one might use to evaluate a senior thesis.”

The Princeton Prize in Race Relations Senior Thesis Prize, endowed by the Princeton University Class of 1966, is awarded annually to a member of the senior class, irrespective of academic concentration, whose senior thesis adds significantly to understanding of issues of race and race relations in the United States, broadly defined. While a prize-winning thesis may rely on conventional research methodologies (in libraries and archives, using the research methodologies of the humanities and the social sciences), the Effron Center for the Study of America will look with favor on theses that also manage to draw this scholarship into practical and experiential engagement.

Asher Hinds Prize

Established in memory of Asher Hinds, professor of English and one of the leaders of the Special Program in the Humanities, which later became the programs in American studies and European cultural studies, the Hinds prize is awarded annually to the student who does the most outstanding work in the humanities.

Kaelani Burja, Department of Anthropology
“Not Your Great White Way: An Ethnography of New York City and New Jersey’s Latiné and New Theatrical Works Rehearsal Room Processes”

Advisor: Elizabeth A. Davis
Associate Professor of Anthropology

In nominating Burja, Elizabeth A. Davis commends her choice to focus on “the people who do the ‘invisible work’ behind the scenes,” and her attention to “how the micro-decisions they make at every step of the production process reflect their experiences of exclusion, including and especially exclusion from the remunerative, high-status, career-making world of Broadway.”

Davis notes how Burja “innovated research practices of participant-observation suited to the fast-paced environment of rehearsal rooms.”

“The great strength of her thesis is her ethnographic writing,” Davis writes, “which documents the passions, frustrations, and accomplishments of her interlocutors in evocative detail, and which explores her own implication in their work, as in the structural inequities of the theater world, with exemplary reflexivity.”

Grace May Tilton Prize in Fine Arts

Alison Hirsch, Department of Art and Archaeology
“Monsanto as Image Maker: Feeding the World Lies”

Advisor: Rachel Z. DeLue
Christopher Binyon Sarofim '86 Professor in American Art
Professor of Art and Archaeology and American Studies
Chair, Department of Art and Archaeology

Rachel Z. DeLue describes Hirsch’s readings of Monsanto commercials as “models of excellent visual, iconographic, and filmic analysis, demonstrating how potent and revelatory the tools of her discipline can be when employed to consider non-art images that operate in extra-artistic contexts (part of the point being, of course, that such images really can be considered, in the end, a kind of “art,” insofar as they combine human skill and imagination to fabricate meaning).”

“A brilliant and original thesis,” DeLue writes, “one that makes a bona fide contribution to the study of the powerful role played by visual culture, including televisual media, in contemporary society, in this case in the arenas of foodways, agribusiness, geopolitics, late-stage capitalism, consumerism, and environmental justice.”

A gift of Robert Schirmer of the Class of 1921 in memory of his mother, the Tilton prize is awarded for an outstanding thesis by a senior in any of the departments collaborating in the Effron Center for the Study of America. The thesis must deal wholly or principally with an aspect of the fine arts or crafts within the Americas.

Willard Thorp Thesis Prize

Susan Lee Baek, Princeton School of Public and International Affairs
“What It Means to Be ‘Asian American’ in New York City: An Interview-Based Analysis of an Evolving Political Category”

Advisor: Tanushree Goyal
Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs

In evaluating Baek’s thesis, Tanushree Goyal notes the “rich policy implications” of her research.

Goyal finds Baek’s interviews with professors “a novel approach, which bring[s] to light how key scholars are themselves divided on the ‘Asian American’ project. Furthermore, she challenges us to think what these discussions mean outside the classrooms for the millions who have no access to this debate.” Baek’s “rich maps […] excellently show us the spatial distribution of Asian as well as disaggregated look into the Chinese, Indian, Koreans, and Philippines distribution in NYC. These maps are complemented with a careful curation of history of each group’s arrival into NYC.”

Goyal concludes that “Susan's thesis is an outstanding example of combining personal experience and interdisciplinary training.”

The Thorp prize is awarded to the senior in the Effron Center for the Study of America who prepares the most outstanding thesis of a clearly interdisciplinary nature. The prize honors Professor of English Willard Thorp, a founder of the American studies program and for many years its director.

David F. Bowers Prize

Gianni Pacheco, Department of Sociology

In her nomination, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies Monica Huerta writes that Pacheco is “truly an exceptional student. One of the best I’ve ever had.”

The Bowers prize is awarded to the student in the Effron Center for the Study of America who does the best work in center seminars. Established in 1951 in memory of Professor of Philosophy David F. Bowers, one of the faculty group that drew up the plan for the American studies program, the prize was endowed in 1955 by Willard and Margaret Thorp.