Research Focus Group Symposium: Historical Memory in Narrative: Undergraduate Research Showcase

Historical Memory in Narrative is the third annual undergraduate research showcase sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group. It features multidisciplinary presentations of undergraduate research related to childhood, including senior honors thesis research in Comparative Literature by senior major Isabella Williams and research on Writing and Literature by Tia Trinh in the College of Creative Studies. The panel of presentations and subsequent discussion on the theme Historical Memory in Narrative will focus on the cultural shaping of children’s stories over generations, as shown in “The Other Cinderella Story: A Social Examination of Cinderella’s Adaptability for Children,” researched by Isabella Williams, and children’s literature as an act of reclaiming and rewriting historical narratives, as shown in “Rewriting Silence: Preserving Cultural Memory and Reclaiming Narrative in Children’s Literature on Japanese Internment,” researched by Tia Trinh.

Isabella Williams’ research focuses on the proliferation of one variation of Cinderella in relation to the negotiation between traditional fairy tale structures and evolving notions of childhood innocence, morality, and cultural appropriateness in adaptations for children. “The Other Cinderella Story: A Social Examination of Cinderella’s Adaptability for Children” demonstrates how authors sanitize and reimagine narratives for child audiences; how they permit violence but censor sexuality; how they reinforce gender roles through the demonization of female figures and the sanctification of male heroes; and how Christian and Protestant ethics shape the ideal of the passive, industrious heroine. By tracing the history of fairy tale adaptations, Williams examines how Cinderella’s image is constrained and recoded into a rigid ideological instrument, replacing a once fluid, complex story of autonomy and survival with a static myth of virtue, labor, and grace. Isabella Williams is a fourth-year Comparative Literature major with a minor in Portuguese. Her academic focus revolves around children’s literature and fairy tale media. In her research, she examines how authors shape children’s stories based on cultural ideas of childhood, morality, and respectability.

In “Rewriting Silence,” Tia Trinh analyzes George Takei’s My Lost Freedom and Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s Love in the Library as acts of reclaiming history and rewriting narratives about a deeply violent and often overlooked part of Asian American history. The paper compares each author’s positionality to critically analyze different perspectives and methods of retelling the narrative of Japanese-American internment. Understood primarily through the lens of an Asian American studies and close-reading comparison of both children’s books, this paper strives to understand how both stories work to share stories of family ancestry, preserve cultural memory, and push back against an increasingly whitewashed education. Tia Trinh is a fourth-year Writing & Literature major in the College of Creative Studies (CCS) with a double minor in Asian American Studies and Professional Writing – Journalism. She is a storyteller exploring the complexities of Asian American coming-of-age and understanding one’s identity today, told through themes of ancestry, travel, grief, food, and much more. Her research explores how Asian American authors retell and reclaim a deeply violent history through childrens’ literature.

Zoom attendance link here

Cosponsored by the IHC’s Global Childhood Media Research Focus Group