Colby College: Research Symposium Opens April 2

At the 13th Colby Undergraduate Research Symposium, April 25-27, students representing 28 departments or programs will present 127 posters and deliver 153 oral presentations. Students offer a broad range of topics from scientific research to analysis of contemporary film. Including associated presentations, performances, and exhibitions, more than 500 student participate in the symposium and related events.

Here’s a sampling of student research from English, geology, and environmental studies. A full schedule, with abstracts, is online.

Dress for Success

The population explosion in 19th-century London, Kristen Starkowski ’14 points out, threw the traditional social structure into a state of flux. Perhaps nobody knew this better than Charles Dickens, whose novels followed the lives of characters on the way up or down or treading water trying to stay in place.

Starkowski, an English major with a keen interest in Victorian literature, saw this in Great Expectations, and she used the novel to explore the ways Dickens used clothing as a flag of social mobility.

Working on an independent study project with Professor David Suchoff (English), Starkowski applied the theories of Georg Simmel and Homi Bhabha to the Dickens novel. Simmel, a sociological theorist, says one way to pass as a person of higher social standing is to mimic dominant clothing styles. Bhabha, a postcolonial theorist, says the mimic actually exposes his or her lower class identity because “there’s always some gap between the imitation and what the customary style is,” Starkowski explains.

Nouveau riche look out.

Starkowski charted every reference to clothing in the novel, and in a time of hatters and haberdashers, there are many. Her conclusion: Clothing that imitates middle-class style both exposes and masks class struggle in Victorian England. Because the “mimetic attire” appears unnatural on lower-class wearers (the social climber Pip “felt tangled up in his clothes,” Starkowski notes), it actually highlights their social immobility.

Clothes don’t always make the man—or woman.

And Dickens himself? He was clearly aware of clothing as a device to explore the social movement of the time. But, as Starkowski points out, he may have had another reason to describe characters’ garb at length. This, after all, was a serial novelist, paid by the word. Said Starkowski, “I'm not sure how much description he put in there just because he wanted to make money.”

Original source here.