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Home2007 Undergraduate Research Award Winners Announced
April 12, 2007
The UO Libraries has announced the recipients of its 2007 Undergraduate Research Awards. This annual competitive program honors UO undergraduates who produced outstanding original research and scholarship during the 2006 calendar year using resources available in the UO Libraries.
To be eligible for the award, students must submit a research paper completed as part of their coursework at the UO, along with a recommendation from a faculty member. This year the top award carried a $1,000 scholarship, with three students winning honorable mention awards of $500 scholarships. The awards are made possible through endowments established by the generous support of Jon and Lisa Stine and Milton C. and Barbara B. Sparks.
Cristina Cruz-Uribe—First-Place Award
Cruz-Uribe, a senior majoring in viola performance and Spanish, won the top award for her paper “Unifying Processes in Boccherini’s Stabat Mater: A Visual Analysis.” Her essay analyzes the music of 18th-century Italian composer Luigi Boccherini and the compositional techniques he used to create unity in his Stabat Mater.
According to Marc Vanscheeuwijck, an associate professor of musicology who nominated Cruz-Uribe for the award, her paper “is a model of thorough research and original thought.” Cruz-Uribe used many library services and resources in her research, including the Reserve Room, the Douglass Listening Room, and Interlibrary Loan.
“The final version of this paper consists of a weaving together of historical research and original analysis,” she says. “I used library resources at every stage of its creation.”
Alison Becker—Honorable Mention
Alison Becker’s wrote her paper, “Bringing It All Back Home: The Height of the Vietnam Movement at the University of Oregon,” after being inspired by listening to the Bob Dylan album of the same name. Becker is a senior majoring in history and political science.
Ellen Herman, an associate professor of history who nominated Becker’s paper, said she was impressed with the way Becker used both primary and secondary sources.
To research her paper, Becker used University Archives and the microfilm collection. Becker says she found the archives to be “incredibly well organized and notated for easy navigation,” even though she was new to this library resource.
Adam Stamp—Honorable Mention
Adam Stamp, a junior art history major, produced his paper, “Nothingness Materialized: Existentialism in the Context of Reality as Revealed in the Early Oeuvre of Robert Rauschenberg,” using many resources in the Architecture and Allied Arts Library.
“Adam is one of the handful of students who experiences most thoroughly the joy of research,” says nominating professor James Harper, associate professor of art history. “He spends days in the library poring over the available material on a subject”.
Erica Stevenson—Honorable Mention
Political science and history major Erica Stevenson used online databases such as Lexis-Nexis Academic and JSTOR to collect and analyze information and data for her paper, “The International Tropical Timber Agreements of 1983 and 1994: An Assessment on Treaty Effectiveness.”
In submitting her paper, Stevenson commented that “without the resources of the UO Libraries and the assistance of the extremely helpful librarians, this research paper would not have been possible.”
Stevenson was nominated for the award by Ronald Mitchell, professor of political science, who describes her paper as “an impressively strong example of what smart students can do when they combine careful research with extensive use of library resources.”
Other Honors
The four award recipients will be honored for their achievements at a luncheon later this month, and electronic copies of their papers will be deposited in Scholars’ Bank, the university’s open access archive for University of Oregon research, publications, and supporting materials in digital form.
All papers submitted for the competition are reviewed by a committee of UO faculty members. This year’s committee members included:
- Julie Hessler, associate professor of history
- Marilyn Linton, associate vice provost for undergraduate studies and associate professor of German
- Barbara Jenkins, head, Reference Department, UO Libraries
- Michelle Holdway, assistant director and scholarship coordinator, Financial Aid/Scholarships
- Andrew Bonamici, associate university librarian for instructional services, UO Libraries
For more information on the Undergraduate Research Awards, visit http://libweb.uoregon.edu/general/libaward.html.