This year, WGSS undergrad researchers have received recognition for their excellent work here at Stony Brook and beyond. Laci Burton (Class of ’25) was named URECA Research of the month this semester, and Angeline Castillo (Class of ’24) published an article based on her WGSS Senior Research Project this past winter.
Laci Burton is a University Scholar majoring in English with minors in Writing & Rhetoric and Women’s & Gender Studies. In March 2025, she was selected as Researcher of the Month by Stony Brook’s URECA (Undergrad Research & Creative Activities) Office. Laci is a participant in the English Department’s Honors Program and completed a senior thesis about how Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House draws on the psychoanalytic theory of Dr. Nandor Fodor. This semester, in addition to completing a Writing & Rhetoric capstone project, she is also completing a WGSS Senior Research Project about what Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir and fiction tell us about archival erasures, public health crises, and the rise of authoritarianism. To learn more about Laci and her research, check out the amazing interview she did with the URECA team!
Angeline Castillo graduated in May 2024 with a near-perfect GPA and earned a B.S. in Chemistry with a minor in Women’s & Gender Studies. During her time on campus, she served as the president of our WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) Honors Program‘s Student Leadership Council. When she enrolled in the WGSS Senior Research Seminar, she was interested in doing a project very different from the research she was doing for her major, and she was interested in sharing this new work with a wider audience. As an Asian American woman, she wanted to examine media representations of Asians and Asian Americans and intergenerational trauma in Asian and Asian American families.
After the seminar ended, Angeline began revising her final paper and reaching out to undergraduate research journals about the possibility of publishing her work. We’re happy to report all her hard work paid off! Her essay “Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Turning Red (2022): Exploring the Mother-Daughter Relationship as a Conduit for Asian Generational Trauma” was published in the Fall 2024 issue of Queen City Writers (a refereed journal that publishes undergrad essays and multimedia work).