Four Hunter College students were selected for the prestigious Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, which helps diverse young researchers to pursue academic careers in the humanities and social sciences.
The four – Julien Carreño, Alif Kazi, Ariana Rivera, and Kristen Song — study disciplines as disparate as Asian American studies and classical archaeology. Each exemplifies Mellon Mays’s goal of diversifying faculty ranks by amplifying marginalized perspectives and contributions and promoting a more socially just world.
“Our diverse and excellent students are engaged in exciting advanced undergraduate research projects that, over the course of two years, will enable them to discover their core scholarly questions about the world,” said Mellon Mays Program Director Dr. Kelvin Black. “They have bright futures in academia, and we hope that their experiences in our program will enable them to produce scholarship of significance.”
The American Council of Learned Societies, which administers the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship across campuses, recently renewed its funding to Hunter with a $192,000 grant.
“We thank the council for its continued support,” Black said.
Julien Carreño
Carreño is a junior majoring in philosophy, with a minor in English with a concentration in poetry. He is a member of the National Honors Society for Philosophy, Phi Sigma Tau. Carreño is the Philosophy Department writing tutor and co-president of the Philosophy Club, as well as a member of Hunter’s Mexican Student Union. Carreño is primarily interested in ethics and political philosophy. He is researching the ethics of freedom with an emphasis on the right to revolution.
Alif Kazi
Kazi, a junior, is double majoring in English literature and criticism and sociology and minoring in Asian American studies and psychology. Kazi is also a Thomas Hunter Honors scholar and Athena Honors scholar. He serves on the Advisory Council for the Athena Honors program and manages its social-media page. He also tutors elementary and high-school students. His research interests include identity formation, migration studies, and multicultural literature, focusing on 20th-century South Asian immigrants and how they fit into American racial dynamics. He is analyzing films and literature on South Asians here for what they say about their relations with other racial groups.
Ariana Rivera
Rivera, a junior, majors in classical archaeology and minors in psychology. She is also a Thomas Hunter Honors scholar and a Solomon Bluhm scholar. Rivera is an Earle Lecture award recipient and a student ambassador for Hunter Undergraduate Student Government. Rivera has studied how the Dying Warrior Pediments of the Temple of Aphaia on the Greek island of Aegina represent a turning point in classical Greek statuary after the Persian War. She is researching the Sleeping Eros statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for how it reflects Pausanias’ school of thought as described in Plato’s Symposium.
Kristen Song
Song, a Macaulay Honors College sophomore, is an English and media studies major and is part of Hunter’s Chinese Flagship Program. She has worked on organizing community-wide events such as the CUNY Film Festival. As a Chinese American visual and performance artist, she explores how East Asian psychology and identity are represented in those contexts. Her research focuses on nonlinear storytelling in memoirs and video games, comparing how each represents recollected experiences of Chinese and Taiwanese families.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation established The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program in 1988; Hunter College is proud to have been one of the first institutions to have participated. Applicants are judged on their prior coursework, plans for a major, and potential to bring historically marginalized or underrepresented perspectives to the academy. Hunter’s MMUF program supports undergraduate students, who are studying in core fields in the humanities and social sciences, to conduct interdisciplinary research on campus or elsewhere throughout the summer and academic year for two years.
The MMUF program provides students with faculty mentoring, professional development, and with application preparation for graduate study in a PhD program related to their research field of interest.
Named after Dr. Benjamin E. Mays, the noted African American educator, statesman, minister, and former president of Morehouse College, Hunter’s MMUF program provides students studying in these fields with the opportunity to conduct scholarly research throughout the summer and academic year for two years. Through workshops, conferences, faculty mentoring and more, the program works to encourage young scholars to enter PhD programs that prepare them for professorial careers.
