Zach Hughes '12, Reporter, Alaska Public Media
Thesis Title: Masks of Glamour, Screens of Discipline: The History of Sunglasses in America
“Social Studies empowered me to be curious about lots of things and pursue a better understanding of them with the discipline, humility, and creativity that I think makes my journalism more interesting. And my interior life, too.”
Michelle Kuo '03, JD '09, Professor and Author of Reading With Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and A Life Changing Friendship
Thesis Title: The Flight to Nature as a Mode of Social Critique: A Study of Rousseau and Thoreau
“I recently published Reading with Patrick, a memoir of teaching literature in an alternative school and county jail in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta. I attribute its social critique, attention to history, and insistence on self-interrogation to my training in Social Studies, whose spirit infuses my work.”
Dylan Matthews '12, Senior Correspondent at Vox
Thesis Title: Get Happy: A Defense of Act Utilitarianism
“The basic questions that dominate debates I cover — is social stigmatization of offensive speech problematic, or itself an exercise of speech rights? what kinds of civil disobedience are justified to resist unjust governments? what kind of limits on international migration are morally acceptable, if any? — are ones whose substance permeates the Social Studies curriculum. … I doubt if I had concentrated elsewhere that I'd be as prepared to tackle them now.”
Farah Stockman '96, Reporter, The New York Times
Thesis Title: Constructing Political Identity out of a Problematic Past: The Experience of Mau Mau in Kenya
“Today, as a political correspondent who is charged with making sense of a country that fiercely at odds with itself over ideas, I find myself thinking often about Karl Marx and Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. If Social Studies helps us make meaning out of history and everyday events happening around us, we need it now, it seems, more than ever.”