First-year Visual Arts student Rama Ghanem has been awarded a summer research fellowship through the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. The Institute supports research that concerns the study of religion or secularism.
Ghanem is the first School of the Arts student to receive this annual fellowship. "I am delighted to receive the IRCPL Summer Research Fellowship and feel honored to be among such a wonderful group of fellows," she said. "This support is invaluable as I continue my research into the displacement and dispossession of Palestinian heritage. I'll be examining the colonial legacy of archaeological practices in the Holy Land, and tracing their contemporary reverberations and physical remnants that have been dispersed across the United States."
The IRCPL Graduate Summer Research Fellowship will fund the initial stages of Rama’s forthcoming documentary film, which investigates the displacement of Roman-Byzantine artifacts discovered under her family’s house in the West Bank in 1948. Through travels and interviews with witnesses in her family, Ghanem traces these artifacts to U.S. institutions, examining the imperial and colonial implications of their appropriation.
