HAA Graduating Senior Cecilia Zhou wins 2023 Taliesin Prize
Congratulations to HAA Graduating Senior Cecilia Zhou on winning the 2023 Taliesin Prize. This prize is awarded to three graduating seniors who best exhibit a spirit of intellectual adventure in their curricular paths as Harvard undergraduates.
Cecilia shared the following statement:
"The things we create—images, ideas, institutions—act back on us, shaping the ways we relate to each other. Such, at least, is what I’ve come to believe through my coursework at Harvard. Though my primary academic interests center around the art and literature of late medieval and early modern Europe, it has often been courses outside these fields that have most saliently impacted my scholarly interests and approaches. Courses on the social impact of scientific advancements have oriented me to how new technologies generate new possibilities and new problems for human society. Courses on different property regimes have furthered my interest in how human-made things have implications for their makers, revealing how social and legal relations between persons can be mediated by non-persons. A course on diagrams illuminated new ways of understanding the work that images perform: more than a picture, a diagram is a tool for thinking, an instrument that generates the process of ratiocination itself.
As I have sought out courses that would enable me to think about human/non-human relations in novel or unexpected ways, I have used these insights to shape my work in more conventional Humanities settings, like exploring how beauty attracts a host of moral and political critiques, or how the development of the codex enabled new means of storing and retrieving information. In short, I have pursed an interest in not only what and how people create—standard fare in the study of art and literature—but also the human identities, conditions, and possibilities that are in turn generated by those very creations."
Cecilia shared the following statement:
"The things we create—images, ideas, institutions—act back on us, shaping the ways we relate to each other. Such, at least, is what I’ve come to believe through my coursework at Harvard. Though my primary academic interests center around the art and literature of late medieval and early modern Europe, it has often been courses outside these fields that have most saliently impacted my scholarly interests and approaches. Courses on the social impact of scientific advancements have oriented me to how new technologies generate new possibilities and new problems for human society. Courses on different property regimes have furthered my interest in how human-made things have implications for their makers, revealing how social and legal relations between persons can be mediated by non-persons. A course on diagrams illuminated new ways of understanding the work that images perform: more than a picture, a diagram is a tool for thinking, an instrument that generates the process of ratiocination itself.
As I have sought out courses that would enable me to think about human/non-human relations in novel or unexpected ways, I have used these insights to shape my work in more conventional Humanities settings, like exploring how beauty attracts a host of moral and political critiques, or how the development of the codex enabled new means of storing and retrieving information. In short, I have pursed an interest in not only what and how people create—standard fare in the study of art and literature—but also the human identities, conditions, and possibilities that are in turn generated by those very creations."