Eleanor Jaffe-Pachuilo is a Human Biology and Society major and a French minor in her second year at UCLA, expected to graduate in June 2023. She is pursuing her degree with hopes of attending law school in the future and enrolling in an MA/JD program, the master’s being in bioethics. She is interested in issues of identity in relation to the health sector and specifically as determinants of health. Identity and cultural issues also play a role in her interests in bioethics and surfacing issues with genetic research and biotechnology. Her interest in this class was prompted by her own experiences in her second home of Corsica. She has always been interested in the role of language in community identity as a speaker of a minority language herself (Corsican), with only 150,000 speakers worldwide due to its suppression by French colonizers in the late 1760s during their conquest of the island. Italian 98T confronts similar issues in the context of the Trieste, whose borders are in constant flux challenging its identity as they change.

Ronke is a fourth-year Music Industry & Media Navigation major with a minor in Italian. Her areas of interest include identity politics, the music industry, and mass media communication strategies. She learned of the Italian 98T course after taking a Digital Humanities 101 course with TA Nina Bjekovic, in which the curriculum discussed how identity and power structure the flows of data and information, especially in our modern world. As a Black woman singer-songwriter studying the way identity shapes one’s navigation of this position, she immediately took an interest in the course, using her position to approach the course’s rich topics.

Olivia Robert is a fourth-year Sociology student from Orange County, CA. She also has minors in Italian and Film, Television, and Digital Media. After already having taken a few Italian language classes with TA Nina Bjekovic, she was interested in this course as she did not know a lot about the history of Italy’s relations with bordering countries such as Slovenia, Austria, and Croatia. With literature being closely related to film, Olivia understands how identity is conceived of through art in such a storytelling medium and understands how the individual and the collective play a role.

Claudia is a fourth-year psychology major and Digital Humanities minor who will join the Teach For America corps following her graduation. With a passion for understanding the human experience and spectrum of emotion, she plans to pursue her Doctorate of Psychology to become a child psychologist. This passion made Nina Bjekovic’s Bordered Identities class particularly appealing as it provided a lens through which to explore the multifaceted interactions between sociopolitical context and personal identity. Claudia extends her deepest appreciation to Ms. Bjekovic for her academic and personal support throughout the course.