Blog

Cultural exchange and connection are at the heart of the experience of Technos International Week (TIW). Each year in Tokyo, Japan, students from Technos College host students from eleven sister schools for two weeks of programming. Dozens of Trinity students and faculty over the years have had the chance to travel to Tokyo for TIW with all essential expenses paid thanks to the support of Technos College and the Tanaka Memorial Foundation. For the June 8-21, 2025 trip, Trinity students Naisola Sarfo-Mensah and Simal Rashid were accompanied by Professor Kifah Hanna. In a special confluence, Ugnė Tumonytė '24 was one of the organizers of TIW. After participating in TIW in 2023, Ugnė applied for a teaching assistant position at Technos College, was selected for the position, and has spent the past year working in Tokyo.

Benedicte Baile and Alexander Cacciato received Projects for Peace grants for projects taking place in summer 2025. “These challenges are deeply personal to me, and I cannot stand by as my community suffers,” Benedicte wrote in her proposal. Benedicte and Alexander conceived of these projects separately, but the connection between the projects extends further than the fact that they both take place in West Africa. Both students began their journey at Trinity in Professor Garth Myers’ CTYP 101: Introduction to Urban Studies class, a first-year seminar coordinated through the Center for Urban and Global Studies (CUGS).

On April 10, 2025, Rio Smith presented his project “Understanding Urban Margins: How Statistics and Urban Policy Police Tokyo’s Homeless Geographies” as a 2025 Marcuss Fellow. Smith’s project examined how Tokyo’s state statistics represent the homeless population and their motivation in choosing how to represent these populations.

Isabella Paris is an Urban Studies and International Studies double major and one of the 2025 Marcuss Fellows. On April 10, 2025, she presented her project “Transnational Lives and Opportunities: An Analysis of Immigrant Experiences in New York City and Barcelona.” Paris describes the bulk of her project as analyzing immigrant community development and assimilation in both cities.

Boran Cui ’22 grew up in Beijing and has dreamed of attending Tsinghua University, China’s top-ranked university, since high school. This dream is now coming true for Cui, who will attend Tsinghua University next year as a Schwarzman Scholar. Cui will be the second Trinity alum to be a Schwarzman Scholar, following in the footsteps of Albert Ananyan ’24, who is currently at Tsinghua’s Schwarzman College.

Carlos García Núñez, a visiting scholar at the Center for Urban and Global Studies, is sharing his passion and expertise on tropical ecology with the Trinity College community. At the ...

This past summer junior Paola Evangelista spent two weeks documenting and researching gentrification in Mexico City. During her summer research she took photos across the city capturing images of the ...

Alyssa Hurley ‘26 and Aleema Kelly ‘26 were invited to participate in Technos International Week, an event held in June by the Technos International College of Japan in Tokyo which promotes international exchange and appreciation of Japanese life and culture. In this setting, Alyssa and Aleema researched projects focusing on tea ceremonies and music, respectively.

Spatially-oriented social sciences have witnessed an “infrastructure turn” over the past couple of decades. While much research has focused on the material and political aspects and consequences of traditional “hardware” infrastructure such as transport projects and municipal facilities for waste treatment, relatively little attention has been given to the critical role of social infrastructure such as local public libraries. This is exactly what Laura Delgado, Assistant Professor of Urban Studies, has undertaken as her research agenda with already published work in such top urban studies journals as Journal of Urban Affairs and a great opportunity for making further contributions to the field of urban studies.

This year’s Marcuss Fellows worked on global urban studies research projects from two different lenses. Rory Trani ’24 was inspired by having her first tastes of freedom as a teenager on the Portland, Oregon area metro system (known as the MAX) and by her experience of the efficient, modern metro system while studying away in Copenhagen. Rory used these experiences, an extensive literature review, and interviews conducted on the trains in both cities to compare the two transit systems under the guidance of Professor Garth Myers. Hannah Lorenzo ’24 was inspired by her identity as a Filipina American to investigate the role and importance of Asian-owned food businesses in the Hartford area. While Rory took a comparative global approach, Hannah investigated the importance of complexities of diasporic communities in Hartford while being advised by Professor Keavy McFadden.