Blog

Trinity sophomore Bennet Gessler grew up in Germany, spent two years at UWC Costa Rica, and found his academic home in East Asian politics. This year, a research assistantship with Prof. Reo Matsuzaki sparked something bigger: a CUGS-funded month in Taiwan, where Bennet interviewed people working in business and trade to understand how the “One China” policy shapes identity in everyday life. In this post, he shares what he learned, how he found interviewees, and why the project is only just beginning.

by Xiangming Chen Director, Urban Studies and Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Global Urban Studies and Sociology Student Research/Scholarship at and After Trinity Student research in Urban Studies has been steady since ...

In Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Alex Goiris '26 led an interdisciplinary project sponsored by the Center for Caribbean Studies. He combined visual analysis and interviews to uncover how fragmented sidewalks shape daily life. By linking design and psychology, the research highlights how uneven pavements affect accessibility, emotions, and sense of belonging, and how small urban details can reveal much larger stories about inclusion and public space.

Supported by the Center for Urban and Global Studies Summer Research Grant, Vy Duong ’26 investigated how labor export shapes social structures in her home country, Vietnam. Her project, Beyond Remittances, examines the cultural and generational shifts occurring as more young people leave home for work in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

Through grant-funded research supported by the Center for Urban and Global Studies, Yulia Puhareva'26 spent the summer in Serbia. She was working with the University of Belgrade students on redesigning Autokomanda highway interchange for a better neighborhood connectivity. Blending engineering and urban studies, they used GIS and AR tools to propose people-centered redesigns, showing how even the most car-dominated infrastructure can turn into safe, human-inclusive spaces.

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.

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 ...

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.

Paz Daniela Ortiz Santa Maria '26 conducted research last summer supported by the Tanaka Fund at CUGS across Japan in search of an understanding of similarities between Japanese Shinto and Peruvian indigenous belief systems from the Inca period.