Blog

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.

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.

Embarking from the tranquil setting “neath the elms of our old Trinity," my academic journey has spanned continents over the past fourteen years. Trinity served as the foundation for my venture into neuroscience, igniting a flame that guided me across the globe, first to Imperial College London where I happened to room with two Trinity students who had attended Trinity’s urban China summer program in Shanghai, and then to Cambridge leading to Shanghai.

Maria Auxiliadora Briceño Barrios and Jose Daniel Anido R were visiting scholars at CUGS from July 2021 to January 2024. Both Dr. Briceño Barrios and Dr. Anido have a PhD in Economics with research experience studying small family owned businesses in their home city of Merida, Venezuela. During their time at CUGS, they worked on a study of Hispanic-owned family businesess in Hartford – an important sector in Hartford and especially in the neighborhoods directly around Trinity College.