Congratulations to art history student Arisa Bunanan whose paper “Helvetica and ZXX: Ubiquity and Surveillance in a Democratic Nation-State” was accepted to Prized Writing, an annual juried publication featuring exemplary undergraduate writing at UC Davis.

According to Professor Talinn, “This outstanding essay is a result of Arisa’s hard work, not just in the final upper-division seminar she took me with in the last quarter of her education at UC Davis, but also a clear outcome of four interest years of learning, reading, writing, and deep critical thinking. Arisa took the very first First-Year Seminar that I offered at UCD, entitled Art and Violence during her freshman year. From then on, she continued to take other courses in art history and the cross-pollination of the arts, visual culture, the humanities with the world of politics and identity. Through a deep commitment to critical thinking and disciplined writing, Arisa developed intellectually and academically to become a skillful and nuanced writer and critical thinker. The seminar was entitled Cosmopolitanism and the Avant-guard, during which students were challenged to read primary sources such as Kant, Zizek, Spivak, and Derrida and to intensely think about the workings of the world in terms of cosmopolitan identity and postcolonial politics. That it was all happening during Covid-19 lockdown and the revolts of the BLM made the discussions that much more important and intense. This outstanding paper of the politics of fonts out of a historical context of cosmopolitan and globalization is Arisa’s masterpiece and the articulation of four years of intense education in the humanities. I applaud her not only for this particular achievement but for her being a much needed outstanding citizen of the world.”

This is not Bunanan’s first successful entry into Prized Writing. In 2018-2019, Bunanan’s article “UC Davis Patwin Memorial: Resistance in Plain Sight” was also accepted.

Prized Writing can be purchased at the UCD Bookstore. Eventually, the 2019-2020 edition will be available online at https://prizedwriting.ucdavis.edu/.