Joanna Chatham ’17 Receives Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award

April 9, 2015

Joanna Chatham ’17 has been awarded an Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award for her project “Tracing Jordan’s Islamic Revival through Advertisements.”

Project Description:

This is a collaborative project with Dr. Tobin on her manuscript entitled Branding Islam: Islamic Symbols in 20th Century Jordanian Newspapers. By examining advertisements promoted during religious holidays, Joanna will reflect on the question: how have public perceptions of Islam changed throughout the stages of the Islamic revival? Dr. Tobin collected over 2,000 images from Jordanian newspapers spanning approximately 80 years, which will be the primary source of data. Supplementing her collection, Joanna will gather the most recent advertisements through online archives. Due to the depth of the data, she is able to trace Jordan’s Islamic revival through its preceding stages, its rise throughout the 1970s, and its contemporary state by examining the most dominant religious themes of a time period, as reflected in holiday advertisements.

The project runs all summer and will constitute Joanna’s full-time summer project.

The UTRA was selected from a number of very competitive applications.