Chloe Nurik

Penn Humanities Forum Undergraduate Fellow

20162017 Forum on Translation

Chloe Nurik

Steering Committee, Undergraduate Humanities Forum

History

College, 2017

Chloe is a senior, majoring in History with minors in English, Classical Studies, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. As a Benjamin Franklin Scholar, she participated in the Integrated Studies Program her freshman year and has developed a passion for interdisciplinary coursework and research. Chloe has pursued varied topics in cultural history, communication research, and gender studies. This year, she published a paper on the use of the Internet for sexual health education for young adults in China, and she is in the process of preparing a second article that focuses on the way that cultural and gender norms impact attitudes and behaviors. Chloe has a related interest in media advocacy and served as a Fellow for FactCheck.org during her junior year. Her honors thesis examines the translation of media images into concepts of masculinity during America's Jazz Age, and she hopes to explore the roots of contemporary gender identity and relations among young adults. In addition to her Penn Humanities Forum Fellowship, Chloe is a University Scholar.

Collegiate Masculinity and the Rise of American Youth Culture in the Jazz Age

As the field of gender history develops, greater scholarly attention has been paid to masculinity; however, American masculinity during the 1920s has been largely neglected. My project will examine how mass media images both reflected and reinforced prevailing notions of masculinity. Through a range of primary sources (i.e., movies, ads, novels, and college archives about college men), I will explore how representations from popular media translated into daily practices for men and shaped new gender ideals during the Jazz Age. Analyzing masculinity in this time period will foster an appreciation of the dynamic and historically contingent nature of gender roles and will address a gap in the knowledge base of gender history. This project may be linked to the PHF theme of translation as it examines the way that media messages are interpreted and used as part of the cultural context.