Aya Labanieh – Fulbright Semi-Finalist

Aya is a recent alumni who triple-majored in French, Philosophy, and Comparative Literature. She presented her research on the emotional induction and false memories at the UROP Research Symposium in Spring 2016 and on Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy of Self and Other at the Koehn Undergraduate Conference in Critical theory the same year. Aya was also active during her time at UCI as the President of College Democrats, the Senior Editor of UCI’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Magazine, New Forum, and as a Co-Commissioner of ASUCI’s Housing Security Commission in which she worked to end homelessness and housing insecurity among UCI students. Aya will be starting a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Columbia University this fall and where she will focus her research on the political roles on non-Western intellectuals in the decolonization of the Middle East as well as Arab modernity.