Congratulations to Dharshine Jayakrishnan, a second-year Spanish and International Affairs major, who was awarded Second Place in the UGA Libraries Undergraduate Research Award for Unraveling an Archival Murder Mystery: My CURO Research Journey.

 

Dharshine built this project from research she began in Professor Elizabeth Wright's Spanish 3030: Texts in Global Contexts, developing it into a full archival investigation exploring the Middle Eastern diaspora in Colombia. Her prize-winning presentation recounted research conducted at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where she found compelling clues to why Gabriel García Márquez changed the name and ethnic heritage of the protagonist of his 1981 novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold. On campus, she worked with Professor Wright on secondary-source research, even corresponding with a historian in Colombia to gain access to the unpublished memoirs of a merchant who emigrated from Lebanon to Colombia in the early twentieth century. With guidance from Elizabeth White, Humanities and Social Sciences Librarian at UGA, she used deep learning tools to locate and analyze public immigration records from early twentieth-century Colombia.

 

Beyond UGA, Dharshine was invited to present a poster of this research at a conference at Harvard University and delivered a conference paper at a scholarly meeting in Richmond, Virginia.