Ithaca College

Andrea Yzaguirre and Charlotte Kane, both senior English majors, are finalists for the top undergraduate award presented by the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Conference in 2021.

The Walden Prize for Graduate and Undergraduate Papers is awarded annually to outstanding emerging scholars in popular culture studies.

Andrea Yzaguirre was nominated for her paper, “The Woman Get Married: How Peggy Carter’s Happy Ending Isn’t So Happy,” a trans-media consideration of the development of the character Peggy Carter in the Marvel Universe. In her work, Yzaguirre extends the elements of the Bechdel Test, developing a “scale of female personhood” as a way of charting a character’s growth across a variety of media.

Charlotte Kane’s work, “Under the Influence: How Instagram Propagates Eating Disorders” was nominated for the award by Dr. Donald Snyder (UMBC), who praised both the presentation and its analysis of social media. Kane’s work features a close-reading of text and images, and considers Instagram within the large context of female-directed advertising and traditional media.