Congratulations to Ria Sood and Lark Chang-Yeh for their selection as winners of the 2022 Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research. Both are current students of CWP lecturer Ryan Sloan and submitted work completed for his CWR4B class.
"Together, the projects elude categorization, unbounded by the constraints of time and space. But a common thread connects them all: Each one embodies the highest levels of academic rigor, and relies upon the clever use of the UC Berkeley Library and its collections and resources. The Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize-winning papers of 2022 cover the themes of identity, tradition, and power, and focus on topics ranging from the careful manipulation of tales in a centuries-old Vietnamese anthology to a recent missing persons case in the United States."
Lark Chang-Yeh, Lower-Division Winner
In 2021, the case of missing 22-year-old Gabby Petito became a fixation of the media, capturing the attention of true-crime enthusiasts and casual observers alike. Lark Chang-Yeh’s project, “Missing White Woman Syndrome: A Historical and Sociological Look Into the Case of Gabby Petito,” examines the forces that amplify and elevate the stories of white women victims, while victims from underrepresented communities often go ignored.
Ria Sood, Lower-Division Winner
In recent decades, obesity rates in America have soared. But how did we get here? In her paper, “Sugarcoating the Truth: The Sugar Association’s Impact on Obesity,” Ria Sood shines light on some overarching factors at play, namely the profit-seeking strategies, misleading messages, and outsize influence of an enormously powerful sugar industry, and the meteoric rise of high fructose corn syrup.
UC Berkeley Library Prize Winners video
Also notable is that a recipient of the upper-division prize and the recipient of an honorable mention for the upper-division prize are also both former CWP student-writers: Congratulations to Jenkin Leung and Annie Ren!
See more about the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research