Advertising student Zoe Zirlin has been awarded a 2019 Scott and Ina McNichols Undergraduate Research Award for $4,000. “I am incredibly honored and excited to have received a 2019 IDEA Grant,” says Zirlin. “I am also thankful for Scott and Ina McNichols, two FSU Alumni who support undergraduate research every year.”

 

The award is presented by The Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Engagement (CRE) and the specific grant is funded by Scott and Ina McNichols, both of whom are FSU alumni who have a deep desire to support research that provides an enriching experience for the student and that also wants to better the community around them.

With this grant, Zirlin will be able to travel this summer to Washington, D.C, to scan and collect a large sample of artifacts from the United States Holocaust Memorial Archives. She will also be able to use the grant funds to incentivize other undergraduate students to act as content-coders in the early fall.

Zirlin’s research involves conducting a content analysis of Nazi propaganda posters from the years 1933 to 1938, framed through the tropes highlighted by American Rhetorician Kenneth Burke in his piece, The Rhetoric of Hitler’s “Battle”. The project is a quantitative, interdisciplinary look at the visual elements of Nazi propaganda posters, and the ways in which these themes were employed to indoctrinate German citizens into Nazism. Zirlin hopes to learn more about which ‘tropes’, or themes, were most dominantly used from year to year.

“This research is important to me because I believe that the first line of defense against genocides is education,” Zirlin explains. “If we are unable to recognize and identify the factors that incubate totalitarian states and mass murder, then we will be unable to eradicate genocides in the future.”

Zirlin admits she had invaluable professional guidance all along the way. “I am so grateful to my thesis director, Dr. Patrick Merle, and the professors on my thesis committee, Dr. Davis Houck, Dr. Michael Neal, and Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus, for their dedication, expertise, and advice.”

Zoe Zirlin will present an oral presentation of her research at the annual President’s Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence on October 1, 2019.