| June 5, 2025
Two soon-to-be UCLA Humanities graduates, Bella Brannon and Dhanya Charan, have been honored for their presentations at the UCLA’s 2025 Undergraduate Research Week.
Both were among the recipients of the Dean’s Prize for Excellence in Research and Creativity in the category of humanities, arts and social sciences. Now in its 12th year, Undergraduate Research Week invites students from all academic disciplines to show off their original research to the campus community. (See the full list of honorees.)
A look at the winners from the Humanities Division:
Bella Brannon
Majors: Religion and Public Affairs, minor in Digital Humanities
Mentor: Nick Sabo
Project: In her paper, “Theodicy in the Trenches: Shifts in Christian Apologetics After the Great War,” Brannon examined how public defenders of Christian doctrine responded to the devastation of World War I while maintaining belief in a god who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good. She identified three major shifts in how these theologians tried to reconcile suffering with divine grace: a Christology that viewed Jesus as the primary lens for understanding religious experience, an emphasis on history as geared toward salvation, and a renewed commitment to the absolute truth of the Bible.
She says: “Undergraduate Research Week gave me a goal to work toward, an opportunity to share my research with the people I love and a chance to witness the incredible scholarship of my fellow undergraduates. My wonderful faculty mentor, Dr. Sabo, helped turn my passion into deeper knowledge, walked me through harder philosophical ideas, and pointed me towards great texts. Any excuse to read C.S. Lewis and learn from brilliant people is a gift I will never take for granted.”
Dhanya Charan
Majors: Linguistics and Psychology, and Cognitive Science
Mentors: Megha Sundara and Victoria Mateu
Project: Charan’s study, “Resyllabification as a Form of Empty-Onset Repair in English Learning Children,” looked at children’s tendency to pronounce consonants when they’re speaking words that actually begin with vowel sounds. (For example, children may use a consonant from the previous word or simply drop the word’s initial vowel sound for ease of production.) Drawing from a body of more 5.5 million words of documented speech and collected data from 39 children, the analysis found that the consonants that children “insert” is most often influenced by the consonant they just heard — for example, saying “dapple” after hearing the phrase “cold apple.”
She says: “The most exciting part of Undergraduate Research Week was taking all of the passion and effort I had put into this work over the past year and being able to share it with such a wide audience. Being a double major, I tried to bring an interdisciplinary approach to the research — bringing together a lot of things that are normally studied separately — which made it very interesting. My mentors’ guidance was invaluable. And receiving this award for the work was surreal, a dream come true.”