St Cross is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural CrossLinks awards, a new programme designed to support interdisciplinary research projects led by members of the College community.
Launched this year, the CrossLinks programme is open to current students and Research Fellows at the College, as well as their academic collaborators outside St Cross. The programme aims to encourage innovation by providing financial support for projects that transcend traditional academic boundaries and leverage research for wider academic and societal benefit.
CrossLinks was conceived by former St Cross Research Fellow Dr Ricardo Marquez Gomez and his friend and colleague Dr Oktay Cetinkaya. The programme is made possible by donors to St Cross, and the College is especially grateful to alumnus Jiannan Zhang (2013, MSc Computer Science) for his generosity.
Three projects have been selected for support in the programme’s inaugural year.
The first project, Is AI Changing History? AI-Mediated Representational Amplification and Evidential Weight in Archaeological Interpretation, brings together Yidan Zhang (Archaeology), Zichen Pu (Anthropology), Deng Pan (Experimental Psychology), and Dr Janice Kinory (Archaeology). The project examines how AI-enhanced visual representations may influence the interpretation of archaeological evidence, comparing responses to original, AI-enhanced, and augmented materials. Combining perspectives from archaeology, anthropology, and experimental psychology, the research aims to contribute to discussions about visualisation, interpretation, and the responsible use of AI in heritage contexts.
The second project, Interdisciplinary Uses of AI in the Humanities - Developing an MLLM-RAG Prototype for Archival Research, is led by Ashley Duraiswamy (English), Sebastian Eck (Music), and Puyu Wang (Engineering). The project proposes the development of a pilot prototype for AI-assisted archival research that brings together English Literature, Musicology, and Engineering Science. Focusing on the use of Multimodal Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MLLM-RAG) systems, the research explores how AI tools can support humanities scholarship while preserving interpretative nuance, contextual understanding, and scholarly rigour.
The third project, designed by Yunjoo Jo (Latin American Studies), Jessica DeMarco-Jacobson (English), Katerina Jennings (Philosophy), and Elizabeth Gilkey (Archaeology), researches the postcolonial aftermaths of nineteenth-century ameliorationist texts written for Caribbean plantation owners. Combining literary and historical studies, philosophical investigation, anthropological research, and archaeological fieldwork, the project will examine plantation manuals alongside the preservation of Afro-Jamaican cultural and agricultural practices within Jamaican Maroon communities.
The College warmly congratulates the award winners, and wishes them nothing but success as they pursue their research!
