“Beinecke makes only twenty awards per year, so this is a tremendous honor for Phoebe,” said Cindy Stocks, director of the Office of Student Fellowships and Research.
A history major and cinema studies minor, Marin intends to pursue a doctoral degree in cinema and media studies. She's especially interested in examining the cultural, artistic, and social influences of video games, which she calls an emerging field.
“While burgeoning fields provide challenges, the idea of creating a career within video game studies excites me because I know, from experience, that video games have a lasting impact as strong—if not stronger—as that of film or television,” she says. “As such, video games are the media of our present moment, and the study of them will provide further insights about our existence in an increasingly digital age.”
Because Bowdoin does not have a cinema studies or media studies major, Marin has embarked on a path of independent, faculty-supported scholarship. In the past three years, she has completed four independent studies—mentored by professors of history, English and cinema studies, and the visual arts—and she intends to pursue another independent study next year. She is also a fellow with the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, which provides stipends for summer research.
Beyond the classroom, Marin works for the Kinolab, a digital humanities laboratory for analyzing film language founded by Allison Cooper, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures and cinema studies. She helped Professor of History Patrick Rael organize the Kemp Symposium in 2024, a conference sponsored by the history department that examines how board games represent historical narratives. And she is co-president of the Bowdoin Film Society, which facilitates conversations about films and coordinates guest-speaker events.
Stocks praised Marin's “intellectual, curiosity, clarity of focus, and originality of research within the field of media studies,” and believes she will be an important voice in the field of media studies.
