Nicole Nalbandian is a fourth-year English major. She is one in a succession of strong-willed women from the Eastern Mediterranean. A child of the diaspora, she grew up hearing stories of the “old country” from which her family hailed. Since childhood, images of the East formed in her mind. Over the past four years under UCLA’s Department of English, she came to learn of a theoretical lens that made sense of these exaggerated fictions of the east. Orientalism served as a starting point from which she would develop research around one of the most prolific texts of time, The Arabian Nights. Her research focuses on the arrival of the Arabian Nights to the European continent by way of translation into French and English at the turn of the eighteenth century. The text functions as a frame narrative, in which a woman narrates a series of tales in order to evade death by the sultan. Nicole examines the harem in the Arabian Nights in order to evaluate the power of the female body and narrative voice for the purpose of re-appropriating literary justice for women of oriental tales. The mental and emotional labor that has gone into this research project is not a product of mere interest, but an homage to her heritage.