Theory and Criticism Commons^™

The Zimmerman Library Mural In The National Register Of Historic Places: A Working Paper And Timeline, Samuel E. Sisneros

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Working paper and timeline about the nomination and listing process of the UNM Zimmerman Library “Three Peoples” paintings to the National Register of Historic Places.

America’S Finest Housing Crisis: Racialized Housing & Suburban Development, Vicenta Martinez Govea

McNair Summer Research Program

U.S. Government operations between 1940-1950 brought unprecedented direct and indirect employment opportunities to San Diego, exacerbating an already growing housing shortage. To accommodate the thousands of new defense workers, the government produced the largest defense housing project to date in the small neighborhood of Linda Vista. However, this opportunity and largesse was extended primarily to a select group of white working-class families who had access to defense jobs and, consequently, subsidized housing. Military presence in San Diego during World War II shaped the design of homes and exclusively allocated housing, as both shelter and financial instrument, to white working-class ...

Cecily Brown And Maureen Gallace: Teaching Covert Feminism In Public School, Danielle Salyers

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Feminist art consisting of explicit, provocative, and politically charged imagery is common in the university setting and the wider art world. Although this freedom from inhibition certainly functions as a valuable source of inspiration for those fortunate enough to participate in the institution of higher education, content of this nature potentially works against feminism’s goals by excluding the youngest audience at the moment they are forming ideas about gender relations; students at the K-12 level. As a public-school art educator, I am faced with strict censorship policies that make it difficult to include students in the ongoing feminist conversation ...

The People Who “Burn”: “Communication,” Unity, And Change In Belarusian Discourse On Public Creativity, Anton Dinerstein

Doctoral Dissertations

The main intellectual problem I address in this study is how everyday communication activates the relationship between creativity, conflict, and change. More specifically, I look at how the communication of creativity becomes a process of transformation, innovation, and change and how people are propelled to create through everyday communication practices in the face of conflict and opposition. To approach this problem, I use the case of communication in modern-day Belarus to show how creativity becomes a vehicle for and a source of new social and cultural routines among the independent grassroots communities and initiatives in Minsk.

On one level, I ...

Aids Normalization, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

Review of On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which was on view from September 2019 to January 2020, and other contemporary AIDS culture.

Gut Feeling, Shelby Fleming

Theses and Dissertations

Through curated space and abstracted sculptures that reference the viewer’s body, Gut Feeling, acknowledges the viewer’s experience as the focal point of the exhibition. I designed the whole gallery as an art object using both positive and negative space. The sculptures act as one unified system that guides the viewer through the exhibition in a counterclockwise rotation inward. The viewer follows the forms as they puncture through the walls of the gallery, while considering their own body’s relationship to the forms being seen. The viewer directly engages with the scale of the forms, sculptural placement, and sensory ...

Encountering Others: Degeneration, Distortion, And Disability In Interwar German Visual Culture, 1918-1933, Kathryn Carney

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis project examines the interrelationships of Weimar Körperkultur (“body culture”), interwar photographic practices broadly known as “Neues Sehen,” and Verist “Neue Sachlichkeit” painting to interrogate visual representations of bodily difference in Weimar media and art. Through close analysis of select case studies in Weimar film, photography, and painting, I argue that the lines between aesthetic, sociopolitical, and bodily deviance are blurred by many artists of the period. Such focus on the body as the site of an intermedial, interdisciplinary debate about aesthetic, social, political, and national “values” has historically been overlooked by scholars. I ultimately argue that certain “reactionary ...

Purposefully Forgetting: Surveying San Diego’S Founding Narrative During The City’S Bicentennial Celebrations Of 1969, Noah Pallmeyer

Keck Undergraduate Humanities Research Fellows

The city of San Diego owes much its success and prosperity to the “victories associated with colonization.” This quote comes directly from the current National Park Service description of the San Diego Presidio. This project turns to the 1969 bicentennial celebrations of San Diego’s founding. This was a rhetorically powerful period in San Diego’s historical remembrance. This project argues that native and other marginalized populations were not properly considered in the narrative of San Diego’s founding during these celebrations. To understand why and how these populations failed to be properly considered, this project turns to the narratives ...

Unaccompanied Minors: Marginalized In The Education System, Arlae Cecilia Gamez-Luna

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

More than 213,000 unaccompanied children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have been apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection from the start of fiscal year (FY) 2014 through January 31, 2019. The U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) is responsible for processing and sheltering the minors who are typically placed with a parent or other adult relative in the U.S., a family friend, or in foster care. Unaccompanied minors wait months, even years, for their cases to be decided in immigration court. Informal relief or no proper legal status ...

Bringing The Shadows Of Hegemony To Light: Social Insights From An Italian Philosopher And American Author, Antonio Cruz-Hernandez

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

As a prisoner in fascist Italy, Antonio Gramsci delineated his concept of the "philosophy of praxis," which emphasized the power of individualism and promoted freedom from the obscure, hegemonic influences that may lead individuals to consider themselves as constituents of groups before anything else. This paper will apply Gramsci's social insights from the Prison Notebooks to Joseph Heller's 1953 modernist American war novel, Catch-22, to demonstrate their meaning in the context of WWII and bring deeper consideration to their value today. It will also argue that Heller's character Yossarian warrants praise as the quintessential "philosopher of praxis ...

Do You Wanna Go Dancing?, Anthony Kascak

Theses and Dissertations

The transdisciplinary art work within Do you wanna go dancing? unpacks the experience and perception of my interpersonal relationships, as well as the role that touch and introspection has in my visual arts practice and everyday life. I am interested in pairing the act of looking with the sensation of touching through specific installation and arrangement of intimate imagery, ceramic fragments and frames, and manual or digitally fabricated surfaces. The negotiation of these installations orient the viewer to consider their positionality within space, as well as the extent in which distance, intimacy, and vulnerability fluctuate inside these psychological spaces.

The ...

The Complexities Of Intimacy, Brie Henderson

Graduate School of Art Theses

Through my research I have discovered there are many complexities that exist within the topic of intimacy. Of these complexities, I chose to explore the topics attachment and codependency in my final series. Attachment and codependency are deeply rooted in psychology, poetry, and many artist’s practices. The relationship between poetry and my work has become deeply intertwined. I combine poetry with my work as a way to document my feelings and to inspire the titles for my paintings. Through a series of intimate watercolor paintings, I reference bodies, intimate interactions and the ambiguity within the two. This ambiguity asks ...

The Homoerotic Architectures Of Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, Samuel Mcintyre

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines how architectures (both literal and metaphorical) in Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) serve to mediate or express homoerotic desire in late-Victorian London. Through an examination of the novel's urban setting, its formal structures, and Stevenson's own architectural history, the thesis tracks an emergence in the fin de siècle of the homosexual as an identity category in an iconic literary work that predates the Oscar Wilde trials (1895). The novel's queer coterie of professional men and Dr. Jekyll's carefully structured home are explored as failed strategies ...

Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

Theses, Dissertations, and Student Creative Activity, School of Art, Art History and Design

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a ...

Understanding Uprisings: Media Discourse And Maryland Race Uprisings (1845-2015), Anna Hartman

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

Despite lengthy histories of complicated race relations, the state of Maryland and Baltimore city struggle to confront their histories of slaveholding and anti-black violence. As Anthropologist Cheryl LaRoche explains, "Maryland is not very good at discussing these thingsand part is to downplay these things we see." As a result, this history has been understudied in broader accounts of racial uprisings in the U.S. In response to this gap, my digital exhibition, Understanding Uprising: Media Discourse and Maryland Race Uprisings, captures three such flashpoints: a slave insurrection beginning in Charles County in 1845; Baltimore's Holy Week Uprisings in response ...

English Language Learners At The University Of Illinois At Chicago Writing Center, Susan Ewa Panek

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

My experience tutoring at the UIC Writing Center has opened my eyes to the various obstacles that writers face, in particular writers who are English Language Learners (ELL). This inspired me to establish a qualitative research project investigating how a Writing Center can best support ELL writers not only in learning grammar and/or culturally specific writing conventions but also with the discrimination and stigmatization that they often face based on their not-yet-developed knowledge of Standard American English. The research question explored was: What are the possible advantages and disadvantages of a multilingual tutor working with an ELL writer in ...

Putting It Into Practice: Moving Forward With Integrating The New Literacy Studies Into Literacy Education Once And For All, Shenir Dennis

2020 JHU Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium

Over the past few decades, the definition of literacy and what it has meant to be considered "literate" has undergone substantial transformation that has distinguished it from solely being able to read or write. Specifically, a new approach to literacy education has been created called the "New Literacy Studies" (NLS) which interrogates the standards that qualifies one as being satisfactory literate against the sociocultural influences that can impact an individual's literate abilities. This is an interdisciplinary approach to literacy studies that collectively calls upon the research of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists in addition to literacy scholars and educators, but has ...

Working Towards More Inclusive History Museum Exhibits: How Can History Museums Better Incorporate The Female Narrative Into Their Exhibits, Morgan Corbett

Education Theses

The purpose of this study was to understand how history museums can better incorporate the female narrative into their exhibits. Women’s stories play an integral role in history and are an important element of authentically and accurately portraying the events of the past. For museums, that is the ultimate objective. As institutions of learning and preservation, museums are empowered with the responsibility to present information with integrity and accuracy. That includes presenting all perspectives in a holistic view. Museums are a significant source of knowledge and information, especially for school children. The images and messages that are portrayed have ...

The Exchange Happens Here: Net Art's Alternative Currencies, April Riddle

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three installation pieces from the New Museum and Rhizome’s 2019 exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics.” Throughout, I question if net art can act as an alternative currency itself, if different projects can interfere with existing economic systems, and, if so, what they can reveal about changing economic structures.

Ultimately, I explore how Cory Arcangel’s Arcangel Surfware, a lifestyle brand offering products for web-surfing, is representative of works that play with accessibility and inaccessibility and alternative patronage systems in relation to social currency; how Shu Lea Cheang’s Garlic=Rich Air ...

Titian’S Poesie: The Visual Allegories Of Morality And Religion, Holli M. Turner

Institute for the Humanities Theses

Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio, more commonly referred to as Titian, created a cycle of mythological paintings based on scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses for King Philip II of Spain. These works are often viewed through an eroticized lens due to this inclusion of nude mortals and goddesses. This thesis argues for the cycle’s moral and religious significance for Philip by utilizing comparative iconography, scholarly texts, and translated allegorical material.