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Touch The Soil, Kirstin Fierro

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Only One Went Through The Green Door, Rachel Sahaidachny

Graduate Thesis Collection

Written in three parts, Only One Went through the Green Door, explores abandonment, homelessness, childhood, womanhood, and choices made or unmade that create the complicated and winding path of life. The poems use narrative and lyric to examine the effects of childhood trauma on the development of a persona, and its shadow. Emotional realities explored through natural landscapes, and at times through child-like language, create an unsettled speaker who quests for some final understanding that might lead to peace.

Baby Snooks And Daddy: A Little Gal's Journey To Joy And Jell-O, Sofia Luella France

Senior Projects Spring 2019

A little girl in pursuit of Jell-O can do anything! In this Theater and Performance project Baby Snooks just wants a happy, gelatinous Halloween, but will Daddy’s petty pranks get in the way? Worry not, Baby Snooks saves the spooky day, and finds herself along the way. Come on pumpkin heads! It’s time for a treat!

Play In The Woods: The Role Of The Dramaturg In Facilitating A Holistic, Slow Theater-Making Process, Claudia Nolan

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I document the ideas behind and my process for Play in the Woods, an experiment in slow theater-making that serves as a model for how dramaturgs can facilitate sustainable, holistic methods of performance. This model is grounded in feminist theater practices and the aesthetic of poor theater. In creating the performance of Play in the Woods, I as dramaturg invited participants to serve as co-creators, individually crafting pieces that examined fairytales and the role those stories have played on their lives. The performance was held out of doors at the Amethyst Brook Conservation Area on …

On The Fringes: The Monsters, The Voiceless, The Abominations, And The Exiled, Virginia Davis Wyeth

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

Peripheral characters/characteristics frequently serve to highlight the problematic societal situation of marginalized groups, even though these characters on the fringes of the text or main characters with unusual attributes are seemingly irrelevant to the primary plot. This portfolio examines, through a teaching unit, the monster archetype and its representation as a means to suppress Other or other within ourselves. The literary analysis pieces also examine the repression of historically marginalized groups, such as women, homosexuals, and children. And the last piece even takes a look at what happens when powerful groups are usurped by socio-economic and cultural shifts.

Leaving Neverland For Narnia: Childhood And Gender In Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, And The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Calabria Turner

English MA Theses

British gender expectations are often epitomized in mature adults, either in society or within novels, but in Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe gender roles are interpreted by the child protagonists. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan inhabits the world of the Neverland, but the gender roles of Victorian England follow them from London to the home below the tree where Peter, Wendy, her brothers, and the Lost Boys reside in a pseudo-domestic sphere. Peter often engages in literal discussion of what it means to become an English man, while Wendy lives …

So, “In Your Eyes, I Am Complete.” A Play In One Act, K. Michelle Sellers

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

So, “In Your Eyes, I am Complete” is a one-act play and a one-woman show. I will be playing various characters such as mom, dad and sister where I will address many layers: such as cross-cultural differences, mental health and alcoholism, to name a few.

Still Life: Growing Up With Death - A Visual Memoir, Lindsey Roth-Rosen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone is a multidimensional visual narrative project that incorporates heuristic methodology to illustrate complicated grief that emerged from early childhood loss. The memoir’s intention is to exemplify grief as a complex and mutable composite response to the death of my mother. One objective of this capstone is to understand melancholy, commonly associated with mental illness or symptomatic of depression, as an aesthetic emotion as well as a conduit for philosophical reflection. I use non-verbal approaches to the genre of a memoir by incorporating my photography to epitomize art as a powerful means to comprehend the totality of loss: as …

129 Home Ave., Ella Whittemore Hill

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Walking through my childhood home late at night, half asleep with my eyes barely open, I was always able to navigate myself around every corner, down every hallway, and past every creak in the floor. The muscle memory of this house, which I left behind long ago, continues to live within my body. Memory becomes faint over time; it changes and evolves, but it never disappears. Rather, it matures from the physical specificity of being in a house to being the stories of that house. When my mother moved out a few years ago (a move which I was unable …

#Lonelymovie Or The Continuation Of Our Brand And The Good Feelings It Produces, Theodore Philip Rosen

Senior Projects Fall 2018

#LonelyMovie or the Continuation of our Brand and the Good Feelings It Produces

A Senior Project submitted to

The Division of the Arts

Bard College

By Theodore Rosen

#LonelyMovie or the Continuation of our Brand and the Good Feelings It Produces

A Senior Project submitted to

The Division of the Arts

Bard College

By Theodore Rosen

#LonelyMovie or the Continuation of our Brand and the Good Feelings It Produces

A Senior Project submitted to

The Division of the Arts

Bard College

By Theodore Rosen

#LonelyMovie Artist Statement

Artist’s List:

1. Stevie Wonder

2. Mario

3. Bowser

4. Cartoon Network

5. Jack Link’s

6. Takashi Murakami

7. Gatorade …

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(Re) Thinking The Past Through Performance: The (Re) Construction Of Militant Childhood Imaginaries In The Post-Dictatorship Of Argentina’S Cultural Production From 2003-2015, Stephanie Rubi Orozco

Theses and Dissertations

Burdened by the atrocities of Argentina’s coup d’état (1976-1982), many children of persecuted parents were forced to live as clandestine hideaways. In recent decades, adult survivors who experience the dictatorship as clandestine children have become primary protagonists, seeking to (re)construct past experiences through the creation of visual and textual productions. In attempt to (re)create their experience in hiding; such adults propose an alternative non-conventional image of a witnessing childhood under military rule as the child of prosecuted parents. For such children, life in secrecy meant having to find refuge from state officials seeking to eliminate their parents. It demanded strict …

Ghetto Birds And Other Things That Lurk, Mary Frances Henn

MSU Graduate Theses

This collection is comprised of poetry critically introduced by a narrative essay. The pieces included explore place, trauma, and the female experience: what modern domestic life looks like, what life looks like in the urban core, how substance abuse impacts familial relations, and especially, what it means to be female in relation to these things. Often, the intersection of these themes becomes central to a poem; the borders of these subjects blur, leading to overlap in the record of personal experiences and observations.

The Twilight Zone: The Confluence Of Childhood Scenes And Future Anxiety, Jongwon Bae

Theses and Dissertations

Jongwon Bae’s paintings reflect his childhood memories as an archive that is to be repressed until it manifests itself in uncertain ways as it becomes confluent with the anxiety about the future.

Beyond The Boundaries Of Childhood: Northern African American Children's Cultural And Political Resistance, 1780-1861, Crystal L. Webster

Doctoral Dissertations

Notions of childhood as a distinct developmental period of life were concretized during the nineteenth century. Features of children’s lives including innocence, play, and exclusion from labor became markers of ideal childhoods as part of the racialized modernization of childhood. This dissertation uncovers the ways in which modern constructions of childhood attempted to subjugate northern African American children throughout the nineteenth century and highlights the means by which black children and conceptualizations of black childhood became agents and sites of resistance. In doing so, it demonstrates both how African American children experienced age-based forms of subjugation as well as their …

Remembering Elsewhere, Amelia Ernestine Walsh

Senior Projects Spring 2017

In my works, I tried very hard to create characters with unusual perspectives. I wanted to write from the point of view of children, while avoiding anything overly precious or intentionally naive. The trauma of aging, and eventually dying, are the themes for these works. I attempted to draw forth unusual and thought-provoking imagery that could successfully draw my reader into a constructed reality and, hopefully, draw them to less common questions we might ask regarding human nature.

Why Did I Marry A Sentimentalist?: Family & Domesticity In The Films Of Steven Spielberg, Emmet Dotan

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

From Once Upon A Time To Happily Ever After: Grimms’ Fairy Tales And Early Childhood Development, Hannah Mccarley

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies and The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Those That Trespass Against Us: Childhood, Violence, And Memory In The White Ribbon, Joseph Kuster

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines aesthetic representations of childhood and violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, I argue that Haneke’s film interrogates notions of the idealized child in the context of German history/the history of the Tätergeneration in order to question the possibility of affixing particular objective truth to historical or cultural narrative. First, I examine and deconstruct culturally accepted representations of the child as a symbol of innocence and purity, and explore how Haneke’s film manipulates and subverts these tropes. I then approach the film using three different theoretical structures: the gaze of the monstrous child in the horror …

Chase Home For Children: Childhood In Progressive New England, Katherine M. Evans

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis aims to further the study of childhood in archaeology through the examination of a children’s aid institution in Progressive New England. Specifically, this research explores how the Progressive and Victorian aims of Chase Home for Children, as expressed in primary sources, are manifested in the material culture. Chase Home participated in the larger Progressive movement in its mission to train children “in the practical duties, to encourage habits of honesty, truthfulness, purity and industry, to prepare them to take their position in life as useful members of society” (Children’s Home Pamphlet 1878). An analysis of small finds from …

Neoliberal Darlings: The Commodification Of Grotesque Children In Contemporary Comics And Literature, Mark Heimermann

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes grotesque depictions of children in contemporary, speculative comics and literature: Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth, Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet, and Richard Starkings’ Elephantmen. It argues that the grotesque in these texts embodies the tension between children as economic objects and children as social beings, as the protagonists’ nonhuman elements are used to justify their commodification. Because commodification metaphorically transforms people into hybrids, part human/part commodity, the grotesque, with its emphasis on hybrid forms and ontological destabilization, is uniquely suited for representing this tension. Concern over the transformation …

Patsy Sings For Me: Stories, Brenna Elizabeth Womer

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis begins with a critical introduction about the function of place in works of fiction and creative nonfiction. I use quotes from Joan Didion, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Allison, and others to support the idea that, though many hold to the belief that people are shaped by place, really it is people who prescribe meaning to landscape and location, not the other way around. Place is at the mercy of memory and language. After the critical introduction, you will find short stories, flash fiction, essay, short memoir, and flash nonfiction. These works were not written with a specific theme in …

Childhood Home, Kira Marie Buckel

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Transforming Emergencies: The Rise Of A Humanitarian Ideology In The United States, 1959-1987, Bethany A. Sharpe

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation is situated within the historiography of humanitarianism in U.S. Foreign Relations and seeks to make better sense of when and how Americans choose to act in humanitarian encounters. To fully explore the dynamism of modern humanitarianism, this work traces its meteoric rise between the years 1959 and 1987 and analyzes key ideas that propelled forward the movement. It argues that conceptions and perceptions of children were the central ideas that spurred emotional, financial, and security investment in emergencies abroad from the American public. A variety of actors, including large and small NGOs, government agencies, and the media, grappled …

From Lion To Leaf: The Evacuation Of British Children To Canada During The Second World War, Claire L. Halstead

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

From Lion to Leaf is a study of the evacuation of British children to Canada in the Second World War. While European refugee children were excluded purposely from Canada, Canadians anxiously called for Britain to send her children as a display of philanthropic, patriotic, imperial, and wartime sentiment. Yet overseas evacuation is often overshadowed, in both the historiography and social memory of the war, by Britain’s domestic evacuation. From Lion to Leaf contributes to the study of evacuation, the British home front, wartime Canada, Canadian childcare and immigration policy, and the changing British Empire. Reflecting the transnationalism of the movement, …

Fill Your Holes For No-Body, Virginia Lopez-Anido

Senior Projects Spring 2015

The intention of this project was to reference the transition from childhood to adulthood by producing a body of work that abstracts, exaggerates and reinforces certain parts of ‘the figure’. This project alludes to a psychological and emotional remembrance of puberty as an experience that introduced and questioned bizarre forms of the ‘body’. Each piece in this project is represented like an artifact and like an image in which both negotiates qualities of humor, the uncomfortable and pathos. The combination between the plaster forms and the reconstructed parts/structures furthers some sort of anxiety out of necessity or support. It also …

Discovering The Chinese Mining Child: The Archaeology Of Children And Childhood In Multicultural American Mining Communities, Nicole A. Lane

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Children made up roughly one-quarter of the population of industrial boomtowns in the

North American West, underscoring the connections of family to places commonly

thought to be bachelor communities. By comparing artifacts and historical contexts from

three mining communities (Butte, Montana; Deadwood, South Dakota; and Sandpoint,

Idaho) established in the late 19th century, this thesis will contribute to archaeologies of

children, childhood, and socialization, examining material remains as a line of evidence

to study the ways in which relationships, gender, race, and class pervaded the lives of

children in these industrial settings. The methods employed here integrate information

from historical …

Confucius, Yamaha, Or Mozart? Cultural Capital And Upward Mobility Among Children Of Chinese Immigrants, Wei-Ting Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the determinants of upward mobility among children of Chinese immigrants. While most studies emphasize ethnic cultural capital as a primary determinant of Chinese upward mobility, this study proposes three new concepts to illuminate understudied processes promoting mobility. Specifically, this study argues that Chinese immigrants' interactions with classical music schools in the Chinese community help generate globalized cultural capital (resources from immigrants' participation in transnational networks), navigational capital (the ability to connect social networks together to facilitate community navigation through higher-status educational institutions) and aspirational capital (the ability of parents to acknowledge the barriers to upward mobility). These …

Innocent Artists: Creativity And Growing Up In Literatures Of Maturation, 1850-1920, Whitney Elaine Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

This project combines three subgenres of the novel—children’s literature, the Bildungsroman, and the Künstlerroman—under a new comprehensive category I term “literatures of maturation,” or texts that share a concern with the inner and outer formation of the individual, with growing up, and with childhood. By reading British literatures of maturation from both the Victorian and modern eras (that is, within the time frame of the Golden Age of children’s literature), I reveal that, creativity disrupts literary plots of growth and development, and that social integration and artistic maturation battle for dominance in the child’s journey to adulthood, resulting …

Toying With Americanization: The Impact Of Corporate Paternalism On Immigrant Children In Early 20th Century Colorado Coal Mining Communities, Jamie Devine

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the early 20^th century coal miners' lives in Southern Colorado were fraught with violence and hardships. Many immigrant men brought their families to remote areas to live in company towns and work in coal mines. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) attempted to assimilate these ethnically diverse immigrants into American society. One method was to impart American values onto the children living in these company towns. CF&I purchased American toys for the children during Christmas and created kindergartens for the children to attend with the intent of imparting American values. In contrast, the parents of these children …

The Vastness Of Small Spaces: Self-Portraits Of The Artist As A Child Enclosed, Matthew John Burgess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A tent of bed sheets, a furniture fort, a corner of the closet surrounded by chosen objects--the child finds or fashions these spaces and within them daydreaming begins. What do small spaces signify for the child, and why do scenes of enclosure emerge in autobiographical self-portraits of the artist? Sigmund Freud's theory that the literary vocation can be traced to childhood experiences is at the heart of this project, especially his observation that "the child at play behaves like a writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of this world in a …