Digital Commons Network^™

“Making A Modern Bolus”: The Non-Poetic Path To The New American Poetry Of William Carlos Williams, 1921-1932, Joshua Lalande

Senior Projects Fall 2012

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

Part I: Choreography "Helen" And "Family Photo" Part Ii: Movement And Story: An Exploration Through The Discourse Of Dance, Zia A. Morter

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Artist Statement:

My choreographic work is stimulated by a mental image that comes to me through research and observation of dance and other art forms. Once I have an image in my head then I realize the image by doing picture research. My image inspires a concept and characters that fit into the piece. I always plant my original image somewhere in the ending product of my dance.

I choreograph by casting my dancers as characters. I use these characters to explore the essential relationships between people and the essential struggles we face as individuals. Creating personality based dances enables …

"A Truthful Accounting Of Events": The Roles Of Linguistic Strategy, Narrative, And Performance In United States Asylum Hearings, Celia Feldman

Senior Projects Spring 2012

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

The Choice Of The People: Direct Legislation, Abortion Policy, And The American Democratic Ideal, Madelin Siedler

Senior Projects Spring 2012

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

'Amakwerekwere': An Assessment Of Xenophobic Sentiment And Violence In South Africa, Travis Bostick

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Amakwerekwere, is an informal term used by South Africans to identify African foreigners. This is an increasingly popular term in post-Apartheid South Africa, primarily because there has been an apparent increase in foreign Africans entering South Africa. The assumption is that African entering South Africa are somehow coming because they want to take part in the recent democratization and new freedoms of South Africa. In May of 2008, there was an outbreak of violence that started in the township of Alexandra in Johannesburg and spread to other regions of South Africa. The violence was deemed a facet of a trend …

Welfare Versus Stability In "Stabilizing An Unstable Economy": A Minskyan Growth Model, Stergios Mentesidis

Senior Projects Spring 2012

The paper focuses on Minsky's financial fragility hypothesis incorporated in a growth model and investigates whether an inherently unstable economy can be stabilized by a big and proactive government. Using dynamical systems theory and expanding a supply-driven growth model developed by Lin, Day and Tse (1992), the paper explores how different government spending programs and financing paths can affect the growth, as well as the stability of a capitalist economy. The results and implications of the new frameworks are analyzed, using analytical and numerical methods of bifurcation, to examine the dependence of optimal government intervention on the economic environment. The …

I'M Here..., Jocelyn Edwards

Senior Projects Spring 2012

This is a collection of things from my life in the past year. Some of them are things that I saw and some one them are things that I felt. Some images, like “Rachel under the bed” were in my head for months before I decided to finally paint them. Other paintings are just historical documents of beautiful things that I have seen.

This past year, I lived in a large old house. This house was the subject of a majority of these paintings. I find its spaces sad and hollow. Houses make me lonely. This house especially makes me …

"I Is An Other": An Exploration Of The Development Of Childhood And Adolescent Self-Concept, Jessica Lebovits

Senior Projects Spring 2012

A multidisciplinary project that combines original empirical research with an analysis of two Modernist novels, The Waves by Virginia Woolf and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Spillways And Sideways, Malin Mcwalters

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Hurricane Irene arrived in New York on August 28, 2011. The greater metropolitan area and much of the Hudson Valley was spared any major damage and within hours the storm had become yet another over-hyped natural disaster. While most people were storing away their AA batteries and emergency radios, small pockets of riverside towns in the Catskills were evacuated to higher ground as the Hudson’s small tributaries flooded their banks.

The damage that Hurricane Irene caused was mostly invisible and quickly forgotten. My attempt to document the development of the Town of Shokan in the wake of disaster began as …

Between Artifice & Authenticity: A Study Of Postmodern Song Lyrics, Mark Fletcher

Senior Projects Spring 2012

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

This Must Be The Place: A Return To The Borscht Belt, Ezra Glenn

Senior Projects Spring 2012

This Must Be the Place: a Return to the Borscht Belt

The Borscht Belt is a region in and around the Catskill Mountains, primarily in Sullivan and Ulster counties, which was once home to over 1,100 resorts, country clubs, golf courses, hotels, and bungalow colonies.

Shortly after the beginning of the 20^th century, the first waves of Jewish immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe to New York City in droves. Small Jewish farming colonies that had sprung up in the mid-19^th century began opening their doors to vacationers from the city as makeshift boarding houses, in order to supplement …

Silhouettes, Curtis Wallen

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Silhouettes

Silhouettes began as an experiment in reduction. I was looking to capture emptiness; to photograph nothing. However, it was important to work within the confines of the program of the camera. I didn’t want to cheat the apparatus, and end up with something not quite photography. I wanted to meet “straight photography” on its own terms, which got me thinking about the function of a photograph.

Photography has long served as a medium for documentation. From its genesis to today, it has been used to a breadth of ends as a creator of records. One particularly interesting case is …

The Environmental And Cultural Effects On The Conquest Of Mexico, Tristan Siegel

Senior Projects Spring 2012

In this work I examine the environment and cultural attitudes of Mesoamericans, specifically the Mexica (Atzec), and how these factors played a role in the Conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes. I begin by examining Mesoamerican agriculture, lithic technology, and metallurgy. I conclude by examining how these factors played out in the Conquest.

Comparison Of China And Japan’S Economic Development In The Semiconductor Industry, Rundong Ke

Senior Projects Spring 2012

While Japan marked its success in surpassing the U.S. to dominate the semiconductor industry in 1986, the Chinese semiconductor industry transformed from a small sector into a global competitor. This thesis tracks and compares the developmental histories of this industry between China and Japan and analyzes the differences in government policy, economic systems, comparative advantage and trade policy in both countries, in order to ascertain the two countries’ industrial development strategies and governments’ impacts on the semiconductor industry. This analysis finds that Japan’s development strategy targeted a knowledge- and capitalintensive industry (semiconductor industry, in this case) by providing preferential assistances …

The Impact Of Ptsd On Veterans’ Family Relationships: Mechanisms Of Distress And Available Treatments, Adam D. Lamotte

Senior Projects Spring 2012

When veterans return home from war with PTSD, the disorder can have detrimental effects on their close family relationships. Researchers have proposed different mechanisms underlying the distress experienced by partners and children of veterans with PTSD in the hopes that these mechanisms can be targeted in treatment. The purpose of this project is to review and synthesize the current literature on these mechanisms of distress, as well as the treatments that have been designed to address them. This review examines several key factors that account for veterans’ relationship distress, including the important factors of intimacy and aggression. Due to the …

Remnants, Lily Rosenthal

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Remnants are pieces that were once part of a greater entity, an entity that has since been removed. A remnant needn’t be viewed as “good” or “bad,” but just “as is” – the state of what remains, of what you physically see right in front of you. The idea of remnants and what they represent began to take shape for me over the course of this photographic project. Feelings I had not previously acknowledged found their space to come forward, embodying themselves in my photographs. As a reticent person, familiar with keeping feelings hidden, I discovered that my photos could …

Dis-Ease, Lana Barkin

Senior Projects Spring 2012

“One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.” –Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Photography is often criticized for its tendency to mediate our experiences …

Gusher, Rosemary Motley

Senior Projects Spring 2012

"Man is above all a storyteller. He lives surrounded by his stories and by those of others. He see's everything that happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it...As if there could be true stories! Things happen one way, we tell them in another" -Sartre, Nausea

My work reflects the collective desire to create narratives out of our lives. Individual experience is tainted by a hyper self-awareness; a desire to retell the story, “to live…life as if…recounting it” and photography perpetuates this inclination. Looking through photographs posted on the …

Running Barefoot, Benjamin Marx

Senior Projects Spring 2012

I have been required by the registrar to submit an artist statement, and to be honest I do not know what I am supposed to say. If I am expected to explain a deep profound message about my music, I have none. And if I should to discuss the pieces in my concert, I would rather leave it up to the audience to figure out what the pieces mean to them. Now I am only on the cusp of my musical exploration. I have just this year glimpsed the vast world of music and begun to understand its endlessness. While …

"Till Death Do Us Part:" White Weddings And Marriage In Contemporary Ritual, Brieze Levy

Senior Projects Spring 2012

No abstract provided.

The Heart Of Light: Rights, Justice, And Representations Of History And Conflict In The Congo, Nion T. Mcevoy Jr.

Senior Projects Spring 2012

In this paper I explore different representation of history and conflict in the Congo, through the lens of the Kony 2012 video released by Invisible Children. I look at the means and ends of representations, and what they tell us about rights, and justice.

Laughter At Auschwitz: George Tabori’S “Theater Der Peinlichkeit” And “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” In Post-War Germany, Leonie F. Bell

Senior Projects Spring 2012

For his premiere of The Cannibals at the Berliner Schiller Theater in December of 1969, George Tabori had an escape car waiting just in case the German audience reacted poorly to his play. Not only was he bringing the first Holocaust play set at a concentration camp to the German stage, but it was extremely comedic in nature. Tabori’s Holocaust play was funny. This had never been done before, especially not by a Hungarian Jew who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust. No one knew how the German audience, especially the non-Jewish audience, would react. Tabori wanted …

Kafka On Trial: Polysemy And Epistemological Enactment In Modern Literature, Michael Chew

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Examination of shortcoming and merits of polysemic language in Modern Literature (Fishhouse)

The Glutamate Hypothesis Of Schizophrenia: Assessment Of A Novel Antipsychotic In Zebrafish Larvae, William Vitale

Senior Projects Spring 2012

The glutamate hypothesis is a new theory of schizophrenia which proposes that deficient glutamatergic transmission at the NMDA receptor underlies the positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms of the disorder. In addition to tracing the development of the glutamate hypothesis in depth, this senior project presents a study investigating the effects of a novel antipsychotic in zebrafish. Zebrafish are an emerging model of several CNS disorders, including schizophrenia, and it has been demonstrated that NMDA-R antagonism induces motor hyperactivity in zebrafish adults and larvae. Previous research supports an ability of typical and atypical antipsychotics to reverse these motor effects in zebrafish …

Vanishing Footprints: Place And Man’S Struggle For Endurance In The Works Of Thomas Wolfe, Tongucnaz Seleme Basturk

Senior Projects Spring 2012

Novelist Thomas Wolfe sought to develop a new tradition of writing which would faithfully capture the experience of Americans. His vivid portrayals of man in various places demonstrate the inherent dignity of man’s struggles as he strives to understand his position in his world. Through his aesthetic choices, Wolfe captured how man’s identity consists of the entirety of his experiences. His dedicated rendering—and inclusion—of seemingly inconsequential details exhibits the worth which these particulars—and the history associated with them – hold in the lives of the men who come into contact with them. This project seeks to explore Thomas Wolfe’s depictions …

The Pull Of The Earth: Thomas Hardy, Willa Cather And Writing The Land, Eliza Holmes

Senior Projects Spring 2012

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

The Professional Cherokee: Elias Boudinot And The Negotiation Of Indian Political Identity, 1817-39, Irina Rogova

Senior Projects Spring 2012

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