Digital Commons Network^™

Power And The Press: Reimagining The World By Producing Information Together, Jen Hoyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study of three collectively-organized activist printing projects examines how information production is a strategy for communities to reimagine and reconfigure oppressive power structures. I consider the High School Student Union and their newspaper, the High School Free Press; the women’s collective that took over RAT Subterranean News; and WIMP, a radical printing collective that broke away from the New York City Students for a Democratic Society chapter and supported a variety of progressive movements in New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This research examines how dissatisfaction with oppressive power structures leads individuals to build collective …

White Supremacist Print Culture And The Creation Of White Working-Class Ideology In 1860s New York City, Anna Meyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

J. H. Van Evrie believed in the biological basis of white racial supremacy and Black inferiority beliefs which he spread in his publications throughout the 19^th century. He generated support for Copperhead politicians, pro-slavery Northern Democrats, who would enact his racial policies, in his newspaper the Weekly Caucasian, published in New York City during the Civil War. He adapted the presentation of his racial theories to appeal to the economic concerns of among working-class white men and Irish immigrants by using allegories about the Civil War. The newspaper created a sense of white nationalism and racial solidarity with …

Dancing Through Time: A Biographical Look On The Evolution Of Tap Dance, Jaimie Cranford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A uniquely American art form, tap dance has often been misrepresented and under-appreciated when positioned alongside other dance forms. This is largely due to the form’s racialized history, which builds upon contributions from African-American culture. Unlike other dance forms, which stem from white European traditions, tap dance evolved out of a necessity for cultural preservation as enslaved Africans adapted to life in America. As tap dance evolved, its association with slave culture led to it not being taken seriously; if anything, tap dancers were viewed simply as “entertainers” – certainly not as artists. Using a biographical lens, this work looks …

Art After Dark: Economies Of Performance, New York City 1978–1988, Meredith Mowder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Art After Dark: Economies of Performance, New York City 1978-1988 examines the interwoven social and economic histories of New York City and performance in the late 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation traces the growth and visibility of performance art, moving from the recession of the 1970s and early years of public funding for the arts, to the downtown nightclub scene of the 1980s, the history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and artistic experiments with television in the 1980s.Looking closely at the economic conditions under which performance occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dissertation …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

The Life And Death Of Mambo: Culture And Consumption In New York's Salsa Dance Scene, Carmela Muzio Dormani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades salsa dancing has become a global phenomenon, spawning a variety of styles and levels. Although formerly passed from person to person through Latinx family and community networks, salsa dance has long been practiced in a more codified way. Today, salsa is largely reproduced in dance studio classes, congresses, and competitions collectively referred to as “the salsa scene”. In New York City, the salsa scene retains vestiges of Nuyorican and Afro-Caribbean identity, though it is practiced by people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and marketed to a global base. Building on long term participation observation and nearly …

Performing Nyc Latinidades: Building A Diasporic Home At Pregones And The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Oriana E. Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In December 1966, Miriam Colón, a Puerto Rican actress, starred in The Oxcart at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. The play, written by Puerto Rican playwright René Marques in 1951, told the story of a Puerto Rican family’s migration from the countryside to San Juan, and finally, to New York City. One-year post-production Colón founded the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) as a response to the lack of diversity she saw in the audiences at the Greenwich Mews and everywhere else she performed during her prolific acting career in the 1950s and 1960s. Thirteen years later, Rosalba …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity, Literature, And Culture In 19th And 20th Century New York City, Krystyna Michael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation, The Urban Domestic: Homosocial Domesticity in the Literature and Culture of 19^th- and 20^th-Century New York City,explores the relationship between transformations in urban planning and domestic ideology through American literature. Specifically, I take up Walt Whitman and Edith Wharton as two authors with distinctly ambivalent relationships to the hetero-normative nuclear family and the ways New York’s built environment shaped and controlled the nation’s gender and sexual politics. My reading bridges a critical gap between studies of culture and its literary expressions on the one hand, and of architectural design and the urban environment …

Morris High School: A Biography, Naomi Sharlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Morris High School was conceived and built in the Bronx with a lofty mission: to provide a comprehensive, world-class secondary education to the children of immigrant and working-class families, and in so doing to elevate the American public education system and America itself. Such a weighty mission for an institution would result, one could expect, in painstaking record keeping, the lionization of great leaders, consistent investment in the building, and attention given to problems encountered or created over the years. And yet, the life of Morris High School remains elusive. Key figures in its story are lost to obscurity like …

Performing Desire In Times Square: Sailors, Hustlers And Masculinity, Kel R. Karpinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From WWII to the early 1970s, New York City as a port town created a liminal space extending from the piers in the Brooklyn Navy Yard all the way to Times Square in Midtown Manhattan. In Times Square, through interactions on the street, in bars and in hotel rooms, desire and masculinity become a performance between and for men. The queerness of these performances lies in the fact that they fall outside of the norms of society both as same-sex encounters and because sex work is viewed as “deviant.” Further, these interactions eschew traditional labels and limits of desire and …

Affective Afterlives: An Ethnography Of Activism Between Movements, Manissa Maharawal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic project starts at the end of Occupy Wall Street in New York City and ends at the beginning of Black Lives Matter in Oakland, CA. In between these two movements it looks at a variety of political projects that focused on issues of housing and anti-gentrification in New York City and San Francisco. Throughout I favor a view of social movements that understands the messy trajectories of activism. This methodological privileging of what activists are doing, and the places and spaces in which they ground their work seeks to de-center bounded social movements in the study of politics …

Classics And Rockefeller Center: John D. Rockefeller Jr. And The Use Of Classicism In Public Space, Jared A. Simard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation situates the mythologically-inspired artwork of Rockefeller Center in the classical education of its sole proprietor, John D. Rockefeller Jr. I argue that his extensive classical education at the Browning School and Brown University led to an adult interest in the Classics. Through extensive, original archival research at the Rockefeller Archive Center and the Rockefeller Center Archive Center, I demonstrate that this interest was expressed through his philanthropy of prestigious institutions such as the American Academy in Rome, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and the excavations of the Athenian Agora. Colonial Williamsburg and Versailles are also …