Digital Commons Network^™

Radical Folk Heroes: Anansi & Br’Er Rabbit’S West African Origins & Their Forced Pilgrimages, Sage Adia Swaby

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

The Leatherman And Other Short Stories, Sophia Joy Slezak

Senior Projects Spring 2022

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

Of Archives And Ghosts, Zara Ruth Franke

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This project, is about Bard's history of ghosts, subcultural lore and what makes something "home" to you. In a place and time, in students life, when things seem dispossessed and temporal. As the subtitle of my written sproj suggests:Temporal spaces of home for Bard students now and then, their connections with each other and how we process memories, ghosts and subcultural lore.

My installation is about these moments in life, when everything seems to freeze for a second, hold still, and you feel like this moment is forever but also not at all. "Ephemerality", in academic, theory terms but also …

Madonna Metamorphoses, Isabella Rose Slezak

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Madonna Metamorphoses is a body of work illustrating the women martyred and monstrous. In fables, myths and folklore the woman is framed as a spinster, a seductress, a virgin, a victim. She is monstrous. She is contrary enough to upset the status quo, but weak enough to be defeated by it.

When women undergo monstrous transformations in these narratives there can be two reasons why. The transformation is either a curse placed upon her, one that must be broken for her to be whole again. The story of Swan Lake, for example. Or it is seen as a form of …

Despite The Blues: Richard Wright And Ralph Ellison’S Blues Based Works, Miranda Virginia Reale

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Ain't got no mother, ain't got no culture

Ain't got no friends, ain't got no schoolin'

Ain't got no love, ain't got no name

Ain't got no ticket, ain't got no token

Ain't got no god

–Nina Simone, “Ain’t Got No-I Got Life,” from the album Nuff Said (1968).

In between human intention and reality lies a disproportionate space that Albert Camus labels “the absurd.” Modern man’s affliction is thus absurd, as orthodox systems turn obsolete, the traditional virtues of the past cease to be familiar. The epistemology of the absurd may not have developed from American soil; but I …

A Return To The Region: 
Reconstructing The Past In Jewett, Cather, And Hurston
 (1896-1935), Anna L. Russian

Senior Projects Spring 2019

My senior project focuses on three works of American literature, starting from 1896 and ending in 1935. During this time period, the United States was undergoing drastic cultural and industrial changes, both of which indefinitely reshaped the American landscape. My project seeks to understand these changes through Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935). All three works look beyond the city, and instead look inward toward small regional communities in Maine, Nebraska, and Florida. With the regional focus placed on the narratives, my project …