Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Placemaking And Placewashing In Manhattan's Chinatown: Capitalist Vs. Community Interests, Mary Chu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the late 1890s, there have been internal and external placemakers in Manhattan’s Chinatown. They take the form of city government, real estate developers, and community organizations vying for space, and seeking to define what this neighborhood should be, for whom it should serve, and how it should look. Sometimes these would-be placemakers operate with neoliberal goals and overt orientalist and/or racist views. They push those narratives through via media representations and as a tactic to attract tourism, but with little regard for how it affects the community. In this work, I examine connections between historic ideas of placemaking and …

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 …

Report From New York City, Two, Or Here I Go Again, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is Marleen S. Barr's description of living through the corona virus horror in New York City. Barr is a science fiction scholar who views her experience through a science fiction lens.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Direct Action Housing: Exploring The History Of Tenant-Led Housing Struggles—On Film—In Nyc, Arielle Lawson

Publications and Research

This independent research project dives into the history of tenant-led housing struggles in New York City with a particular focus on using film archives and documentaries to highlight key moments and case studies when housing activism opened up new political imaginations, intersections and possibilities in the city.

As outlined in the Direct Action Housing zine, I curated and hosted four public events in the spring of 2019 on different aspects of housing struggles documented through archival film records. This series of housing history films was a starting point and catalyst to think about the role of and for the home …

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 …

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 …

Carceral Camouflage: Inscribing And Obscuring Neoliberal Penality Through New York City's Borough-Based Jail Plan, Katie Wilson

Honors Papers

This project seeks to interrogate the socio-spatial implications of New York City's contemporary criminal justice machine through mayor Bill de Blasio's ongoing jail reform plan to build new, "borough-based jails." In 2017, following decades of controversy over entrenched violence and horrific abuses on Rikers Island, New York's notorious island penal colony, de Blasio announced a 10-year plan to "to close Rikers Island and replace it with a smaller network of modern jails." While the plan claims to make jails in New York "smaller, safer, and fairer," this project analyzes the plan's strategies, its rhetoric, and its goals to understand the …

Blotner, Joseph Leo, 1923-2012 (Mss 200), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 200. Research material collected by Joseph Leo Blotner for his literary biography of Robert Penn Warren. Includes Warren’s correspondence (photocopies from various repositories), interview transcripts, notes, news clippings, critical essays, and other documentation about Warren. Also includes drafts, galley proofs, and permissions related to the biography.

Gen Ms 11 Leo Brooks Photographs Finding Aid, Siobain C. Monahan

Search the General Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Description:

Leo Brooks was an artist who was also a linotype operator at the New York Times. He worked in a variety of media, including jewelry and painting. He worked for the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, making a photographic record of life in the city during the Great Depression. The collection consists of reproductions of photographs taken in New York, in 1932 and 1933. Possibly acquired by the University Art Gallery for an exhibition.

Date Range:

1932-1933

Size of Collection:

4.5 ft.

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 …

The Beat "Pad", Heike Mlakar

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "The Beat 'Pad'" Heike Mlakar analyzes the importance of Joan Vollmer's and Hettie Jones's Manhattan apartments as centers for the upcoming avant-garde movement of the time in order to understand the meaning of "home" in postwar bohemianism in general and specifically for female Beats. In sensationalized late 1950s films and in print media, the Beats were associated with low-rent Beat "pads" in poor urban areas, in which wild all-night parties were held—sites of drug use, destitution, and sexual promiscuity. Both Vollmer and Jones contributed greatly to the formation of the Beat Generation by providing the perfect setting …

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 …

From “Destroying Angel” To “The Most Dangerous Woman In America”: A Study Of Mary Mallon’S Depiction In Popular Culture, Claire Sandoval-Peck

History Undergraduate Theses

My paper examines the life of "Typhoid Mary" Mallon, and looks at how she has been depicted and vilified in popular culture. It asks why and how she has been remembered in history as the infamous “Typhoid Mary” and how her portrayal has been influenced by the attitudes and beliefs of the time and place of her life. I discuss her historical legacy through the lens of her three identities as a healthy carrier, Irish immigrant, and a working woman, researching both primary and secondary sources. Through exploring those subjects, I have concluded that the convergence of these three identities …

Cultural Commentary: The Many Secrets Of Joe Gould, Patricia Fanning

Patricia J. Fanning

No abstract provided.

"Happily Ever After": The Tragic Queer And Delany's Comic Book Fairy Tale, Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

Discusses the formulations of queer futurity and normativity in Samuel R. Delany’s autobiographical graphic novel Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York, drawn by artist Mia Wolff. This love story that is depicted via an interplay of text and imagery resists clichéd homonormative recasting of existing familial templates and questions how expectations queer happiness are bounded by a persistent set of social norms (race, class, education, and income) and their intersections. Also suggests how happy endings can function as a renegotiation of the utopian impulse into something more complex and realistic.

Anti-Transgender Discrimination And Oppression In New York City And San Francisco During The Gay Liberation Movement, 1965-1975, James Brady

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Transgender and gender non-conforming people in San Francisco and New York City were oppressed in many ways during the 1960s and 1970s. Due to employment discrimination, many were homeless and worked as prostitutes. While living on the streets, transgender and gender non-conforming people frequently faced arrest and police harassment due to laws against cross-dressing and solicitation. Transgender and gender non-conforming people were also oftentimes the victims of hate crimes. Even gay liberation activists oppressed transgender and gender non-conforming people. They did this by excluding transgender and gender non-conforming people from gay liberation organizations and refusing to support transgender causes. Despite …

Perversions Of The American Dream In The 20th Century Novel: Requiem For A Dream And The Great Gatsby, Mary C. Menzemer

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The American Dream’s outlines are pretty clear: find a good job, make enough money, raise a good family, love your neighbors and friends, and uphold American laws. In this essay, I am going to explore what happens when the dream’s goals are darkened, corrupted, and attempted to be found by unconventional means and shortcut through the lens of two novels written in the 20^th century, at the height of the American Dream’s popularity: Requiem for a Dream and The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby was published in 1925, at a time when a slew of immigrants were seeking better …

Mayo, George Morrow, 1896-1983 (Mss 521), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 521. Scrapbooks (2) documenting the life and times of journalist George Morrow Mayo and his fashion designer wife Muriel L. Van Norden. Scrapbooks contain a historical narrative, articles written by Mr. Mayo, as well as photographs and other ephemera such as postcards, small maps, etc. Also includes news clippings, photos of Mayo’s Family and an autographed copy of his book Los Angeles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 193)

Dreaming And Surviving In Heterotopia: First-Generation Immigrant Girls’ Pursuit Of The American Dream In New York City, Kaoru Miyazawa

Kaoru Miyazawa

This paper analyzes experiences of first-generation immigrant girls in a newcomer school using Foucault’s notions of heterotopia.

Victim Of A Revolution: Nicholas Cresswell's American Odyssey, 1774-1777, Matthew Exline

Masters Theses

The diary of Nicholas Cresswell, a young Englishman who traveled in America from 1774-1777, has long been an important primary source on the American Revolution. Cresswell's travels took him from the eastern seaboard (and Barbados) to Kentucky and Ohio, and from Williamsburg, Virginia to New York City. The people he met encompassed almost the entire political spectrum of the day, ranging from William Howe and Loyalist operatives such as John Connolly to grassroots patriot activists on the Committees of Public Safety and founding luminaries such as George Rogers Clark, Thomas Jefferson, and Patrick Henry. He rubbed shoulders with people from …

Conjuring The Close From Afar A Border-Crossing Tale Of Vieques’ Activism And Obama-Empire, Víctor M. Torres-Vélez, Sarah Molinari, Katharine Lawrence

Publications and Research

After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people’s will in the face of globalization—is also a border- …

Cooper-Hewitt Museum Of Design And Technology (C-Hmd+T): Biomimetic Architecture As Part Of Nature, Isabel Marisa Corsino Carro

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

If architects are to create a sustainable world, one in which we are accountable to the needs of all future generations and living creatures, we must recognize that our present form of designing buildings is deeply flawed. Being the number one cause of emission gases, building design needs to be revolutionized to be able to surpass such climatic changes and finally harmonize with nature. To create a sustainable future and solve the global warming crisis, architects need to incorporate nature within design through the process known as biomimicry. Janine Benyus, the author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, stressed how …