Arts and Humanities Commons^™

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Kaboom, Karstin Margaret Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This document is a collection of original poems written between Fall 2018 and Spring 2022.

How Aesthetics Shape Our Ethics: Exploring Nazi Germany, The Soviet Union, And Digital World, Nika Kokhodze

Senior Projects Fall 2022

Every day, we encounter numerous amount of images, films, news and propaganda. The different forms and manifestations of aesthetics haunts our lives daily. What if I told you that Aesthetics has immense amount of power? This project aims specifically at that as it explores authoritarian states and the liberal democracies alike. How could the moral compass that we all cherish and hold dearly be predicated and shaped by something so remote as aesthetics? Exploring through examples from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and the digital world we all live in, one might find some answers and the right questions to …

The Grid Elegies, Pamela A. Kallimanis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Immigrants are a key component in New York City’s pandemic. Historically, New York is a city of immigrants and their children. In the latter part of the 20th Century, more immigrants arrived due to changes in migration policy. There was also an increased outmigration through second and third generations, which mirrors an economic trajectory seen in previous points in history, mainly in the 1970s. At that time, there was the lure of government policies – from federal mortgage agencies that graded white suburban areas as safer areas for banks to make loans than racially mixed urban areas, to road construction …

The Caged Bird Still Sings: The Poetics Of Peace, Sofia Diane Skavdahl

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Although poetry has been used as a method of peacemaking since Homer’s Iliad, little research, theory, or analysis has been done evaluating precisely what role poetry holds in the realms of peacemaking and conflict resolution. Poetry, along with other arts-based practices of peacemaking, is beneficial because of its ability to encourage personal autonomy and emotional communication, while offering an open and creative space to heal from violent conflict. In terms of the arts, poetry is especially unique because it holds the ability to transform relationships between adversaries and the relationship with the self. This paper seeks to analyze both the …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Sean Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In December of 2001, Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry (Def Poetry Jam) turned HBO viewers into audience members of a televised poetry reading, featuring spoken word and performance poetry. Over six seasons, actors, rappers, comedians, and the host, Mos Def, joined poets in a unique representation of counter-public open mic poetry readings and poetry slams. This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the …

A Matter Of Life And Def: Poetic Knowledge And The Organic Intellectuals In Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, Anthony Blacksher

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation unpacks the poetry, performances, and the production of Def Poetry Jam to explore how a performative art embodied and confronted racial discourses, including stereotypes and also, addressed the racism, patriotism, and imperialist discourses that circulated after 9/11. Def Poetry Jam contributes to the intellectual capacity of spoken word and performance poetry, and poets as intellectuals, where poets produce and disseminate knowledge, ideas, and data, in the form of narratives, that contribute to critical consciousness. The effectiveness of the series lay in the consistent blurring of entertainment, knowledge, anti-capitalism, and capitalism. This research demonstrates how Def Poetry Jam provided …

A Hundred Houses: Pauline Leader And The Spatial Poetics Of Disability, Carl Robert Nelson

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Finding And Making Home: Poems And Reflections Of Undergraduate Children Of Immigrants, Gladys Perez

Master's Theses

The number of children of immigrants within the United States has grown over the past few decades and more so we are seeing a greater number of these children pursuing a higher education. With a growing number of undergraduate children of immigrants growing, there is a need to understand how they see themselves as a part of the United States. Previous studies take into consideration how these students navigate higher education, however, there is a lack of research on these students’ larger understanding of belonging within the overall nation. Poetry as data and a process was the grounding methodology that …

The American Nightmare: Land Of The Incarcerated, Jamara Bernard

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

A collection of poems focusing on the mass incarceration of African-American men and how the prison industrial complex is designed to legally exploit prisoners specifically for profits. Along with a reflective essay about the history of legal discrimination and the creative process by which the poems were created. Then how it ties in with the capstone course theme of race, gender, class, feminist theory, and social justice.

Happily Ever After And Other Lies My Childhood Told Me, Rachel Anna Neff

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

A manuscript-length book of poetry with a critical preface centered on the idea of mythology, nursery rhymes, and foundational (Western) fictions and how the cultural norms and expectations that those texts create influence an individual, particularly with respect to gender and gender identity.

Tiger Shell, Christopher Sinnett

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Poetry is everything. A poem is a shell filled with a sliver of poetry. Life goes in, life comes out. These shells are filled with what we know, and deep inside, what we do not know. The ocean goes in and out. Art is in the shell. The poet enters, does not perform, does not act, does not do. The poet is.

Are Historically Black Colleges And Universities Necessary? It's Not That Black And White, Keara Jones

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

This is a creative thesis about the environment, culture and achievement of HBCUs. This thesis uses spoken word poetry as the creative means to express the past and present issues of HBCUs from a personal perspective. The poetry is supported by contemporary analysis to further add to the conversation about the necessity of HBCUs.

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book, Melissa Anne Morrow

Theses and Dissertations

Black Lazarus: Conjure Book is a hybrid-genre collection of poems (including lyric, narrative, graphic, prose, and combinations of these four forms) uttered in the voices of fictitious personas based on the participants pictured in, the historical circumstances surrounding, and one inscribed artifact of a postcard depicting the lynching of Allen Brooks in Dallas, Texas on March 3, 1910. The theoretical scaffold for the manuscript is "triangulation," a method used by qualitative researchers to validate their studies by exploring research issues from multiple perspectives. Triangulation is also a mapmaking method used to verify the position of waypoints by measuring them against …