Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reimagining The Flute Masterclass: Case Studies Exploring Artistry, Authority, And Embodiment, Sarah Carrier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work explores the flute masterclass as an aesthetic, ritualized, and historically reimagined cultural practice. Based on fieldwork that took place between 2017 and 2019 in the United States, in Italy, and on the social media platforms Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, I argue that the masterclass—an extension of the master/apprentice system that dominates learning in the classical music tradition—is characterized by embodied qualities of artistry and authority. These qualities are not inherent, but are perceived through subjective, social, familied, and affective bodies.

Chapter One outlines the main themes and the research design. Chapter Two is a case study that analyzes …

Little Egypt: A Critical Biography, Katherine Vecchio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Structured as a biography, this thesis investigates the origins of Little Egypt—a stage name assumed by multiple women performing either the danse du ventre or the hoochie-coochie—and considers the character’s cultural legacy. The work draws on nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, advertisements, photographs, and official publications and archival records from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Chapter one takes a new look at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and shows how the presence of dancers performing the danse du ventre on the Midway Pliasance was turned into a flashpoint of controversy by the popular press. This controversy would be key …

A Deep-Er Practice For Educators: Reflecting, Unpacking And Confronting Racism Through Critical Performative Pedagogy, Natalia Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the current political climate, we have seen time and time again the killings of black and brown youth, witnessed the separation of immigrant families, and the mass murders caused by nativist xenophobic white rage. Teachers in schools across our country need to be better prepared to engage in critical race dialogues and need to understand their location in the larger educational system so to contest, rather than reproduce, racism. This study is based on the premise that teachers are not adequately learning about structural oppression that impact the experience of school children and are not trained in the art …

Staging English Affairs In Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the creation and dissemination of alternative versions of English history through the means of dramatic fiction, and contextualizes them in the panorama of the intellectual debates of seventeenth-century Italy. Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy studies the ways in which the reinvention of Tudor and Stuart affairs in dramatic literature mirrored the ambitions, fears, and fantasies of a century in disquieting transformation. This research documents how news and information from England entered the Italian states, how they were perceived, and what their repurposing can reveal about the potentialities of intercultural exchange. Anglo-inspired drama became a …

Love And Revolution: Queer Freedom, Tragedy, Belonging, And Decolonization, 1944 To 1970, Velina Manolova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary works by U.S. writers Lillian Smith, Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry written in the early part of the postwar period referred to as the “Protest Era” (1944-1970). Analyzing a major work by each author—Strange Fruit (1944), The Member of the Wedding (1946), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Les Blancs (1970)—this project proposes that Smith, McCullers, Baldwin, and Hansberry were not only early theorists of intersectionality but also witnesses to the deeply problematic entanglements of subjectivities formed by differential privilege, which the author calls intersubjectivity or love. Through frameworks of queerness, racialization, performance/performativity, tragedy, and …

Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I claim the collective emotional connections and historical explorations characteristic of musical theatre constitute a nostalgic impulse dramaturgically inherent in the form. In my intervention in the link between nostalgia and musical theatre, I look to an area underrepresented in musical theatre scholarship: social dance. Through case studies that focus specifically on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, I ask what social dance is doing in musical theatre and how the dancing body functions as a catalyst for nostalgic thinking for …

Reclaiming The Musical Burlesque: A Reconstruction Of The 1855 Musical Score To John Brougham’S Po-Ca-Hon-Tas: Or, The Gentle Savage, Christopher Drobny

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most historians begin their musical theatre chronologies with the 1866 premiere of The Black Crook. However, a few respected scholars cite Po-Ca-Hon-Tas: or, The Gentle Savage, John Brougham’s 1855 musical burlesque, as an important development in the art form’s earlier evolution. The neglect of Brougham’s work is often justified for two reasons. First, his practice of creating lyrics to pre-existing melodies reduces his work to second-tier status. Second, because none of Brougham’s musical scores are extant, it is impossible to recreate a performance of his work and access its qualities. I offer two responses. First, as our contemporary musical …

Broadway Bodies: Casting, Stigma, And Difference In Broadway Musicals Since "A Chorus Line" (1975), Ryan Donovan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how embodied identities facing social stigmatization are represented in Broadway musicals and provides histories of casting specific kinds of embodied difference. Broadway Bodies: Casting, Stigma, and Difference in Broadway Musicals since “A Chorus Line” considers the politics of representation and makes clear that casting is always a political act, situated within a power structure favoring certain bodies. Previous scholarship on casting largely centers on race and ethnicity as the central issues; this research reframes the study of casting to focus on bodies, inclusive of race and ethnicity but especially relative to ability, gender, sexuality, and size. Though …

Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the practice of white musical variety clowns embodying stereotypes of African, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has been widely documented and theorized in scholarship on US American popular performance, it has been done largely in segregated studies that maintain the idea that racial impersonations in musical variety is a privilege of white performers. For instance, no study exists that focuses on more than one stereotype at a time, and the performer’s body is always either white or of the same “color” as the type being played. In addition, very little has been written about the tours and circuits run by …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

Racial Becoming: How Agentic (Self-Initiated) Encounter Events Inform Racial Identity Refinement, Devin A. Heyward

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Racial identity literature has typically focused on identity formation through a series of stages. It also has centered how the experience of negative encounter events informs racial identity formation. With the advent of new genealogical and genomic technology, it is imperative to expand the focus of identity literatures to include encounter events, which participants elect to experience (i.e. self-initiated or agentic encounter events). By using this frame, identity processes become fluid and informed by individual life experiences. In the context of this study, direct to consumer genetic ancestry tests (DTC-GAT) are operationalized as a self-initiated encounter event. Participants were …

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 …