Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The "I" Of The Artist-Curator, Natalie Musteata

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation charts the proliferation of artist-curated exhibitions in museums and institutions of art from 1969 to the early 2010s. It is my contention that the artist-curated exhibitions of these four decades can be divided chronologically into several types: in the 1970s and ’80s, they disrupted museological conventions and helped contemporize the (perceived) aging collections of historical institutions; in the late 1980s and ’90s, they tackled pressing social and political issues, reimagining the practice of “institutional critique”; in the late 1990s and 2000s, they indulged in solipsistic investigations of the artist’s psyche, reinforcing the traditional, romantic conception of the artist …

Afecto Impropio Y Estética Huacha: Relatos Íntimos De Alejandra Costamagna, Nona Fernández, Andrea Jeftanovic, Andrea Maturana Y Lina Meruane, Nan Zheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work examines selective novels and short stories about Chile during and after Augusto Pinochet’s the military regime, written by five contemporary female writers that share generational traits: Alejandra Costamagna, Nona Fernández, Andrea Jeftanovic, Andrea Maturana and Lina Meruane. Their intimate stories on family relations that the common society brands as non-ideal and deviant, epitomize the aesthetics defined as symbolically huacho. This is a term that originally refers to the mestizo orphans or illegitimate children born during the European conquest and colonization, but appropriated by the author of this work to address the prevailing discontent and malaise that contradict …

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 …

La Vigencia De Lo R/Real: La Memoria Traumática Y El Relato Policial Postdictatorial En Argentina Y Chile, 1996–2015, Jelena Mihailovic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present dissertation investigates crime fiction produced in Argentina and Chile between 1996 and 2015. It offers an analytical and critical reflection on five Argentinian works (four novels and one movie) and four Chilean novels. The Argentinian corpus includes the novels El secreto y las voces (2002) by Carlos Gamerro, A quien corresponda (2008) by Martín Caparrós, El espíritu de mis padres sigue subiendo en la lluvia (2011) by Patricio Pron, and Una misma noche (2012) by Leopoldo Brizuela, and the movie El secreto de sus ojos (2009), directed by Juan José Campanella. The Chilean novels are Estrella distante (1996) …

The Equal Right To Sing: The American Zeitgeist And Its Implications For Music Education, Youngeun Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to music educators and proponents of arts education, music education in U.S. public schools seems to be in jeopardy. This thesis brings attention to several issues in current music education. It is a case study of music education in New York City public elementary schools. First, it shows that music education is not equally distributed to all students in the public-school system and is especially unequal among elementary schools. Next, it investigates possible causes for this inequality, from the current system’s limitations to more fundamental causes including the cultural perception of music among the U.S. public. The consequences of …

Visualizing The Decline Of The Corset Business, Iris Finkel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The corset defined a woman’s silhouette for nearly four hundred years. It continues to fascinate and inspire new ways to study its place in culture. Taking a digital humanities approach, my project encompasses visualizations of metadata from advertisements for foundation garments in Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Vogue from 1905 through 1929. These visualizations represent the marketing behavior of corset manufacturers, a well-established group of businesses that benefited from the industrial revolution to produce and sell a type of garment that held a constant place in women’s wardrobes.

Immigration, Small Business And Assimilation: Three Stories Of Small-Time Capitalism On The Lower East Side, Marcus Hillman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Small businesses in New York City have often been a catalyst to assimilation for individual immigrants, their families and their communities. For this capstone project, I have recorded conversations with three small-time entrepreneurs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and created a narrative audio piece that explores some of the important and study-worthy characteristics of New York City including economic opportunities in the city, immigration, assimilation and the ways that New Yorkers share space, just to name a few. These themes are threads that ran through all three of the conversations that I had and are crucial elements of …

Through The Eye And Into My Heart: Scenes Of Embrace In Morgan Ms M.245 And The Tactile Responses They Provoked, Zoe A. Coyle

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines representations of embrace in a Roman de la rose (Morgan Library, M.245). Emphasis is on the reader’s tactile interaction with the manuscript as an object, and the notion of romances as sites for a distinctly physical reading practice, in which miniatures would be kissed, rubbed, or pierced.

Forward, Backward, Colin Cannon

Theses and Dissertations

The is a piece that explores compositional structure and form. The piece is divided into two movements, “Forward” and “Backward” and may be performed in either order. I like to think of it as a Rorschach inkblot – a reflection of an asymmetrical image creating a symmetrical image.

Dress Up, Ye'ela B. Wilschanski

Theses and Dissertations

Dress Up (Performance, 40 minutes) is a dress that functions as a floor, blanket, tablecloth, book and walls. It tells a visual story about domestic care giving rituals, referencing different times and places.

My Painting, Brian Byun

Theses and Dissertations

When the painting is done, it begins to ask me “Who are you?” and “What am I?” This ongoing conversation has fascinated me in making these paintings over the last several months and I’m hoping the viewer will have a similar experience.

The Social Role Of The Artist, Gabino A. Castelan

Theses and Dissertations

Gabino A. Castelán, tells a personal story of loss that influenced his artistic practice. He embraced this narrative to create two projects “Practice of Everyday Life-205 (PoEL-205) and the formation of a temporary collective called, Cultural Workers. He presents two case studies of twenty-first century artists, whose projects have business models that allow them to function in social roles during political and social turmoil. "Conflict Kitchen" and "Rebuild Foundation" provide context about running for-profit and not-for-profit artistic practices. Castelan writes about these projects' influencing his artistic practice in general.

“The Healing Balm Of Sympathy Denied”: Moral Sense Philosophy, Patriarchy, And Monstrosity In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Estefania Velez

Theses and Dissertations

Though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein produces an ideology of sympathy consistent with the literary and philosophical aims of Romanticism, this essay examines Shelley’s critique of patriarchy which posits that though sympathetic companionship in Frankenstein remains an ethical necessity, it is unattainable within a social order marred by misogynist structures of power.

Archaeology Of Social Patterning, Chase Bray

Theses and Dissertations

The episteme that created the grid as a structure for logic has been usurped. We compose meaning from an adulterated grid, or pattern. I process meaning through the abuse of acrid patterns and the grid, the reduction of imagery to silhouettes and by referencing both cultural and classical mythology.

The Hydra Of Modern Literature, Genevieve Sharp

Dissertations and Theses

Modernist Literature

"Dawn And Doom Was In The Branches": Eros Revisited In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Fernando M. Duran

Dissertations and Theses

No abstract provided.

Mental Illness And Psychiatry In The Victorian Era: An Analysis Of The Prevailing Power Dynamics Between Women And Male Authority Figures Through Gilman And Freud., Rumaisa Nasim Jumana

Dissertations and Theses

In this research paper, I intend to focus on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Sigmund Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (written in 1900 and published in 1905), with an aim to represent the prevailing attitudes of men, especially male physicians, towards women in the Victorian era. I intend to demonstrate how the Victorian social system placed women in a subordinate position through patriarchal ideals of femininity and unapologetically labeled them “insane” if their behavior and personality dared deviate from the prevailing social norms and conventions. In addition, I hope to shed light …

Freedom In Existence: A Comparative Study Of The Poetics Of Emily Dickinson And Sohrab Sepehri, Neda Zahraie

Dissertations and Theses

Poetry, like thought, belongs to all people and is representative of existence itself. In one sense, poetry is the musical formation of words, whose effects must be experienced in sound, tone and melody, but in another sense, poetry is also an artistic discourse where the “fundamental character is that of an incidentally moving and imaginative form of communication” (Edman 46). Emily Dickinson and Sohrab Sepehri are two poets who sought to identify and define the Self in their modernist poetic discourse, and they each appropriated language as a means and a stepping-stone towards a methodological and unrestricted method of inquiry …

A Consideration Of Kafka's Platonic Influences In The Trial, Shana N. Creaney Ms.

Dissertations and Theses

An analysis of Kafka's The Trial using the lens of Plato's Republic to re-analyze the character arc of Joseph K. What exactly does Kafka mean when he has K. die "like a dog"? Is it possible to see the ending as hopeful or optimistic rather than bleak?

"Beyond Consolation": Or Strangeness, Estrangement, And Strange-Ing In The Elegy For The Black Body, 1955-Present, Naomie Jean-Pierre

Dissertations and Theses

The Elegy for the Black Body examines the mid-twentieth to early-twenty-first-century poetic justice crafted by African American poets to eulogize individual African Americans whose deaths were the result of racial and political violence. In the age of lynching, mass shooting, and police brutality, I argue that an African American poetic tradition persists that, while not entirely beholden to the ancient elegy, is its distant relative, along with the English and American Elegy. I argue further that while the contemporary American elegy has undergone for the last six decades intensive study, from the notable studies done by Peter Sack’s in The …

"The Hazards Of Being Free": Thinking About Not Thinking In Infinite Jest, Josh Cunningham

Dissertations and Theses

This paper is about self-consciousness and how it figures in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Because Infinite Jest is such a large novel (1079 pages, including the indispensable footnotes), it serves, like other large novels before it, as a kind of encyclopedia of contemporary culture. The novel, in large part, treats self-consciousness—a distinctly human phenomenon, one which certainly accounts for our dominance as a species—as a problem (on both an individual and collective level) that needs to be overcome. This is because, as it turns out, self consciousness, when it becomes epidemic, is as much a boon as it …

"Excellent Propaganda" Zbigniew Brzezinski's Narrative For The Soviet Invasion Of Afghanistan, Matt Mulhern

Dissertations and Theses

My focus is Cold War, and my thesis is about Zbigniew Brzezinski's larger geopolitical vision and objectivesforthePersian Gulf region, including how he used the Afghan war to pursue those objectives, and how important his willful misunderstanding of Soviet intentions in Afghanistan was to the legacy of America’s involvement in that nation’s affairs.

The Embodiment Of Theory In Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Julie A. Ficks

Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this research is to explore how Maggie Nelson, in her groundbreaking memoir The Argonauts (2015), works to bring critical theory (primarily queer and feminist theory) out of the academy and into the realm of the personal, rendering theory as tangible and embodied in a real-world setting. Through this unique exchange, Nelson radically reinstates norms relating to gender, sexuality, motherhood and relationships.

La Cofradía De Artes Y Artesanos Hispánicos: 1978 To 1983 Redefining Tradition In The New Mexican Art Market, Ethel Mercedes Everett

Dissertations and Theses

La Cofradía de Artes y Artesanos Hispánicos: Redefining Tradition in the New Mexican Art Market. May 2019.

This master’s thesis explores the 1978 founding, existence, dissolve, and the legacy of the Santa Fe, New Mexican artist exhibition group, La Cofradía de Artes y Artesanos Hispánico (La Cofradía). La Cofradía was formed by six Santa Fe Hispano artists in reaction to creative limitations first imposed on Hispano artists in 1926, when the annual Spanish Market was formed. The Spanish Market was the sole arts sales venue available to Hispano artists in the exclusionary Santa Fe gallery and museum market. The Spanish …

Revolution, Reform, And Class Conflict In Rebecca Harding Davis’S Life In The Iron-Mills, Thomas Collins

Dissertations and Theses

Life in the Iron-Mills (1861) by Rebecca Harding Davis is a very early example of American fiction that depicts the living and working conditions in a mill town. Although the novella advocates for workers, it does not accurately depict contemporaneous working-class culture. Davis depicts workers as isolated and helpless in the face of the forces that oppress them rather than giving voice to the workers’ movement of her time. Although Davis depicts workers in a debased state, the text’s narrator holds out hope of the “Dawn,” suggesting a revolutionary movement. Because the narrator offers no interpretation regarding how the working …

Reframing As Reclamation: Trauma Theory, African Spiritualism, And Ecocriticism In Jesmyn Ward’S Sing, Unburied, Sing, Alexandra Cohl Ms.

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores how ecocriticism and trauma theory intersect within Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) to tackle the complex act of collective healing. Trauma, and its subset transgenerational trauma, have often been a focal point for critical analysis of other African American texts that engage with ghosts and hauntings, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Often, these ghosts are symbolic of transgenerational trauma in fictional works. While this association is apparent in Ward’s novel, this thesis applies the aforementioned modes of scholarship alongside African-based spiritualism to investigate further the inclusion of ghosts. To accomplish this approach, this thesis …

Suffering And The Black Female Narrative In The Twentieth Century, Aquilah Jourdain

Dissertations and Theses

Adventure, romance, and happiness are not large parts of the stories Black women tell. If we had to name ten mainstream literary novels released in the last 50 years that featured Black women central to the plot — and included the aforementioned themes — we would be hard-pressed to find them. Though there are real life accounts of love, joy, and adventure in the lives of Black women, why do we see these life experiences documented sparingly? In the stories written by andforBlack women, where can Black female readers find joy in their history and culture without elements of grave …