Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Freedom Now!: The Function Of Jazz In The Civil Rights Movement, Christa R. Gammage

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Cedar Hill: A Case Study In Preservation And Education In A Digital World, Lin Barnett

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Visit Cedar Hill (now Annandale-on-Hudson) as it stood over a century ago, reconstructed in virtual reality. This interactive project retells an important aspect of Hudson Valley History, its mill communities, which do not get preserved in the archeological record and are not as closely maintained as its neighboring communities of Bard College and Montgomery Place. The project analyzes the structures' changing purposes, as well as their changing architectural qualities, to trace the story of the hamlet's decline.

Programming Proletarian Literature: Kobayashi Takiji’S "Kani Kôsen" And Gaming As Reading, Jacob Philip Fisher

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Abstract

This project translates a novel, Kobayashi Takiji’s, Kani Kôsen (The Crab Cannery Ship, 1929) into a video game. As a joint project between Computer Science and Japanese, its focus is to develop a game for the original Game Boy (1989) narratively based on a work of Japanese proletarian literature. Specific tools used in development were the Game Boy emulator: bgb, the Game Boy Developers Kit (gbdk), the Game Boy CPU manual, as well as a foundation in the C programming language, and some lower level systems experience. Being based on a novel, the play style utilizes text …

Simul., Julie Marie Roberts

Senior Projects Spring 2019

My work stems from a process-heavy and researched-based art practice. Many of the sculptures I create are biomorphic forms that invoke a sense of physicality and a body, while slipping in and out of renderings of natural and post-natural environmental landscapes. In this space of elusive identification, I aim to find merging points for the personal and political, as well as for feminism and environmentalism. My interest in the narrative histories, as well as emotional references of objects, drives my selection of materials. Often pulling from deposited trash, altered through natural processes as well as my own hand, I aim …

Thawra, Olivia Snow Smith

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Exploring The Acculturation Preferences Of Bangladeshi-Muslim Second-Generation American Immigrants In New York City., Jakir Hossain

Senior Projects Fall 2019

The purpose of this study is to apply previous frameworks of acculturation to evaluate the acculturation preferences of the Bangladeshi-Muslim second-generation American immigrant population in New York City. This thesis attempts to understand the acculturation preferences of the aforementioned population by analyzing how they view their Bangladeshi ethnic identity and their Islamic religious identity in relation to their American immigrant upbringing. To do this, participants have been organized into acculturation preference tracks based on John Berry’s acculturation preference model. This thesis will then explore possible explanations for why differences between these acculturation preferences exist and why certain individuals found themselves …

Tulpa, William Charles Squier

Senior Projects Fall 2019

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

Qipao And Female Fashion In Republican China And Shanghai (1912-1937): The Discovery And Expression Of Individuality, Qingxuan Han

Senior Projects Fall 2019

This project is an attempt to understand the Chinese dress qipao in Republican China, with a primary concentration in Shanghai, and its associations with body politics, urbanscape, modernity, personal and national identity, and sociocultural practices. In particular, I argue that qipao, amongst other fashions of Republican China, had been one of the earliest examples of the modern expression of individuality through fashion in China; I strive to discover how this practice was enabled by its contemporary social environment as well as technological advancements.

What If I Don't: Episodes From Her Life., Emmanuella Okoli

Senior Projects Fall 2019

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

Color X Line, Vittoria Ciaraldi

Senior Projects Spring 2019

COLOR x LINE

VITTORIA CIARALDI

The four main paintings that are 6x6 foot are my central concept of the Color by Line theme. In these paintings I chose to work from sketches I made two years ago. My past sketch paintings revolved around a self reflective human figure. As I was thinking about the bigger scale and what those paintings meant to me, I wanted to deconstruct the notion of the figure and really break it down to the basics that for me, revolve around: Color and Line.

My four central paintings are meant to emphasize colors and how lines …

Affects Of Elimination: Foundations Of Collectivity, Oskar Coltrane Dye-Furstenberg

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This paper examines specific indigenous social movements in the United States. Two examples are considered: the occupation of the decommissioned Fort-Lawton, Seattle military base in 1970 and the contemporary movement for missing and murdered indigenous women (MMIW). Both are examples of resistance to assimilation and ‘elimination’ in the form of collective action by indigenous persons. The paper explores the relation between coming together as a group and responding to the experience of violence, injury, or suffering. This dynamic between collective formation and shared affective experience constructs the foundation upon which these movements imagine and work to enact a social and …

Casualty Of Design: An Exploration Of The Zeniths And Nadirs Of American Public Diplomacy, Tonery Rose Rogers

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College. This thesis is an examination of various factors inhibiting effective American public diplomacy. A unique case study, American public diplomacy operationalized through educational and cultural exchanges, radio broadcasting and American cultural centers and libraries and implemented through American public diplomacy agencies such as the World War II era Office of War Information and the Cold War era United States Information Agency has been an effective tool for pursuing U.S. foreign policy objectives. Despite positive impacts, for example, helping to dismantle the Soviet Union, facilitating cross-cultural understanding and respect …

Primo Levi And Frantz Fanon: The Seizure Of Human Dignity, Reprisal, And Thereafter, Jake Cicero

Senior Projects Spring 2019

History has proven that memory, both collective and individual, can act as a trigger for revolution – the question at stake is the extent to which violence is appropriate, or furthermore beneficial, to the revolutionaries. There are limits to rational, ideological, and theological approaches to humanity amidst defining 20th century experiences for humanity. The path to modernity is a contested one. Primo Levi and Frantz Fanon give voice to the internalized debates of the oppressed and uncover historical truths to shed light on the reality of revolution in the 20th century. Fanon, the anti-colonial revolutionary and Levi, the survivor of …

Becoming Ourselves: Black Women’S Autobiographical Interrogation Of Tropes Of Identity, Christina L. Duncan

Senior Projects Spring 2019

A central premise of this project is that Black female identity has historically been seen as a fixed identity. Much of the imposed rigidity on Black female identity has been informed by conservative strategies for survival. Such conservative strategies include respectability politics, as racial leaders have found utility in upholding the principle that if they or others work hard, they can uphold the race. Only by maintaining these standards of respectability have Black women been deemed as worthy and able to uphold and reinforce positive images of Blackness. Many of the stories written by Black women generally fall into the …

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 …

In The Illusory Babels Of Language: Contemporary Artists’ Novels, Gage Pearson Frink

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

"Rebel Girls: Radical Feminism And Self-Narrative In Early 20th-Century Japan And China", Corrina Gross

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Textuality And Historical Crisis In John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire, Zelda Mazor-Freedman

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

How To Be Okay, Isabel G. Van Den Heuvel

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I began this line of thought with the desire to understand human connection. I want to know how people operate both as individuals being perceived as well as how they connect to each other in small, casual ways. Acts like introducing yourself, or navigating in a crowded place seemed like skills that everyone had learned on the day I had skipped class. This began as a private venture, an intensifying of my day to day attempts of applied observation. My result, rather than gradual mastery of interpersonal relations, was deeper confusion and frustration. I wanted instruction, but the construction of …

Dead Flowers // I, Daphne C. Fitzpatrick

Senior Projects Spring 2019

In the essay In Plato’s Cave, Susan Sontag makes a point of illustrating how in the moment a photographic image is captured its subject becomes ephemeral. Unable to interact with the world from behind a two-dimensional plane, the subject is forever frozen eliminating all agency that would exist within the frame of time that it takes the camera’s shutter to open and close. This agency death is then repeated each time the image is reproduced, multiplying the silence of the subject exponentially with each new viewer.

Thanks to Instagram we don’t have to worry about this! Any morsel of agency …

The Wrightly Crumple, Eleanor Rose Rudnitsky-Brown

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Between Branching Paths, Amanda Christine Silva

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Fly Not Hence, Brandt M. Rohde

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Mrs. Harbinger And Her Elf Present: Instant Wisdom At Swan Lake, Sarah Lynne Bastacky

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Instant Wisdom is a puppet show about one Mrs. Harbinger, and old green woman whose pet bird has escaped. Haunted by swans and in search of a new bird to call her own, Harbinger embarks on a gritty and befuddling journey to restore order to her life.

Marcel's Bedroom, Joseph W. Finnie

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Moving Forward By Looking Back:How Reconstruction Arguments For Civil Rights Became The Modern Argument For Reparations, Alliyah Richann Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

From The Church Of Disco To Waterfront Ruins: An Analysis Of Gay Space, Liam Nolan

Senior Projects Spring 2019

My senior thesis is an analysis of gay space from the late 1970s to 1980s New York, and I’m questioning how themes of private vs. public, accessibility, race, and economic status dictated where one searched for gay self-expression and community in the built environment. In order to understand how queer spaces functioned architecturally and socially, I’ve chosen to research two opposites: The Saint and the west side piers. The former was a private club in New York City from 1980-1988 and was considered to be the “Vatican of Disco” with a planetarium that could hold over a thousand men, two …

Sanguine Salvation: Pilgrimage And Penance At The Sanctuary Of Chimayo, Isabella J. Spann

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

Fruit Chapel, Olivia Claire Zorn

Senior Projects Spring 2019

This is my chapel where I have gathered a massive amount of fruit and other precious objects for the living things that are sacred to me. These are my non-violent, sacrificial offerings brimming with art symbolism, sympathy, and whimsy.

I think it’s endearingly illogical to leave food offerings for beings who can’t eat them because they’re transcendent, not present, or mouthless. I can’t stop marveling at the tiny sugar sculptures made by nature. I can’t stop taking pictures of fruit.

Understanding Iran: Attempts At Unravelling The Structures That Determine Iranian State Behaviour, Simran Gupta

Senior Projects Spring 2019

The goal of this paper is to determine if Iran is a rational actor and to determine the basis of its rationality. If Iran is categorized as an unpredictable and unreliable state, more coercive and isolation based foreign policy decisions would make the most sense. However, if an effort is made to understand the state’s rationality there can be more effective policies that would be more likely to produce the behavior policymakers desire without causing more instability in the international community.