Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Unusual Children: Queerishness And Strange Growth In A Wrinkle In Time And The Giver, Olivia Morris

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This project examines two different pieces of modern children’s literature, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Lois Lowry’s The Giver, in terms of their protagonists’ respective strange identities. I begin with Katherine Stockton’s theory of sideways growth, which outlines the unusualness often found in child protagonist. I use Stockton’s work as a jumping off point to examine the queerishness of two protagonists, L’Engle’s Meg Murray and Lowry’s Jonas. Meg is unfeminine, and her experiences with language and definitions defy gender binaries and easy definitions; throughout the course of the novel, she learns to embrace her “flaws” (her unfeminine, …

The Art Behind The Baroque Violin, Carolyn Goldstein

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Since the age of three, I have been playing the violin; however, I was uninformed about the history of the violin or how the instrument works in a mechanical sense. Inspired by my love of the music of the 1700s, I chose to study how violins were made, how their physical properties affected performance practice, and how to play Baroque violin—a project that allowed me to combine elements of my two majors, Music History and Cultures and Violin Performance. I narrowed my area of focus to the late Baroque (1700-1730) because renowned violin-maker Antonio Stradivari was considered to be in …

Stillwater: An Exhibition That Explores Touch And The Everyday Through Ceramic Objects And Photography, Lily Fein

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The exhibition, stillwater, is a Capstone Project that showcases ceramic-based installations in addition to photographs by Ian Sherlock. Both Ian and myself use material and process in its raw form. The work that Sherlock exhibits in stillwater is a series of pinhole camera exposures of the sun passing. He sees this simple yet profound passing of time as an opportunity to gain tacit knowledge of the sun. In my work, I gain parallel knowledge in the medium of clay, as I am physically invested in every mark that I make. There is no smoothing over or correcting; every moment is …

A Spy Of His Own Confession: A Revolution In American Espionage, Cole Ellenbogen

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The most well known spies are usually the ones who were caught. But what about those who took their secret lives to the grave?

In the summer of 1778, arguably one of the biggest players in the United States’ fight for independence was released from a rebel-controlled prison in Connecticut. Abraham Woodhull, arrested earlier in the year for smuggling, was offered his freedom in exchange for his loyalty to the continental army. His friend, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, was looking to replace the dated espionage methods employed by his superior officer and contentious rival.

In just a few short years, the …

Ethnography And Analysis Of The Effects Of Racism And Creating A Black Family Tree, Courtney Garvin

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This research looks at the effects slavery and racism has had on the ability to make an accurate family tree. This research is spurred by both the desire to document my family and by the unfortunate events of the Mother Emanuel AME Church massacre on June 17th, 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. Using archival research, interviews, and family documents to build an accurate family tree, this research looks at the ways in which systematic oppression has played a generational role in my family. By looking at my own family for this research, I look at the stigmas, behavioral, regional, and …

Personal Memory And Digital Mobile Media: How A Product And A Web Platform Can Improve Digital Memory Archiving, Sarah Folger

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Our technology has been evolving so rapidly and our ability to capture our moments has been become so accessible, we are creating hundreds of thousands of digital files. When we were operating with analog methods of memory making and archiving it was much easier to organize our files because we had fewer or them and they were often all sentimental because of their value. Today, it is hard to distinguish between all of our digital files to determine which ones are most important and even to determine where they are. The creation of social media has created an interesting dynamic …

Applying Linguistics: Analyzing The Differences Between Human And Machine Translation Of Selected Texts, Nicole Howell

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Machine translation systems experience a trade-off between efficiency and efficacy: while quicker and easier than human translation, machine translations are less accurate and comprehensible.

This study analyzes two sets of English to Spanish translations to compare the differences between human and machine translation and evaluate the performance of machine translation. Google Translate—the best-performing machine translator—represents machine translation as a whole in producing English to Spanish translations of the given text. The primary investigator—a non-native speaker and graduating student of Spanish Language, Literature & Culture at Syracuse University—serves as the benchmark for the average non-native speaker of Spanish at the advanced-mid …

Soil For Your Soul: African American Women & Social Entrepreneurship, Markova Casseus

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This study seeks to take a look at the growing trend of African-American women in social entrepreneurship, more specifically their motivations for pursuing this career path. In the traditional business model, we find that women are underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline, especially in upper level positions. For African-American women, these numbers are even smaller. As such in the recent years, we have seen more and more women turning to entrepreneurship, with African-American women becoming the fastest growing segment of the women-owned businesses population. At the same time, we are also seeing a rise in social entrepreneurship, which …

Introducing Alexandra Moniqué: A Journey Through The Music Industry, Alexandra Mayo

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The music industry is a wide field with careers ranging from artist management, publicity, marketing, promotions, and music litigation to songwriting, producing, recording, and mastering. The list goes on and on; but there is a clear distinction between the artistic side of the industry and the business side of the industry.

This Capstone Project is my journey through the music industry both artistically and commercially. As a singer/songwriter, I wrote, recorded, and released an EP under my artist persona, Alexandra Moniqué. I then tackled the business side of the industry by promoting the album as a manager, publicist, and marketer. …

Escape From Amherst: Emily Dickinson’S Life Of Freedom, Maria Whitcomb

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Through Escape from Amherst: Emily Dickinson’s Life of Freedom, I endeavored to create an immersive art song recital experience through which I explored the character of Emily Dickinson, hopefully rendering her ambiguous, iconic character somewhat more comprehensive to modern day audiences. Enclosed in the following chapters, please find the formal research I performed in examining Emily Dickinson’s character, an explanation of my own artistic journey, the program that I distributed to audiences during the concert (containing analyses of the Emily Dickinson texts that I performed), stage directions illustrating actor/singer intention and movement onstage, and lastly an explanation of my …