Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Boys Will Be, Victoria Hoffman

Capstones

SocialJ Presentation

SocialJ Report

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …

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 …

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678): Converso Composer In Antwerp, Elizabeth A. Weinfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a converso of Jewish descent living in Antwerp, is the author of seven five-part Sinfonias for viol consort — the only known seventeenth-century viol music written by a woman. This music is testament to a formidable talent for composition, yet very little is known about the life and times in which Duarte produced her work. Her family were merchants and art collectors of Jewish descent who immigrated from Portugal in the early sixteenth century to escape the Inquisition; in exile in Antwerp, they achieved enormous success and provided the means with which to educate their children and …

Making It New And Keeping It Old: Recasting Frameworks And Contexts In Georgia O’Keeffe Studies, Linda M. Grasso

Publications and Research

Three recent Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition catalogues devise new interpretative frameworks and situate O’Keeffe in new contexts that are especially relevant to American Studies scholars interested in visual culture, material culture, gender studies, reception studies, and modernism. One places O’Keeffe in the company of other white women making modernist art in the early decades of the twentieth century; another provides critical interpretations that acknowledge and reject previous views that were skewered by monolithic gender and sexual lenses; and a third moves O’Keeffe into popular culture domains such as fashion, consumerism, and interior design. Raising questions about how curators present and shape …

James Buchanan And Ideals Of Manhood In The Election Of 1856, Ryan Lockwood

Theses and Dissertations

James Buchanan was the only lifelong bachelor to be elected President of the United States. While not seen as disqualifying in and of itself, his single status was often commented upon. Analysis of the campaign literature reveals competing ideals of manhood in the lead up to the Civil War.

Getting Dressed And Being Dressed: A Constructed Autobiography Of Identity, Jana Jarosz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This written and visual capstone project examines how feminist theories surrounding the construction of a gendered subject are related and situational to the narrative of a lived body experience within a layered context of clothing. It opens up a discussion concerning the negotiated space between an individually-empowered, subject-in-process and the boundaries of social expectations outlining gender and cultural identities. The thesis introduces the concept of using an automediality framework to connect the material culture of clothing to still and motion imagery with text as a way to encapsulate and illustrate the fluid nature of becoming. It concludes by suggesting that …

Imagining The Archive: Speculation As A Tool Of Archival Reconstruction, Marieclaire Graham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines a speculative methodological approach towards restoring silenced Black voices in the archive. First, I will discuss the reasons why this work is necessary, exploring the various patterns of muting, distortion, erasure, and disenfranchisement that Black communities experience within the United States in both physical and written forms. The use of speculation specifically addresses the dehumanization that has followed the Black experience in the United States from the earliest violent incarnation of slavery, and creating the foundation of this kind of silencing allows us to understand why speculation, as opposed to other methodological models for archive restoration, is …

Tracing Trans Bodies In Neobaroque Literature, Huber David Jaramillo Gil

Publications and Research

This document briefly explores the ways in which trans people have been written through Baroque aesthetics in the social and cultural imaginary of Latin America, despite the various unjust forces that have attempted to make them invisible and exclude them from the national narrative. The differences between Severo Sarduy’s Neobaroque, Néstor Perlongher’s Neobarroso, and Pedro Lemebel’s Neobarrocho are analyzed, while exploring their individual limitations and potentialities for voicing the joys and pains of being trans in an exclusionary society.

Modernizing The Arthurian Legend: Julia Margaret Cameron’S Photographic Illustrations Of Idylls Of The King, Hannah Rozenblat

Theses and Dissertations

This study identifies Julia Margaret Cameron’s contribution to the Arthurian Revival through Illustrations to the Idylls of the King and Other Poems, taking into consideration the development of narrative photography, the depiction of Arthurian themes in art and book illustration, theatricality and its connection to photography, and Victorian gender roles.

“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …

"Must Be Heavyset": Casting Women, Fat Stigma, And Broadway Bodies, Ryan Donovan

Publications and Research

This article surveys how contemporary Broadway musicals cast fat women and focuses on Hairspray. The use of fat suits and contractual weight clauses figure into the discussion of fat stigma and casting practices. Seemingly body-positive musicals both celebrate and undermine the identities staged in them.

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 …