History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons^™

Priestesshoods As Expressions Of Civic Identity, Isabella Kershner

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis offers a comprehensive examination of the role of priestesshoods in shaping the civic identity of women in Classical Athens. It challenges the traditional narrative that confines Athenian women to the domestic sphere by highlighting their public and influential roles in religious practices. Through a meticulous analysis of archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence, the study traces the journey of Athenian females from childhood rituals to the esteemed positions of the High Priestess of Athena Nike and Athena Polias, revealing how these religious roles served as both a spiritual passage and a civic curriculum.

The thesis argues that these priestesshoods …

The Cult Of The Nymphs: Identity, Ritual, And Womanhood In Ancient Greece, Ivana Genov

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Examining archeological and epigraphic evidence in its historical context, in this thesis I explore the Cult of the Nymphs venerated across ancient Greek poleis. I analyze the nymph’s profound cultural and historical impact that is often overlooked in the study of ancient Greece. Nymphs were female deities thought to embody ecological sites, such as fountains and springs, and became fundamental to polis identity. Their locations were often central to city plans, and their faces, depicted on coinage, became representative of the city itself. In the community, nymphs were integral to rituals for major life events, most often in the lives …

Asking For Forgiveness: Negotiating The Creation Of Memory Through Public Memorialization, Alyssa Castronuovo

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The practice of spatializing culture, or “examining space through theories of embodiment, discourse translocality, and effect,” localizes the global and separates hegemonic narratives of space from how it is actually utilized by the people who interact with it. Setha Low argues that this perspective is especially useful to the anthropologist committed to challenging the discipline’s historically eurocentric approach to studying culture. She writes that a spatial focus “[draws] on the strengths of studying people in situ, producing rich and nuanced sociospatial understandings.” This project began with an interest in theorists such as Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre, …

“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I situate Edith Wharton’s guiding idea of “garden-magic” at the center of my thesis because Wharton’s fiction shows how a garden space could naturalize otherwise inadmissible behaviors within upper-class society while helping a character tie such behavior to a greater possibility for escape. To this end, Wharton situates gardens as idealized touchstones within the built environment of New York City, spaces where characters believe they can reach self-actualization within a version of nature that is man-made. Actualization, in this sense, stems from a character’s imaginative escape that is enabled by a perception of the garden as a kind of natural …

Photographic Automatism: Surrealism And Feminist (Post?) Modernism In Susan Hiller's Sisters Of Menon, Katharine Conley

Arts & Sciences Book Chapters

Excerpt from book chapter: "Susan Hiller stated in a 2005 interview that what drew her ‘to look again at surrealism’ and ‘the repressed history of automatism within modernism’ was the experience she had drawing Sisters of Menon (1972) as part of a group project she initiated involving automatic practice. One reason for this reconsideration must surely have been the surrealists’ engagement in the countercultural ideals of her own generation as evidenced by their commitment to the May 1968 student protests in Paris..."

Indian Woman And Revolutionary Men: Representing The Body Politic In The Satirical Prints Of The American Revolution, Andrea Kathleen Westcot

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

Picturing Home: Domestic Painting And The Ideologies Of Art, Mark E. Sprinkle

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This dissertation describes domestic painting in Atlanta, Georgia between 1995 and 2004 as a market defined by its intentional connection of the ideologies and spaces of art with those of bourgeois domesticity. The first half of the work seeks to contextualize the market's various objects and texts within public and academic discourses on culture that commonly posit an antithesis between the practices of bourgeois women (especially decoration) and "high" or avant-garde art, as suggested by the sentiment, "GOOD ART WON'T MATCH YOUR SOFA." Thus, Chapter 1 addresses the promises and pitfalls of sociological approaches to understanding art in general, Chapter …

Archaeology Of A Female Landowner C 1768-1832, Marie E. Blake

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.