Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Verlust & Pérdida: On Loss Of Love And Innocence; Entre Mis Brazos: On Belonging - A Set Of Voice Recitals Featuring German, Mexican, Spanish, And American Composers, Sonny Phillip David Capaccio

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This pair of recitals was programmed with the intent to evoke emotions that we have all experienced, whether it be the intense sorrow of solitude or the unbridled joy of companionship. Also, in compliance with the guidelines set by the concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies, half of the music from these recitals was composed by Spanish and Mexican composers dating from the late 19th century to modern day. Each concert was meant to illustrate some kind of narrative around their respective themes.

The first concert, “Verlust & Pérdida: On loss of love and innocence,” consists of two basic …

“As Natural As Earth Turning” : An Analysis Of The Relationship Between Self And Other In Improvised Music, Maeve M. Schallert

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

My Moonshadow And I, Sarah J. Sieber

Senior Projects Spring 2020

February 10

Waiting on hold with eBay customer service because I won a bid for a butterfly shirt. My winning bid was $0.32. I didn’t realize I’d won because I wasn’t very invested and apparently a month passed and an unpaid item case was opened against me. When I go on the website to try to pay I get an error message. This is why I’m on hold with eBay customer service. I’m now being helped by a person named Justin.

The item description is “Eyeshadow Long Sleeve Blue Butterfly V Neck Shirt.”

The call ended abruptly. A disconnection. Now …

Time Is A Construct(Ion): Heritage And Becoming In Quito's Historic District, Samuel Abate

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Paradigm Of The Unknown, Vasia A. Pemberton

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This project is about portraying the essence of certain unexplained or controversial areas of belief that affect the lives of each and every one of us whether or not we are aware of it. My focus is to explore these confusions over the paranormal, the existential, and the supernatural, by overlaying, compiling, and comparing these different narratives as well as connecting them to a sense of greater mystery, or a fundamental knowledge that we are somehow not privy to.

Graft And Slime In New York City: Exploring The Impact Of Organized Crime On The Nullification Of The Eighteenth Amendment, Tristan T. Kozul

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

The Ethos Of The Blues: An Ethnography Of Blues Singers And Writers, Zoë Emilie Peterschild Ford

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Dawn Tyler Watson, a blues singer based in Montreal, QC, performs a variety of genres. No matter what she performs, however, she continually expresses a blues ethos. Through improvisation and her resolute individuality Dawn writes and sings narratives always with a nod to the blues. What I call the “ethos of the blues” refers to a blues spirit that exists not only in music, but in literature, and in everyday life. Dawn’s practice reveals that blues is a music that values protective, generous, and exploratory narrative. As important as its storytelling quality is the genre’s Americanness. Blues, derived from a …

Disintegration And Other Stories, Brian Araque Pérez

Senior Projects Spring 2020

"Disintegration and Other Stories" is a collection of fictional short stories accompanied by two translations written originally by two iconic Latin American writers. The stories although fictional, are both deeply personal and distant from my own life.

Viewing The Covid-19 Resilient Skincare Market Through A Sociohistorical Lens: The Patterning Of Conspicuous Consumption Mediated By Marketing, Siren Chen

Senior Projects Fall 2020

The Chinese skincare market distinguishes itself with an inelastic consumer demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project employs the endogenous preferences economic framework and a sociohistorical lens to analyze the social forces that sustain the resilient beauty market. Through setting up a socially embedded framework for economic analysis, this project highlights the active role of marketers, which are omitted in mainstream economics, in fostering a bond between consumers and skincare products. With a comparative analysis of both the colonial and the COVID-19 pandemic contexts, this project demonstrates how marketers connect consumers to skincare products through reference to the system of …

Animals And People, Nikolas Slackman

Senior Projects Fall 2020

A novella detailing the end of photographer Eadweard Muybridge's life, after his return to Kingston-upon-Thames. His story is intercut with quotations and investigations into the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, an ancient Albanian codebook.

Waves Upon The Sea: Accident And In Search Of Lost Time, Ethan Hosta

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to the Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College

"She Believes She Is Herself, Which Isn't Complete Madness:" Becoming The Female Subject Through Womanhood As Relation, Isabel Rudner

Senior Projects Fall 2020

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

“Tell Me I Did Well” And Other Things Left Unsaid, Shirley X H Cheng

Senior Projects Spring 2020

A collection of short stories built around a disease that turns you into a stone flower. The stories explore sadness, loneliness and helplessness and the ultimate effects that can have on people.

Eurydice, Gus Aronson

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Does the attention we pay to the world around us when we photograph destroy the inherent truth of it, as it was when Orpheus looked back at Eurydice? Is our attempt to understand the world by preserving it through a photograph only a fleeting attempt for survival in the face of eschatological thought? Or does pho- tography -- the act of looking itself --- render the opaque into a living clarified truth through poetic action?

As Roland Barthes notes in Camera Lucida, “the Greeks entered into death back- ward: what they had before them was their past.” What Orpheus had …

Shalamov's Testament: Pushkinian Precepts In Kolyma Tales, Andres I. Meraz

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In a letter from 1972, the author of Kolyma Tales and survivor of the gulag Varlam Shalamov, declared “In my prose, I consider myself the inheritor of the Pushkinian tradition <…>.” Indeed, in Kolyma Tales, Shalamov exhibited a studied understanding of Pushkin’s artistic technique. Through his implementation of Pushkinian artistic principles, Shalamov was seeking to restore the poet’s image to what it had been prior to the Soviet Union’s politicized interpretation while simultaneously revealing the truth about life in the labor camps to a readership that could not otherwise fathom what the inmates endured on day-to-day basis. In writing …

Bach To The Future: An Exploration Of Authenticity And Baroque Performance Practice Through Bwv 131 & Bwv 111, Megan Elizabeth Halm

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College. An exploration of historical performance practice through J.S. Bach's cantatas BWV 131 and BWV 111.

Small Packages, Caitlin E. Harris

Senior Projects Spring 2020

I chose to honor a lifelong impulse to make small objects. As my mother describes: “you've always been self sufficient and could get lost making things in your creative world. You were very independent and perfectly content spending hours entertaining yourself.” “Small Packages” is a collection of work created and installed entirely from my home. I spent a year making drawings and sculptures of a certain scale in order to accumulate enough tiny pieces that, when put together, would produce something impactful. I worked in a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, screenprinting, casting, carving, weaving, felting, and sculpting, and …

Death Of A Hero: A Translation Of Sophocles' Ajax, Gabriel Martin Doyle

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This project consists of a translation of the first half of Sophocles' tragic play Ajax from Ancient Greek into English. Additionally, the project includes a brief introduction and Bibliography

Embodied Desire: Establishing The Transmasculine Viewer, Bel Simek

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Voice Of Silence: Women Inmates' Perspective On Sexual Violence In The Soviet Gulag, 1936-1956, Louisa Jane Fulkerson

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Hut Annandale: Humblest Dwelling, Ruiqi Zhu

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Lots of us have a dream deep down in the heart: to get away from the congested cities and live in a hut in nature. French port Jean Wahl once wrote: The frothing of the hedges I keep deep inside me. In my project, he explored this dream and constructed a group of architectural structures by hand for those potential hermits. Studying at Bard College, I have found this region is a place with a great hermit culture. With the picturesque scene of nature and the location near the New York Metropolitan area, here the mid-Hudson Valley has attracted lots …

Can You See It?: Providing Visual Arts Access To Audiences With Visual Impairment And Blindness, Rowan A. Puig Davis

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

“Communism May Be The Only Alternative If America Walks Away”: The Reagan Administration And The Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act Of 1986, Abby Townend

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

Health In The Musical Profession: A Human Rights Investigation At The Intersections Of Identity, Reputation, And Resources, Jillian P. Reed

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This project investigates the effects of illness, injury, and disability on professional musicians. Issues of the musician’s identity, importance of reputation, and disability stigma are explored through firsthand accounts of 15 musicians who faced health challenges during their careers. My original research also includes the data from 200 responses to my musicians’ health survey. The patchwork of resources available to these musicians is examined through the lenses of human rights claiming and humanitarian charity, with a focus on healthcare, interpersonal accommodations, and the currently insufficient legal protections for this population.

On a micro scale, this paper is about the experiences …

Der Froschkönig: Einer Epilog, Avery N. Greenberg

Senior Projects Spring 2020

The goal of this project is to give the viewer the immersive experience of touring the portrait hall in the castle of the Froschkönig (Frog King). While the moniker of the Froschkönig is passed down through the royal family, the installation centers around Kaiser Frogerick Wilhelm III. The first room contains the portraits, displayed chronologically, of a selection of members of the royal family that most influenced Kaiser Frogerick. This includes his first wife, Louise von Mecklenpond, his second wife, Aguppy von Harach, his father Frogerick Wilhelm II, his mother, Frogerica Louise von Fresse-Swarmstadt, his grandfather, Augustoad Wilhelm, and his …

This Is The Knot In My Stomach, Violet Savage

Senior Projects Spring 2020

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

This Is The Knot In My Stomach, Macey Clarice Downs

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This is a story about two young women who think they will be friends forever. They learn that forever comes and goes in the blink of an eye. They are not particularly exceptional--they don't shatter any glass ceilings, they make silly mistakes, they never know what to wear to school tomorrow. But we get to watch them do the most exceptional thing any of us will ever do: grow.

A Feeling, Julianne Emma Arnold

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In this paper I use Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, specifically, considerations of the meaning of a word, in order to establish a groundwork for, and further illuminate, the messier areas of thinking about thinking and feeling about feeling that seem to occur across time. This "messier", and perhaps even physical, under-grid creating our feelings across time is one that I paint to shift endlessly, in its own ever shifting moments of sentiment comparison. It is also one that I undertake to comprehend using a similarly configured process of infinitely splitting methods of thinking and feeling.

Losing True, Maizy L. Hillman

Senior Projects Spring 2020

At the beginning of this project, I found myself researching something I wasn't even sure existed. I was searching for a word or a phenomenon that explained an indefinable feeling that I have come across in my life. This feeling, which is so pronounced and yet invisible, causes me to question how it works, how it makes us feel things, what it is made of, when it is present and when it is not. I cannot access it intentionally, I only notice it when it is already happening.

My research oscillated between the scientific and the spiritual. I came across …

Open Sans, Access Incomplete, Lia J. Taus

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Why do some have access while others do not?

Think about your answer, don’t say it aloud.

To say it out loud is a privilege which we have and others do not.

Two ways to see it: what are you restricted from and others have access to?

Or: what do you have access to which others are restricted from?

Each of us are unique compilations of acquired knowledge.

Which is based on the availability and limitations of opportunities.

The unfortunate hierarchy of the world is decided by education and wealth.

Education is not freely available.

We are all told “you …