Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reading & Teaching Chaucer: The "Good Wif"?, Sophie Friedman

Honors Projects

This two-chapter project applies formalist and feminist thinking to the thirty-line description of the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval, British work The Canterbury Tales. It is an interdisciplinary project; it studies how to read and teach Chaucer at the secondary level based off of these two approaches. In this formalist chapter, I study narrative voice, rhyme, irony, and ekphrasis, writing about the history and function of each of those tools and their role in the passage. I argue that the formalist close reading approach is an excellent teaching tool that generates thorough, rigorous, and joyful reading. In this …

Bubbles & Bought-Ins: Reevaluating Price Movements In The Art Market, Silas Wuerth

Honors Projects

Employs two tests for bubbles in the art market. First, a right-hand forward recursive augmented Dickey-Fuller test to identify explosive price movements. Second, a test for the statistical significance of hedonic regression price index coefficients after controlling for equity market performance. Finds strong evidence for a speculative bubble in the pre-Great Recession "Post-War & Contemporary" market. Evidence for this bubble diminishes but does not dissipate after accounting for the effect of failed sales on index returns.

“How The World Could Be In Spite Of The Way That It Is”: Broadway As A Reflection Of Contemporary American Sociopolitical Life, Isabel Thomas

Honors Projects

Drawing on the plays and musicals of the 2018-2019 Broadway season, this thesis examines how theatre responds to the sociocultural, economic, and political conditions of society. Sociologists have largely overlooked theatre’s cultural influence, but Broadway productions act as social reflection by reproducing the conversations and inequalities of their context. Access to Broadway is limited, in various manners, by socioeconomic class, race, gender, ability, and age. As conversations about equity expand and audiences increasingly demand diversified representation, Broadway begins to shed the restraints of its conventions. In many regards, the recent changes fail in meaningfully transforming the Broadway institution. Those who …

The Future Regained: Toward A Modernist Ethics Of Time, Jack Rodgers

Honors Projects

This project explores the convergence of futurity and ethics through an examination of key figures in modernist literature. It studies works by Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in order to conceptualize an encounter with the future which goes beyond a traditionally linear and teleological model of time, setting out to reimagine the role of both temporality and ethics in novels including Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway, In Search of Lost Time, and Ulysses. Key facets of this exploration, which is metaphorized and guided by the image of a window, include temporal otherness, transgression and fracturing of the self (primarily understood …

The Soviet And American Wars In Afghanistan: Applying Clausewitzian Concepts To Modern Military Failure, Artur Kalandarov

Honors Projects

This paper evaluates the validity of three concepts from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War as they relate to contemporary military conflict. Utilizing the Soviet and American Wars in Afghanistan as case studies, the paper also offers a model for comparative conflict analysis by expanding upon Clausewitz’s culminating point concept. It argues that – despite limitations to Clausewitz’s theory of war – his concepts of culminating points in military operations, mass and concentration, and changing war aims provide useful insights into counterinsurgency military failures. Chapter One identifies the Soviet and American culminating points. Concluding that the concept of a culminating point …

Tradition Et Nouveauté: Une Étude Du Baccalauréat Et De La Réforme Blanquer, Fiona Carey

Honors Projects

The baccalauréat exam has played a significant role in the lives of French high schoolers for more than two centuries. Not only does the exam determine a student’s eligibility for university, it is a long-standing national tradition and an important aspect of French identity. The baccalauréat consists of a core curriculum and a choice of specialties, all of which prepare students for the exams that they will take in their last two years of high school. In 2018, Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer announced a reform to the baccalauréat that would drastically alter the content and structure of the exam. …

Sex Sells: The Iconography Of Sex Work In Contemporary Art Since 1973, Mackenzie Philbrick

Honors Projects

Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art Since 1973, explores contemporary renderings of the sex worker as a response to the heavily constructed formalist ideology of the “pure gaze” which privileged the heterosexual male voyeur. The analysis covers a broad range of media, sectioned off into three chapters—painting and photography, body art, and systemic critiques—to explore the affordances of each in critiquing the position of the voyeur as well as the larger capitalistic system. The first chapter investigates the ways in which realistic pictorial renderings depicted the sex worker to impose the voyeuristic viewing position of pornography …

“The Spirit Of Turbulence”: East Indian Political Imaginaries In Early 20th Century British Guiana, Faria A. Nasruddin

Honors Projects

After the abolition of slavery, the Colonial Office instituted an indentured labor scheme that lasted from 1838 to 1917, in which they brought East Indians to the plantation colonies as laborers under five year contracts. Due to the planter class’ desire for permanent sources of labor in British Guiana, the Colonial Government incentivized East Indians to permanently settle. East Indians thus dominated the British Guiana’s agricultural landscape and became the single largest ethnicity in the Colony by 1920. This thesis explores the early negotiations of the meaning of diaspora and diasporic citizenship for East Indians in British Guiana. They comprised …

Duty And Distinction: Scientists As Intellectuals In Modern China, Helen Wang

Honors Projects

As critical players in the Chinese state’s pursuit of modernization and political legitimacy, Chinese scientists have been the recipients of state attention and scrutiny throughout modern history. This paper will analyze how Qian Xuesen (1911-2009) became a national hero as the Chinese Communist Party’s model scientist. Qian developed his scientific expertise in the United States, before Cold War political tensions forced his extradition. Upon his return to China, Qian became a key missile scientist in the state’s emerging nuclear weapons program. By analyzing Qian’s public persona as portrayed in official state media, this paper will argue that the CCP conferred …

Traders And Troublemakers: Sovereignty In Southern Morocco At The End Of The 19th Century, Joseph Campbell Hilleary

Honors Projects

This thesis explores changes in and challenges to Moroccan political authority in the region of the Sous during the late nineteenth century. It attempts to show how the phenomenon of British informal empire created a crisis over Moroccan sovereignty that caused the sultan to both materially and discursively change the way he wielded power in southern Morocco. It further connects these changes and the narrative contestation that accompanied them to the construction of the Bilad al-Siba/Bilad al-Makhzan dichotomy found in Western academic literature on Morocco starting in the colonial period. It begins with an examination of letters between Sultan Hassan …

Répresentations De La Banlieue Dans Le Cinéma Français Contemporain, Yaw Owusu Sekyere

Honors Projects

Inhabitants of the poor French banlieues are rejected and isolated from the larger French society, who refuse to acknowledge their marginalization. As a result, the cycle continues where no political change is made. The French film genre, cinéma de banlieue, seeks to explain the perspectives of the underrepresented and marginalized groups within France. This honors project analyzes the representations of the banlieue through the films of La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz), Wesh wesh qu’est-ce qui se passe ? (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche), Bande de filles (Céline Sciamma), Divines (Houda Benyamina), and Banlieusards (Kery James & Leïla Sy). These films focus on the …

Performing Sor Juana: Reimagining A Mexican Literary Figure In The 21st Century, Uriel López-Serrano

Honors Projects

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (c. 1648-1695) was a Mexican nun, poet, playwright, and scholar from the colonial era. She has become an icon for various global, social, and political movements. This project looks at four dramatic works created by Sorjuanistas who reimagine Sor Juana’s story for contemporary audiences living in the United States. The works included in this essay are Estela Portillo-Trambley’s Sor Juana (1986), Karen Zacarías’s The Sins of Sor Juana (2001), and Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s “Interview with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz” (1998/2014) and her newest work, Juana: An Opera in Two Acts (2019), …

Mémoire Et Souvenir Dans L'Imaginaire Antillais - Maryse Condé Et Fabienne Kanor: Identité Et Existence Noire Aux Antilles Et En France, Elijah B. Koblan-Huberson

Honors Projects

L’histoire d’un peuple est en grande partie liée à sa mémoire, aux souvenirs et commémorations des évènements passés et des ancêtres.En raison de la colonisation et ses conséquences, les habitants des îles de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique vivent un malaise vis-à-vis de la mémoire en tant que peuple antillais.Par conséquent, il est important de se demander comment, après la déshumanisation effectuée par l’extermination des premiers habitants, les Caraïbes et les Arawaks, l’esclavagisation des Africains, et la colonisation des territoires antillais, une nouvelle conceptualisation de la mémoire peut mener à une nouvelle conceptualisation de l’existence et de l’identité pour …

Hermeneutic Encounters: Hans-Georg Gadamer In North America, 1968-1986, Ian Ward

Honors Projects

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s myriad contributions to the continental philosophical tradition have been well documented, but his influence on North American intellectual life has gone largely gone unrecognized. This paper attempts to fill that gap, using primary and secondary source material to document Gadamer’s scholarly activities in the United States and Canada between 1968 and 1986. The paper also evaluates Gadamer’s influence using detailed accounts of “hermeneutic encounters” that occurred between Gadamer and four notable North American philosophers: Richard Palmer, Paul de Man, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Through these accounts, this paper argues that Gadamer made lasting contributions to ongoing debates …

Narrative, Identity, And Holocaust Memorialization In The United States, Alexander Noah Kogan

Honors Projects

Narratives at Holocaust memorials and museums in the United States connect the Holocaust to present-day identities and weave the Holocaust into American history. Holocaust narratives––whether at the universal, national, or local level––draw moral lessons from the past. These narratives and their moral lessons redefine what constitutes the Holocaust and are determined by the needs and sentiments of the present. The sites of remembrance in this thesis at once show the significance of the Holocaust in American identities at both national and local levels, as well as encourage an active remembrance of the past that restructures these identities. The type of …

Survival Strategies: Historic Preservation, Jewish Community, And The German Democratic Republic, Emily Ann Cohen

Honors Projects

Following the Second World War, as German Communists worked to establish a new socialist East German state, Jews who survived persecution and imprisonment by the Nazis worked to reestablish a Jewish community at the same time. Though many scholars dismiss the relationship between Jews and the Socialist Unity Party, the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic, as one characterized only by neglect and occasional political exploitation, it was much more nuanced, shaped in large part by the Cold War. Both the party and the Jewish community relied on the other to accomplish their goals, namely, survival in a new …

Perdido En La Transculturación: Compromisos De Identidad En La América Latina Judía, Jacob Bernard Baskes

Honors Projects

Esta investigación explora los procesos de negociación y compromiso presentes en la experiencia judía de América Latina. Durante siglos, esta identidad ha existido junta con otras, sean nacionales, religiosas, o raciales, lo cual resulta en una nueva identidad compleja y singular. A través de novelas de Eduardo Halfon (Guatemala), Achy Obejas y Leonardo Padura (Cuba) e Isaac Goldemberg (Perú) en adición a una investigación antropológica en Lima, el texto explora una colección de temas que incluye el movimiento, la memoria, el exilio, la diáspora, el trauma, y el mestizaje. Cada tema aquí analizado tiene un rol profundo en la formación …

Chambers Of Reflection: Rousseau, Tocqueville, And Self-Government In The Digital Age, John Sweeney

Honors Projects

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville each warn that the dominant cultures of their days may hinder the project of self-government. Against the backdrop of advancing Enlightenment philosophy, Rousseau writes that as social visibility increases relative to intimate connection, the drive for recognition corrupts self-love. Following the American and French revolutions, Tocqueville explores the democratic erosion of social hierarchies. He writes that a rise in individualism may obscure “self-interest well-understood”—the perspective gained through collaboration with others, thoughtful reflection, and reverence for truths that lie beyond the dictates of cursory instincts.

In this project, I apply these political theories to the …