Arts and Humanities Commons^™

#Flawless: The Intersection Of Celebrity Culture And New Media In The Modern Feminist Movement, Laurel Schwartz

Scripps Senior Theses

People have organized around gender equality in modern America for the last century. However, with the advent of new technology, people largely organize in around social movements in online spaces. This thesis explores the ways in which new media expands a popular understanding of the Feminist movement.

The Germ Theory Of Dystopias: Fears Of Human Nature In 1984 And Brave New World, Clea D. Harris

Scripps Senior Theses

This project is an exploration of 20^th century dystopian literature through the lens of germ theory. This scientific principle, which emerged in the late 19^th century, asserts that microorganisms pervade the world; these invisible and omnipresent germs cause specific diseases which are often life threatening. Additionally, germ theory states that vaccines and antiseptics can prevent some of these afflictions and that antibiotics can treat others. This concept of a pervasive, invisible, infection-causing other is not just a biological principle, though; in this paper, I argue that one can interpret it as an ideological framework for understanding human existence …

Catullus And Urbanitas: Ancient Roman Sophistication Through The Eyes Of A Multi-Faceted Poet, Marcus A. Vu

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Our culture seems to be fascinated with the lives of celebrities or high-society, but this fascination has not come about recently. Throughout time, we as humanity have always been curious and captivated by these individuals, especially when they make faux pas. Let us take Catullus for instance. He is considered the poetic “playboy” of the late Republic in Rome traveling through the social circles of Roman high-society and displaying atrocious behavior the whole time. He is linked to the most salacious indiscretions such as his relationship with Clodia Metella, a much older married Roman noble woman who was thought to …

The Battle Of Good And Evil In Shakespeare, Erin K. Miller

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Drama through the ages—from the Greeks’ Oedipus Rex to the morality plays of the Middle Ages—centers on an exploration of the human condition, and the plays of Englishman William Shakespeare are no different. What starts as the impact of fate on the life of man becomes, by the Middle Ages, a religious spectacle centered on evil’s impact on man. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, Shakespeare goes much further to develop the concept of evil. A chronological study of four of Shakespeare’s plays--Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Macbeth--demonstrates that the playwright evolves his portrayal of …

The Curse Of The V: Contemporary Feminist Movements And Performative Dichotomies In The Plays Of Caryl Churchill, Meredith A. Connelly

Honors Program Theses

Caryl Churchill mixes historical setting with shallowly defined characters and dissociative references to the contemporary within her vast body of work. She seeks to deny her audience the opportunity to blindly accept the entertainment of narrative theater, forcing them instead into a realm of discomfort where they must identify the unsavory elements of history with their own lived experience. This research began with the questioning of previous critical models which examine characters as autonomous beings rather than as personified themes, and asks how Churchill responds radically with theater as a medium to events pervading her own experience as a woman …

Copyrights And Creativity: The Affects Of Copyrights On Fairy Tales, Dina Arouri

Honors Program Theses

This work attempts to argue for a correlative relationship between copyright law and the evolution of literary works. It uses the laws and common practices of intellectual property to achieve this hypothesis.

The Demonic Women Of Premodern Japanese Theatre, Jasmine C.E. Umeno

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis aims to examine the ways in which women are used as vehicles within the noh and kabuki theatre traditions to perpetuate moral and religious doctrine. Using the theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Jill Dolan, I examine two plays which feature a female demon as their antagonist, Momijigari and Dojoji, and focus on the ways they incorporate Buddhist and Neo-Confucian ideology in their respective noh and kabuki renditions.

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land: An Analysis Of Presidential Immigration Rhetoric In The "Nation Of Immigrants", Hilary Slauson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the function and limitations of presidential immigration rhetoric, using Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as examples to show the development of rhetoric across their presidencies. Reagan and Clinton are theoretically ideologically juxtaposed, though examples found in their public speech on immigration politics show patterned language that contributed to harmful discourses, kept legislation ineffective, and promoted anti-immigration sentiment. Most persistent since Reagan’s response to the fourth and current wave of immigration to the U.S. was the description of the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” Reference to the “nation of immigrants” was often conflictingly coupled with …

Leadership Cultural Intelligence: A Path To Highly Effective Global Operations, Joseph C. Gelineau Jr

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

This is a comparative study of how to achieve highly effective leadership in foreign cultures. The collective findings reveal that effective leadership is significantly limited when not accompanied by conscious efforts to apply cultural intelligence as a leadership dynamic in global operations. It reviews the science of leadership in terms of visionary transformation of organizations by leaders and the application of cultural intelligence operating in foreign culture environments. It evaluates the effect of cultural differences in the key leadership areas of innovation, a primary determinate of effective organizational performance, and ethical behavior applied across different cultural groups. Published research from …

Ngos V. State: A Case Study Of The Effectiveness Of Women’S Development Programs In Tanzania, Sara M. Eliason

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper compares the effectiveness of an NGO and a government branch at promoting development through gender equality in Tanzania, in an attempt to determine whether one actor is more suited to this sector of development. Due to the nature of the actors, their approaches impact different parts of the population of Tanzania and are complementary in their impact. Both NGO and government efforts can help to empower women and in turn promote economic development in Tanzania.

Interior, Concept And Clay: A Study Of Self And Space, Lily Alan

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper considers theories of perception, interaction, and being as a historical and philosophical foundation for themes of space and the self within art; namely, my senior installation, Interior, Concept & Clay. Beginning with a biological discussion of the eye’s perception, the paper moves on to Kant’s theories of Differentiation of Direction in Space. From there, I discuss Gaston Bachelard’s text The Poetics of Space as an investigation of personal awareness within domestic interiors. Finally, I study the vast and varied philosophical notions of selfhood and no-selfhood with the help of John Canfield’s The Looking-Glass Self: An Examination of …

Being "Like A Girl" In The Twenty-First Century: Branding And Identity Through Cultural Conversation, Jane A. Condon

Scripps Senior Theses

Branding exists at the intersection of culture and economics and is an increasingly important tool in distinguishing commodities. Over the past few years, more and more companies have started to use discourses of female empowerment, celebrating femininity, womanhood, and all things “girly” to sell their products - spiking sales, racking up millions of online views, and starting important conversations in the process. Procter & Gamble's “Like A Girl” campaign for Always creates a productive tension and way of thinking about both brand and buyer. The “Like A Girl” campaign is unique because it presents a feminist message to and about …

Grotesque Depictions And Seduction: Exotification Of Asian/American Women, Mabelle Bong

Scripps Senior Theses

My senior art project is an exploration of contemporary representations of women of Asian descent in the United States, specifically looking at issues of body image, sexuality, and exotification. I will examine the lack of representation of Asian women in America in media and art, specifically painting and mixed media. Ultimately, I will elucidate on why I chose this topic and used certain techniques and materials to explore the contemporary features and symbolic representations of Asian women in America.

Beneath Still Waters: An Exploration Of Transmedia Narratives And Twitter Fiction, Anjali Gupta

Scripps Senior Theses

Beneath Still Waters is an original transmedia mystery narrative that explores the possibilities of an interconnected media landscape as a unique platform for creative use and audience engagement. Transmedia storytelling refers to the building of a fictional world comprised of multiple parts across different platforms, where each component makes a valuable contribution to the whole. This project uses the tools and strategies of social media to tell a complex and interactive multi-platform story.

Queer Content In Science Fiction Allegory And Analogue: Is It In Disguise?, Anna C. Marburger

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis performs a textual analysis of two for-profit science fiction texts in which the authors implanted queer content: Bryan Singer's X-Men films and James Robert's Transformers comic series, "More Than Meets the Eye". The argument incorporates queer (referring to attraction and gender variance) media representation and western identity politics lenses into its critique.

By interrogating reality through the masquerade of an impossible universe, science fiction affects how subversive a text can be. When authors designate the natural and the unnatural in a strange universe, they designate what and who belongs in our society. Whatever they imagine has an effect …

The Impulse To Punish: A Critique Of Retributive Justice, Devika Agrawal

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the strength of the two major theories of punishment, consequentialism and retributivism. It also explores the two most critiqued systems of punishment in the world: The U.S and Norway. By presenting the idea that retributivism is the only plausible theory that can morally justify the U.S. penal practises, I argue against the theory by incorporating various objections delivered by Antony Duff, Michael Zimmerman, and Jeffrie Murphy. I then explore the question of what could possibly ground the Norwegian justice system, for the answer to this is crucial, if we hope to demand prison reform and tailor our …

Love At First Sight? Jane Austen And The Transformative Male Gaze, Rachel S. Grate

Scripps Senior Theses

In this thesis, I claim that the gaze is central to the courtship process in Austen’s novels. I also propose that an analysis of the gaze is crucial to understanding the gendered power dynamics that are central to these relationships. We tend to think of male gazers as having all the power, but one of Austen’s subversive arguments is that women can also be subjects of the gaze and transform through it. However, limits exist to their power. As I will argue, while men are able to simply project their transformative gaze, women must first use their gaze to perceive …

Hamlet #Princeofdenmark: Exploring Gender And Technology Through A Contemporary Feminist Re-Interpretation Of Hamlet, Allegra B. Breedlove

Scripps Senior Theses

Exploring the process of designing, producing, directing and starring in a multimedia feminist re-interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set in a contemporary social media landscape.

Pour L'Orgueil Et Contre Les Préjugés: Mémoires De George Sand Et Valérie Trierweiler, Femmes Répudiées, Vittoria Mollo

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the themes of Pride and Prejudice in two texts written roughly two hundred years apart. The first work that is analyzed is Elle et Lui by George Sand, published in the year 1859 . The second book that is explored throughout this dissertation is Merci pour ce moment: a best seller penned in 2014 by the ex french Première Dame Valérie Trierweiler. In particular, this thesis takes a closer look at these womens' use of a biography as a means to redeem their image as perceived by the public.

Claiming Images: The Production And Preservation Of Desire In Richard Prince's Re-Photography, Meghan M. Gallagher

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the re-photography of contemporary artist, Richard Prince. Using Lacanian theories of the gaze and of the drive cycle, it attempts to establish desire as the central theme of Prince's work. It looks primarily at the Cowboys, Girlfriends, and New Portraits, in order to combat the dominant perception of Prince's work as critical commentary on contemporary consumer culture.

Precious Stones, Mineral Beings, Performative Materiality In Fifteenth-Century Northern Art, Brigitte Buettner

Art: Faculty Books

Materials carried the meaning of early modern art. Transformed and crafted from the matter of nature, art objects were the physical embodiment of both the inherent qualities of materials and the forces of culture that used, refined and produced them. The study of materials offers a new approach to this important period in the history of art, science and culture, linking the close study of painting, sculpture and architecture to much wider categories of the everyday and the exotic.

Drawing on new research and models from anthropology, material culture and the history of art, scholars in The Matter of Art …

Las Etapas De Transformación De La Figura Femenina En El Exilio En Primavera Con Una Esquina Rota, "Geografías" Y "Como Greenwich" De Mario Benedetti, Maria Liliana Labrador Morales

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

During the decade of the 1970's in South America, people saw the governments become overrun by dictatorships. These dictatorships destroyed the fabric of democracy. The horror of these new politics brought destroyed men and women in many different ways. These policies included such things as torture, censorship, impositions of patriarchal ideas, exile, and even included imprisonment and disappearance.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the importance of the stages of transformation of women in the works of Mario Benedetti and how these stages reflect on the process of adaptation to exile. This analysis centers on four characters who …

Depintrix, Samantha Mae Allen

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

My work speaks to the intimacy of individual pleasure. I separate the societal barriers of what private and public pleasure should be. The techniques used convey the same kind of physical consistency of sex. It is wet and sensuous, it is physical. By bringing pornography that is usually consumed in the privacy of one's own home to the public eye, one has to become accustomed to viewing these works with the added pressure of being in a public space. The same ideas follow when using the sexualized photographs of models which are viewed daily and seem to have no response …

A Reader's Beheading: Nabokov's Invitation And Authorial Utopia, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

“A Reader’s Beheading: Nabokov’s Invitation and Authorial Utopia” argues that Invitation to a Beheading polemically outlines Nabokov’s position on the relationship between reader and writer: in other words, that writing and reading are difficult, elite pursuits whose meanings should necessarily be available only to those willing to face and surmount the magician’s challenges. Narratively, it operates as a kind of roman à clef in which Cincinnatus C. follows a trajectory towards artistic freedom (or authorial utopia) where he is liberated from the constraints of poor readers—among them literalists and Freudians—while Nabokov, ever the unaccommodating creator, frustrates that progression with the …

An Exploration Of The French And American Schools Of Classical Saxophone, Sarah E. Miracle

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project is an exploration of the relatively short history of the classical saxophone genre. It will focus mainly on the styles created by Marcel Mule, the second professor of saxophone at the Paris Conservatory, and Larry Teal, the first full-time professor of saxophone in America. Mule and Teal’s contrasting ideas of playing and teaching created distinct French and American schools of classical saxophone playing. This project explores the similarities and differences between these two schools of thought, and places them each in historical and cultural contexts. In addition, it traces the subsequent lineage of prominent saxophone performers and pedagogues, …

Sketching The Stories Of The Ausbund, Carita B. Keim Ms.

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project investigates the ballads compiled into the Ausbund, which literally means “a true selection or sampling. This hymnbook is the oldest one continuously in use in the world. Although the hymnbook was compiled by Amish and Mennonite ancestors, only the Amish use it today. Through creative non-fiction, this series of essays sketches ways in which the hymnbook continues to influence the Amish and Mennonite community. It attempts to prove that the Ausbund is a unique piece of art that has literary, cultural, and spiritual value. It had value in the sixteenth century, when most of the hymns were penned, …

Honoring The Victims: How The Change In Ethics Ruined Science In The Third Reich And What To Do With The Remaining Medical Data, Kathleen M. Mitchell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper analyzes both sides of the debate over using the Nazi medical data and brings forth one possible compromise. While using the data can provide the scientific community information that can be beneficial for society—and thus salvaging some good out of the evil—are the survivors’ sentiments on the subject truly being heard? The idea that the victims are once again being abused by using the information without their consent is not a matter to be taken lightly. On the other hand, if the data is valuable, it can be detrimental to scientific experimentation to deny access or destroy the …

The Only Dreamer, Katelyn H. Long

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

For my Senior Honors Project, I submitted an excerpt from a novel length story about a family line with the inheritable ability to take objects out of people’s dreams. In this young adult fantasy, Melody is a nineteen year old girl who struggles with the fact that her twin sister has inherited the ability while she has not. The excerpt introduces Melody’s family and shows the tension that exists between them while hinting to the reader that there is something more sinister that drives Melody away from her home.

The novel explores morality and its gray areas, the difficulty that …

The Quiet Conversation, Samantha Weisend

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

No abstract provided.

Inspiring Piety: The Influence Of Caravaggio’S Paintings In Santa Maria Del Popolo, Cara Coleman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This article looks at the way Italian Baroque painter, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio broke from the artistic conventions of the Renaissance and Mannerist styles in his religious paintings to create an entirely new style that reflected the needs of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. Caravaggio pushed painting throughout Europe in a new direction, away from the idealization of the Renaissance and the artistic extremes of Mannerism, by popularizing realism in art. Caravaggio’s unique style is examined through comparisons of his paintings, The Conversion of Paul, c.1601 and The Martyrdom of Saint Peter, c.1601 in the Roman basilica, Santa Maria del Popolo …