Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

The Language Of Legal Violence: The State’S Role In Silencing Capitalist Dissent, 1877-1915, Jaclene Paolucci

Theses and Dissertations

From the 1870s to the eve of World War I, the United States government enacted a violent and repressive campaign against labor activists and political radicals to protect capitalist interests. The growing alliance between employers and the government threatened American democratic traditions and turned those who challenged the capitalist system into potential enemies of the state.

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Tied Together, Eiko Nishida

Theses and Dissertations

The paper is about a site-specific installation that questions a viewer’s norms and perspectives, through the use of multilingual newspapers as a sculptural material.

Blueprints, Lauryn E. Welch

Theses and Dissertations

“Blueprints” is an open letter on chronic illness and its shaping of the artist’s partnership and painting practice. Through the framework of a house—foyer, kitchen, library, bedroom, garden—put in relation to the body, this paper examines the vibrant matter inside, as an alliance of parts including people, objects, and spaces.

The Invisible Box, Rafael Yaluff

Theses and Dissertations

A work of art is something so simple that it puts you in front of it. And through its simplicity it makes you aware of yourself in front of it, it gives you yourself. This paper explores the creative process from a structural perspective

To Love, And To Be Loved: The Art And Relationships Of Gwen John (1876-1939), Karina Grady

Theses and Dissertations

Extremely close kinships that lasted decades, love affairs with other artists, a patron who fulfilled both her financial and cerebral needs, and a lifelong creative curiosity: these are the distinct relationships Gwen John carried throughout her life and, I maintain, that her art should be viewed as their reflection.

Or Read The Wikipedia Entry For The Parable Of The Tower Of Babel But Imagine It’S 2023 This Time And We’Re Getting So Close Just Give The Artist A Little More Of Your Money, David Thonis

Theses and Dissertations

Systems and their inherent design underlie everything in contemporary life. Design exists to facilitate interaction, to ease workflow, to keep us producing. As such, it exerts its own control.

Through disassembling recurring conventions in design, I look to break with preconceptions of logic. To deny functionality. In doing so, my intention is to dislocate the user from the usual patterns of applicable systems.

The resulting discomfort may feel strange, disembodied, but it should be embraced. Long have capitalism’s solutions created more problems. In the face of this complexity, and beyond it, there can be freedom.

Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

The horrors inflicted on Black bodies, souls, and spirits in the United States during the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and the current era (2023) have a lasting legacy of trauma metabolized through the body and transmuted generationally. Jones uses this data to contextualize the work of Black dance artists as hermeneutic phenomena in which the Black dance artist is a hermeneut tasked with delivering a message of the Black body/spirit complex: “I AM HUMAN. DO NOT KILL ME.” This paper examines how Black dance artists frequently petition for their survival — incessantly subjugated to the interpreter’s empathy, …

The Cosmicomica, Corinne Bernard

Theses and Dissertations

My drawings are a reconciliation of multiple, coexisting truths. They are a practice of creating a new relationship with this world and myself in it; creating a system of symbols that give substance to the same primordial gunk we swim in daily.

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Simone Martini's St. Louis Altarpiece: Materiality, Franciscan Propaganda, And Sacral Angevin Dynastic Object, Charles Morrow

Theses and Dissertations

Simone Martini makes lavish use of gold, silver, gilt glass, paste pearls and gems in the St. Louis Altarpiece, and these materials carry underlying meanings that support the panel’s sacred, dynastic and Franciscan elements. Actor Network Theory is used to present visualizations of the networks in which the altarpiece participates.

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

The Flex Voice In The Soundtracks For The Nintendo Game Boy, Matthew Dineiro

Theses and Dissertations

The Nintendo Game Boy had a sound chip which allowed for only three pitched voices and one unpitched percussive voice. These limitations affected the music that was written for this video game system. Of the three pitched voices, one voice typically performs the melody, and one voice typically is the bass and harmonic foundation. This thesis analyzes the third voice, typically in the middle of the musical texture, and the various functions that it can hold. As is discussed, the middle voice sometimes pairs in harmony with the melody or the bass. In other cases, however, it forms a musical …

Gloria Rehearsal (Excerpt) A Feminist Mechanism For Metabolization, Eleanor Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Weaving embodied trauma studies with feminist theory, non-hierarchical creative structures, and research in dance improvisation, this thesis paper written by Eleanor Smith contextualizes the dance performance gloria rehearsal (excerpt). The performance piece was choreographed and performed by Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith, who have been co-choreographing feminist dances since 2006.

(Not) Knowing, Jared Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

Jared Friedman’s work creates monuments out of banal common objects. Through acrylic paintings on- Astroturf, burlap, canvas, and upholstery fabric- he explores the ambiguity of the unremarkable, such as the condenser coils on the back of a refrigerator. In, (Not) Knowing, he parses the difference between knowing and understanding.

The Lives And Afterlives Of The Arenberg Gospels: Materializing Medieval Oaths, Sarah Ganzel

Theses and Dissertations

The “social life” of the Arenberg Gospels, a gospel book later used as an oath book in ecclesiastical officiation ceremonies, illuminates the impact and meaning of oath books in medieval Europe. This thesis traces the manuscript’s materiality throughout its life, showing why both words and flesh mattered to oath rituals.

Loca, Alejandro Heredia

Theses and Dissertations

Loca is a queer transnational novel highlighting the potential of friendship as home when nations, family, and identity groups fail us.

Grouping Against The Groove: Metrical Dissonance In Hiromi's "Voice", Sam Falotico

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis engages theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in an analytical study of Japanese-jazz pianist/composer Hiromi Uehara’s tune “Voice.” In doing so, it examines not only the techniques of this specific artist, but it also explores general issues regarding how a sense of embodied, forward propulsion—that is, a “groove”—may manifest in a jazz work that uses odd meters, and how metrical dissonances function in this context.

Almost Human, Sarah Huang

Theses and Dissertations

A collection of poems centered on extinction, loneliness, cultural identity, and what it means to be human.

Red: Stories And Novel Opening, Josephine Sloyan

Theses and Dissertations

“Red: Stories and Novel Opening” is a collection of three short stories and the beginning of a novel.

Excerpt From Novel, The House Of Bad Spirit, Balim Barutcu

Theses and Dissertations

This is an excerpt from Balim Barutcu's debut novel, titled (for now!) The House of Bad Spirit. It follows the story of a multi-generational family that lives a split life, not only across countries and continents, but across time. It is the story of a family divided and reunified by the gifts granted by an old god, presiding over their tale amid the stars, from the heavens. She is grateful for the support of the MFA program in Fiction, particularly of her advisors Sigrid Nunez and Adam Haslett.

Los Días De La Calle Gabino Barreda: The Social Circle Of Remedios Varo And Benjamin Péret In Mexico, 1941-1947, Esther R. Levy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the social circle of Surrealist exiles that formed at the home of Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret on Calle Gabino Barreda between 1941 and 1947. This group is immortalized in Gunther Gerzso’s painting Los Días de la Calle Gabino Barreda (1944) and includes Gerzso, Varo, Péret, Esteban Francés, and Leonora Carrington. This thesis argues that the environment cultivated on Calle Gabino Barreda provided these artists with a place to expand on what they learned in Europe to develop their Surrealist practice in Mexico.

Darkroom, Alexandra Romero

Theses and Dissertations

Romero’s poetry manuscript “Darkroom” dips into the surreal with a playful tonal range, blurring the distinction between reality and dream state. Scenes are vivid and speakers ever-changing as the poems move between preoccupations of love, anguish and more, scaling from the microscopic to the universal.

For What Cannot Be Reached, Yasmeen Alkishawi

Theses and Dissertations

On searching and yearning for connection, forgiveness and love.

Beyond Participation: Hélio Oiticica And Neville D’Almeida, Jocelyn Elliott Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

The collaborative works by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica and filmmaker Neville D’Almeida responded to Brazil’s dictatorship and their self-imposed exile in New York between 1969-1974. Oiticica’s concept of crelazer and the artists elective “marginal” position converge to create a new cinematic language; challenging gender norms, and proposing new systems for living.

Machines Don't Stop: Stories & Novel Excerpts, Alexander N. Richardson

Theses and Dissertations

Collection of short stories and novel openings. Nancy Reagan consults astrology to prevent nuclear Armageddon. A son is influenced by his sick mother, his video-game-obsessed father, and commercials. A lawyer attempts to convince the governor of Illinois to prevent Six Flags Great America from reopening during the pandemic.

Leonora Carrington’S "Down Below": Transgressive Renderings Of The Grotesque Female Body, Kelsey King

Theses and Dissertations

The classification of the bodily grotesque relies on the transgression of boundaries, marked by an openness to the world. Leonora Carrington’s memoir (1944) and painting (1940) that share the same name, Down Below, illustrate the grotesque body as a revisionist self-configuration, destabilizing traditional representations and eroticization of the female form.

I Mondi Incrociati Di Machiavelli: Il Principe E La Mandragola, Carrie Tighe Cristiano

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Machiavelli’s ideas of virtù and fortuna and how, through an exploration of these terms, we can better understand the writer and theorist. By examining his works, principally Principe and Mandragola, we see many consistent ideas as well as gain a clearer understanding of Machiavelli’s character.

Made In Italy: Gli Effetti Della Musica Italiana (T)Rap Sulla Società E Sulla Lingua, Paraskevi Z. Gkana-Alberico

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the history of Italian (t)rap music, and uses the lyrics of famous songs in an attempt to examine the effects the sometimes vulgar and explicit themes, which are usually accompanied by the use of foreign languages, could have on society and the Italian language.