Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Place-Conscious Vs. Place-Bound, Julie Avetisyan

Theses and Dissertations

Julie Avetisyan’s installation of sculptures, paintings and printmaking works are driven by an exploration of constructed identity that is not place-bound, but place-conscious. In this paper, she explores how her art practice generates world building under the context of the Armenian Diaspora – considering histories of indigeneity, migration, and assimilation.

Children And The Cold War: Race & Hypocrisy Amid Fear Of Nuclear War, Richard D. Mctaggart Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

During the Cold War, American propaganda centered the wellbeing of the child in its messaging warning of atomic attack at the hands of the Soviet Union. However, despite American claims that all children were valued by the United States, this was proven untrue by its unequal treatment of Black children.

Revolutionary Women, Fredgy Noël

Theses and Dissertations

Revolutionary Women is a five screen video installation that honors five women leaders of the Haitian Revolution that lasted from August 22, 1791- January 1, 1804. Women revolutionaries are almost non-existent in its historical documentation in spite of their important roles as fighters, military leaders, and spiritual guides. Revolutionary Women aims to fill this gap. It re-inserts these erased women into the history of the Revolution through telling the stories of Cécile Fatiman, Dédée Bazile, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, Victoria "Abdaraya Toya" Montou, and Sanite Bélair. The video installation takes an experimental mixed-media approach to tell their dynamic stories. The five screens …

Dust, Mist, Haze, Michael C. Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores painting through the ideas of dust, mist, and haze as specific atmospheric metaphors that could be used to describe ontologies of space, time, memory, and history.

Experimenting With History: Confronting The Archive Through Poetry And The Historical Graphic Novel, Gerina Xhiherri

Theses and Dissertations

While there is general agreement among scholars about the violence of archives and the danger in engaging with them, there is also dispute about how to challenge the power of official records—whether such a thing is possible—and how literature might be a means to recover some of the lost stories, experiences, and personal histories of enslaved people. The stakes involved in preserving the deepest truths of slavery are high, especially for people of color, who remain both under-represented and hyper visible in objectified terms, and for whom there is ever the threat of a collective erasure as subjects in both …

History Is The Devil's Doing, Christopher W. Berntsen

Theses and Dissertations

My work engages with the idea of queer time and place. The waterfront, especially that in New York City is a space where these ideas have felt most potent. I utilize photography, particularly various methods of collage that combine images made from a sixty year range engaging with the queer waterfront. This work visualizes the waterfront as a space in which time exists beyond a static linear understanding of it. I look back in order to look forward, forward in order to look back. Or am I looking both ways at once?

Meditations, Adrian D. Mosby

Theses and Dissertations

Adrian Demarco Mosby (b. 1991, Bronx, Ny) is a figurative painter focused on the use of allegory and narrative. His stone like figures depict a modern day apathy and disillusion. The narrative content is meant to formulate a moral philosophy that might combat such apathy.

Time Machine Research And Approach, Tarek Bouraque

Theses and Dissertations

Time Machine is a hybrid documentary that explores the logics of enslavement, colonialism, eurocentrism and their interconnectedness in our globalized world. Mustapha Azemmouri, born in 1502, undertakes a journey to the 21st century to recount his own story of enslavement and exploration, and reflects on a collective puzzle of 500 years of hidden history.

Bitter Fruit, Ronald J. Green

Theses and Dissertations

Pain is a phenomenon like fear, belief, and love -- among the forces that determine the course of our lives long before we are born. These conditions generate the layers of the human soul, marrying one life with others past, present and future.

There is an unconscious consensus on the linearity of time. Our lives, memories, dreams and reflections constantly present a challenge to this general agreement. Life, like time, is a series of interlocking awarenesses. Paths intersect, the actions of individuals deposit change into an internal pool of collective experience. Freud once believed that the past is not fixed …

To The Peaches, Jazmine Hayes

Theses and Dissertations

My work focuses on erased histories and the ways these histories are preserved through cultural traditions. I explore histories across the African diaspora with specificity on African American culture and black female subjectivity.

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang

Theses and Dissertations

I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.

Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau

Theses and Dissertations

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Things They Carried subvert dominating historical narratives by challenging the frameworks that construct them through introducing alternate narratives. By reframing the ethics of truth, they rupture central narrative space with marginal perspectives, rewriting History in service of their own truths.

The Posers: Instinctual Simulation Across Time, Kathryn Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations

The Posers is a video about the occlusion of the self in history and in love. This paper explores methods of laminating historical moments with contemporary experience to explore the passage of time and the ongoing marginalization of women.

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Tuff Breeches, Arkadiy Ryabin

Theses and Dissertations

In consideration of language and it’s relationship to information and knowledge, the author explores personal set of events in relationship to that of the public, via forms of orality. 19th century American literature is posited as a hangover influencing contemporary events.

Deposition, Conjecture, And The Word Of Nod, Victor Vaughn

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis involved mixed medium drawings based on written colonial papers regarding the beginning of a border war between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. To fill in the fragmented historical information, the project incorporated period artifacts as merged and manipulated by contemporary technology and the internet’s ethos.