Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Luca (Last Universal Common Ancestor), Tansy Xiao

Theses and Dissertations

LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is a non-linear virtual environment with a non-anthropocentric approach. Streaming real-time biometric data from performers' movements, brain activities, and bioprocess data from living microbiomes such as slime mold and yeast into the virtual ecosystem, LUCA explores the collective agency and interconnectivity among diverse living entities.

The Mailroom, Davis Alianiello

Theses and Dissertations

Nadia takes a job in the mailroom of a sinister Boston ad agency. Her coworker is a disciple of Uncle_Hogshit, a radical online extremist. As the packages pile up and the wealthy disappear, we discover that Nadia is not who she seems.

This House Is For Laughing, Sam Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

Kendra has the perfect all-American family. She’s made sure of it. But when her brother Ben proves uncontrollable, she’s forced to confront her concept of family and how we choose to show up for one another.

Corridors, Miguel Antonio Alfredo V. Luarca

Theses and Dissertations

After twenty years away, Anj has come home to the Philippines, where three generations of women mourn the death of her estranged father. But one day in her family’s ancestral house is enough to remind her why she left. And why she might never escape.

Last Gold, Minna Lee

Theses and Dissertations

At the Winter Olympics sponsored by Beef Bowls ™, figure skating’s three-time silver medalist Chili must compete against their perfect girlfriend for one last shot at gold. In an arena filled with penguins, Beef Bowls ™, and real Olympic history, love and success go head to head.

My Sauce! Living In The Polyrhythm, Zakiya Harris

Theses and Dissertations

This paper contextualizes “Ghana: The Place Where the Chief Sleeps,” for which Harris served as dance captain, rehearsal director, dancer, stager and choreographer. Harris details how her work living inside the polyrhythms of performance, practices, and pedagogies can produce a holistic West African dance education for students.

Oblique, Edward Kijowski

Theses and Dissertations

Oblique is a multi-sensory art installation that provides a story of fragmentation in sound and light rendered by an obtuse hexagon arrangement of speakers and associated lighting prompts. The oblique direction of the soundwaves creates sonic sculpturing that propels listeners into an active state.

Chemical Meadows, Nate Dorr

Theses and Dissertations

Chemical Meadows correlates water chemistry and photochemistry in New Jersey’s Meadowlands. A vast marshland transformed by industry and environmental contamination, the Meadowlands today are home to seven Superfund sites. By bathing 16mm film in contaminated waterways, sensitive photochemistry reveals hidden histories.

Feeble Transmitters, Indranil Choudhury

Theses and Dissertations

Feeble Transmitters is a series of electroacoustic sculptures made using ceramics, plexiglass, and home audio components like speakers, transducers, and amplifiers. The sculptures occupy a space between manufactured objects and organic forms. Drawing on the material culture of industrial design in audio, the series explores people’s relationships and rituals with consumer technology. When installed together in temporary installations, the sculptures activate their environment with a spatial soundscape.

The Routes, Wei-Ta Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The Routes is a 30-minute documentary that explores the filmmaker's reflection on the ties to family and homeland, as well as the nature of non-fiction filmmaking itself, all the while portraying in parallel the story of immigrant artist Hung-Ju as he delicately balances creative challenges with nostalgia.

Time's Radiant Keepers, Tara Aliya Kesavan

Theses and Dissertations

Time’s Radiant Keepers is a body of work comprising paintings, ceramic sculptures and video. Through these materials, my work emphasizes a tactile, embodied relationship between people and the virtual worlds they inhabit. I build on the idea of contending with the screen as a sculptural surface - one whose texture, form and objecthood we may look at, rather than simply look through. My formal inquiries are anchored in a rich narrative world. Drawing from state sponsored documentary films, feature films, and familial anecdotes from the 1950’s-1970’s in India, my paintings chronicle the emergence of the image of the urban, working …

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Bengal Memory, Fahim Hamid

Theses and Dissertations

Bengal Memory is a documentary short film, told through an expository and personal lens, about a forgotten genocide that occurred in Bangladesh during its Liberation War, the controversial role that the U.S. government played in it, and how the lives of Bengali people in both the homeland and in the American diaspora were shaped by these events. As a Bangladeshi American and narrator of this story, I traveled to my native country to investigate. My father, Mohammed, had lived through the 1971 war and recounts his memories of the atrocities committed by West Pakistan, which claimed the lives of a …

Pricks And Pills, Anna A. Charles

Theses and Dissertations

"Pricks and Pills" is a collection of audio pieces designed for an online platform where individuals with diabetes can listen to and find emotional support from others who share their experiences. This audio project provides an intimate look into the lives of people navigating the challenges of diabetes. Through heartfelt interviews with individuals and their families, the podcast highlights their journeys, showcasing both their struggles and triumphs.

Blurring The Boundaries: The Filmmaking Approach Toward Remission, John M. Mastriano

Theses and Dissertations

Remission explores the filmmaker’s personal experience with grief and fatherhood as well as the importance of a shared connection with the natural world that transcends life and death. Though primarily a first-person, reflexive short documentary film, Remission draws from other documentary models and modes, blurring the boundaries of documentary filmmaking.

Reflections Of Little Red Dot: An Interactive Mixed Reality Archival Experience, Chloé Lee

Theses and Dissertations

It has been nearly a decade since I last visited Singapore, a place I am connected to yet an outsider. Reflections of Little Red Dot is a mixed-reality experience that animates my archive of drawings, videos, and 3D imagery from everyday Singaporeans in 2015, the year their country celebrated its 50th birthday.

Walking through this liminal mixed reality space, we hear how citizens are personally affected by the rapidly developing landscape and erasure of personal and historical sites of significance while reflecting on our collective agency to shape the future of our environments. We are invited into homes where loved …

Rgb Root Matriz Color Dance, Danielle E. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

RGB Root Matriz Color Dance (Color Dance) is an immersive, interactive experience that combines poetic phrases and color filters to create a womb-like environment. Designed by Danielle Gauthier, this artistic piece uses a webcam to respond to users’ movements in real time, allowing them to confront and express their emotions through metaphor and dance. Color Dance creates a unique platform for self-discovery and empowerment by fostering a connection between the body and discomforting emotions.

Erase The Record, Anne Sofie Noerskov

Theses and Dissertations

Erase the Record follows a young immigrant as she embarks on a magical journey to unearth her vanished memories and elusive cultural identity.
The film delves into the malleable nature of memory in an allegorical universe in which myth, dream, and magic coexist. Slowly unfolding themes of immigration and the imagination, the film sprung from a personal desire to approach immigration as a psychological experience. Erase the Record explores how the physical landscapes we inhabit affect us, and how memory, language, and time are stored in a body and in a landscape.

Front Matter

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

No abstract provided.

Community As A Force Of Action In Lorraine Hansberry's "Les Blancs", Lily Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

This paper explores Hansberry’s philosophy of community in her 1970 play, Les Blancs. The paper analyzes Hansberry’s use of complex characterization in this text to show the wide reach of the colonial power structure and to show what is required of a community to push for effective action. The paper also analyzes the National Theatre’s 2016 production of Les Blancs, and how this production incorporates and enhances Hansberry’s philosophy of community through the characteristics afforded through theatre as a medium.

“Our Experience Is Fragmentary”: Partial Redemption In Marilynne Robinson’S Gilead Tetralogy, Zachary Stevenson

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Although the characters and thematic throughlines vary across the four books in the Gilead series, each book takes an interest in the reality of division and considers ways of negotiating and healing that division. Whether the divisions are theological, familial, socioeconomic or racial, their presence haunts the text and the question of their resolution always hovers near the surface. Taken together, these considerations of difference across the four books demonstrate that Robinson populates her novels with chasms that her characters bridge, but only partially so. This coexistence of alienation and reconciliation allows Robinson to articulate a vision of Christian community …

The Humanities And Interdisciplinarity: Borderless Sympathy And Global Citizenship, Lianne Gabrielle Sauvage

Honors Thesis

In an era marked by capitalism, rapid globalization, and technological advancement, the humanities, and interdisciplinary studies have been pushed aside for the sake of profitability. Drawing on insights from scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Stuart Hall, this paper explores the crucial role of a humanities-based and interdisciplinary education in fostering skills and sensibilities necessary in navigating the increasingly interconnected world. Through an examination of various interdisciplinary courses at Loyola Marymount University, this paper demonstrates the nuanced ways in which the humanities enrich our understanding of human experience, cultural diversity, and sociopolitical dynamics, ultimately developing a borderless sympathy that is necessary …

The Set Falls Apart, Thomas F. Tait

Theses and Dissertations

Using systems, puppets, and reappropriated technologies as central features of my practice, in my work I explore allegorical connections and cross-affiliations between otherwise separate ontological categories. In this text, I draw on sources such as affect theory, science fiction, theater, and the uncanny, to consider our affectual relationship to the nonhuman.

Withholding In Shakespeare: An Analysis Of King Lear And As You Like It, Nylene R. Ward

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Shakespeare is a name familiar to most people who have had the opportunity to study beyond the third grade. Withholding is a practice that isn’t as well known to us until we reach teenage and young adult years. This essay examines both of these topics, exploring the causes and effects of withholding in King Lear and As You Like It while comparing them to real-world definitions and findings. No concrete resolution is formed, instead leaving the outcome to readers as they consider the ethical, relational, and logical implications of the adult hide-and-seek that is withholding.

Thematic Synthesis: Rethinking Generative Music With Compositional Understanding In Game And Software Development, Jasper Moore Tucker

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Generative music, first introduced by composers like Brian Eno and David Cope in the mid-to-late 20th century, has evolved through many stages, with diverse applications across music and technology companies as well as the game industry. However, despite this widespread interest, there remains a notable lack of the foundational understanding of composition and individual expressiveness in current generative systems that was apparent in the work of early composers. This paper advocates for a shift towards prioritizing compositional thought in system design to foster greater diversity and innovation within generative music. To demonstrate this approach, a novel system synthesizing two distinct …

Dear Dad,, Kimin Kim

Theses and Dissertations

A father-to-son relationship is often described as cold, distant, and detached. Mine was no different. A son looking for his father's approval for his entire life, realizing the approval has to be given by himself, not from his father.

The Catholic Runway: Examining The Representation Of The Chasuble In Modern Couture, Brendan Baehr

Honors Thesis

In Catholic tradition, the chasuble is a central garment worn by clergy members originating as far back as the 6^th century, albeit under a different name. The chasuble is the outermost form of vestment for members of the clergy and takes the general shape of a cone, leaving room for the head to be placed in a circular opening. The changes in form of the chasuble will be something I exam within this paper, as although often relatively minor, still reflect changing attitudes towards fashion sensibilities within the Catholic church over time. I will be primarily examining these changes …

間, Lele Dai

Theses and Dissertations

LeLe Dai makes contingent participatory public interventions using sensory materials such as sound, flickering light, and water. This paper examines their works through the lens of Chinese character Jian (間), meaning “gap/slit/incision,” to investigate the concept of “in-betweenness.”

Like Shapes Moving In Another World: An Identification And Interpretation Of Mythical Figures In C. S. Lewis’ Novel The Silver Chair, Benjamin S. Perkin

Student Research

As a result of his conversion to Christianity, author C. S. Lewis felt compelled to formulate a unique definition of myth. From his perspective, myth is a means through which God communicates His truth to the non-Christian world. Myth recognizes the yearning for home all people experience yet cannot satisfy, but while it correctly diagnoses humanity’s symptoms, myth fails to treat the underlying disease responsible for them. The influence of non-Christian, specifically Greek, myth can be felt most strongly in The Silver Chair, the sixth installment of Lewis’ series The Chronicles of Narnia. Through the allusions this essay explores, in …

Theological Songwriting, Jake William Dimas

Senior Honors Theses

Music affects people deeply. Because of this, Christian songwriters have a responsibility to write songs that are theologically accurate. To provide a comparison to the experiment that took place for this paper, Chris Tomlin’s biography, songwriting influences, and music are presented and discussed. The experiment began with exclusively Christian songwriters being given an initial questionnaire. A song prompt was then given to each songwriter, and once returned, the songwriter was given a questionnaire. This step took place once again for the other prompt. The songs produced by the songwriters were then analyzed, being compared with one another and with the …