Arts and Humanities Commons^™

​​​​From Repression To Appropriation: Soviet Religious Policy And Reform, 1917-1943, Andriy Dyachenko

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyses the dynamics of religious reform in the USSR from 1917 to 1943. It argues that the early Bolshevik policy of persecution was increasingly substituted by state co-optation. This dynamic was shaped primarily by Stalinist concerns with state security and problems of ideology.

The Portrait And The Pedagogical Object: Art, Advertising, And Commerce In The Works Of Marcel Broodthaers, 1968-1971, D'Arcy Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the opposition of language and object and the roles of art, poetry, advertising, and commodity in Marcel Broodthaers’s van Laack ad (1971). Through a theoretical analysis of Broodthaers’s works from 1968-1971, this study situates the enigmatic van Laack ad as one of the Belgian artist’s most significant, yet overlooked artworks.

“Started From The Bottom”: The Ascension Of Hip-Hop As A Sonic Art Form, Benjamin Nile Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

For over four decades, hip-hop has been a part of the American soundscape, drawing from influences of jazz, rhythm and blues, disco, etc. Hip-hop is one of the cultural bridges between African Americans and the world. This paper will focus on the artists, culture and its ascent to high art.

Margery Kempe’S Mysticism In The Context Of Late Medieval English Spirituality, Beata A. Butryn

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the complexities in the mysticism and literary authority of Margery Kempe as the author of her book. I consider Margery’s struggles for the acceptance of her devotion to Christ in her status as a laywoman in the context of late medieval English spirituality to challenge medieval misogyny.

Long Live The Queer: Demystifying Noncitizenship In Uncle Frank And Pain And Glory, Andrew D. Manker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the ways in which a nation infantilizes its citizens, and how family dynamics internalize this infantilization. Queer family members and citizens are treated as threats to the family and by extension the nation because to live into queerness is to refuse the nations infantilization. Additionally, this thesis shows how queer people can cultivate a hopeful future for themselves and the family-as-extension-of-nation by radically redefining what citizenship looks like in a family and nation.

The Construction And Defense Of Artistic Authorship In Contemporary Copyright Disputes, Sophie Bell

Theses and Dissertations

Through the lens of three contemporary copyright infringement cases, this thesis examines topics in the field of art law, each grounded in the recent history of art and its controversies, in order to illuminate the unique set of legal conditions shaping contemporary artmaking, sale, and exhibition in the United States.

Rethinking Watteau In The Context Of Early Eighteenth-Century Bourgeois Culture, Bronwyn C. Roe

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis reexamines the work of Antoine Watteau through a social-art historical lens. Traditionally, Watteau's fêtes galantes have been closely aligned to the culture of the French nobility. However, a closer look into the artist's background, training, social milieu, and the class identity of his primary buyers reveals an alternative class alignment, inviting new interpretations for Watteau's most elusive work. This thesis challenges the close association between Watteau and the French nobility and aims to broaden the socio-visual landscape from which Watteau was drawing, namely that of a burgeoning bourgeois consumer culture. In particular, the culture of emulation, with its …

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 …

Claiming Ownership Of One’S Body Through Language: The Disability Memoir, Sarah Elizabeth Kaufman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the ways in which the disability memoir creates pathways that generate new ways of thinking. Focusing primarily on the disability memoirs of Simi Linton, Ellen Forney, and Kenny Fries, this analysis will personalize the disability experience as these authors live it and redefine its social stereotypes.

Slaying The Dragon: Dances Created During The Time Of The Pandemic, Regina Nejman

Theses and Dissertations

Regina Nejman’s paper details a dance artist’s negotiation of art-making in a global pandemic. It focuses on her improvisational dance films that were combined with live performance and animation in a gallery-like viewing environment. She situates herself among the many screendances and digital archives shared during NYC’s lockdown.

Bodyverse, Colin B. Stilwell

Theses and Dissertations

This paper supports the MFA dance thesis film BodyVerse. Exploring the intertwining relationship of body systems with the natural world, it brings somatic principles such as Body Mind Centering and dance improvisation together with film legacies and digital platforms.

Artists And The Push For Black People's Access To Healthcare, Kaitlin Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Using the works of Latoya Ruby Frazier, Simone Leigh, and Renée Stout, I explore the ways in which healthcare has been made inaccessible for Black Americans. Each chapter explores the impact of inaccessible healthcare and stereotypes, and the choice to opt for traditional alternatives to Western medicine.

Through The Eye Of The Needle: Embroidery As A Tool For Intimacy, Feminism, And Activism, Kristin D. Howell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the work of contemporary women artists who utilize embroidery as their primary medium. The careful execution of each artwork, whether created by career artists or amateur participants in artist-led projects, simultaneously engages with the legacy of the embroidery arts and explores new strategies of expression.

Driftbone, Noémie Jennifer Bonnet

Theses and Dissertations

My multidisciplinary work is premised on the idea that the contemplation of mortality can foster life-affirming redirections beyond the self. My explorations include ethereal abstract paintings, sculptural works hybridizing human and nonhuman forms, and meditative sound pieces. The works seek to inspire a heightened awareness of corporeal and ecological dependency.

Black And Silver Screens: Afropessimism And Filmic Appropriation In Contemporary Video Art, Madeleine A. Seidel

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis looks at the video works of artists Ulysses Jenkins, Ina Archer, and Garrett Bradley and their appropriation of images of Black actors in Classic Hollywood films through the theoretical framework of afropessimism.

The Sole Result Is The Game, Julia Taszycka

Theses and Dissertations

I address the idea of the game understood both from the perspective of the art world and the socio-economic system. My recent projects have been based almost entirely on found objects, bearing strong traces of damage, deterioration, and destruction.

Life, Man, Diane Wong

Theses and Dissertations

This piece paints the picture of what life felt like from the composer’s vantage point, specifically at the time when the composition was conceived. The first section employs the first sixteen pitches present in the harmonic series as an embodiment of the pure nature of sound – vibration, physics, and acoustics. The middle section shows a dynamic that pulls in two directions, one going sharper and sharper ascending through the circle of fifths and the other going flatter and flatter descending, all the while a steady pedal point in the center of the axis nonchalantly ticks like clockwork. As this …

Fabricated Homogeneity, Kimberly Nam

Theses and Dissertations

My work examines the national identity embedded in the homogeneous culture of Americana, and how that’s infiltrated into the subconscious mind of an immigrant.

By altering and parodying vernacular imageries of Americana, my paintings discuss how they generate a sense of foreignness and reveal the false illusion of cultural homogeneity.

Building For A New National Body: The Architecture Of Manuel Amábilis And Neomaya Modernity, Emily A. Cocco

Theses and Dissertations

In the history of architecture following the Mexican revolution, Yucatecan architect Manuel Amábilis (1889-1966) has often been passed over in favor of discussions of architects working in the nation’s cultural and political center, Mexico City, many of whom engaged in neocolonial and functionalist modern style to envision a modern Mexico transformed by the revolution. This omission is short-sighted, since Amábilis’s Maya revivalist architecture provides an iteration of postrevolutionary Mexican architecture that visually and ideologically manifests the socialist and proindingenous aims of the revolution while imagining a paradigm of modern nationalism that was not rooted in Western ideals. Amábilis’ neomaya architecture, …

I Still Love You, Despite Everything, Amy Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

My practice seeks to reconcile the family—be it a found, queer family, or blood relatives. Addressing ancestral conflict, the complications of US/Cuba relations and my physical and cultural distance from the island I hail from, my work offers another world for communing with those you cannot physically reach.

Data-Driven Decision-Making: Using Counterfactual Predictions To Allocate Scarce Homeless Services Fairly And Efficiently, Amanda Rose Kube

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithmic techniques in general, provide two crucial abilities with the potential to improve decision-making in the context of allocation of scarce societal resources. They can flexibly and accurately model treatment response at the individual level, potentially allowing us to better match available resources to individuals. In addition, they can reason simultaneously about the effects of matching sets of scarce resources to populations of individuals. This thesis leverages these abilities to study algorithmic allocation of scarce societal resources in the context of homelessness. In communities throughout the United States, there is constant demand for an array …

A Leadership Journey: How Advising Shapes An Institutional Culture, Jacquelyn Jones, Melissa Welker, Jonikka Charlton, Janna Arney

Writing and Language Studies Faculty Publications

Although we know advising can be conceptualized as a critical component of an integrated and comprehensive student success strategy on a campus, it is often difficult to implement. This chapter will provide a case study of the development and execution of a leadership initiative at an American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) institution to transform advising in service of the goals of student equity and success. The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley's advising model grew out of a convergence of a handful of key momentum points including strategic planning processes and the use of emerging data surrounding …

Black Homelessness In Los Angeles, Dezmin Hemmans, Rosemary Kim

Honors Thesis

Throughout American history, Black people have experienced disproportionate amounts of racism, inequity, and lack of resources. This systemic lack of resources and disparities contribute to an overall lack of individual economic development. These factors were further emphasized following the COVID 19 pandemic, which, increased the separations between others. At the start of the Reconstruction Era, the recently freed enslaved faced homelessness as they left plantations penniless with nowhere to go. They were met with both de facto and de jure segregation codified through restrictive covenants, deed clauses that restricted the sale of property to Black people (Cite). Today, Black people …

A Mind Of Her Own: Women's Interiority In The Middle English And Older Scots Pastourelles, Anne L. Klinck

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The pastourelle achieved what might be called its classic form in Middle French poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a mini-narrative in which the narrator, a knight or clerk, tells how he tried to have his will with a lower-class girl he happened upon while riding in the country. He greets her, sweet-talks her, and propositions her; she protests vigorously. Sometimes the debate ends here. Otherwise, her accoster overcomes her resistance by guile or force, and sexually assails her. The tone is light-hearted and cynical, the action crude. To modern readers, this narrative may be mildly amusing, rather tedious, …

Alchemy, The Liber Aureus, And The Erotics Of Knowledge, Kersti Francis

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Medieval alchemy was an overwhelmingly masculine practice, and its instruction books reflect the exclusivity of its practitioners. This article examines the use of secrecy and masculine discourse in a sixteenth-century Latin alchemical handbook, the Liber aureus, to demonstrate that there exists an erotically charged tension between authors and their readers. Alchemical instruction books like the Liber aureus draw upon this tension in the service of a particular kind of gatekeeping that creates hierarchies of both knowledge and alchemical practitioners. By investigating secrecy and its provocative effects both within and beyond this manuscript, I argue that alchemical instruction books’ secretive …

Calkas’S Daughter: Paternal Authority And Feminine Virtue In Troilus And Criseyde, Jennifer Alberghini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The heroine of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde has been of considerable interest to medieval feminist scholars as a woman who is depicted as both virtuous and an adulteress. Yet critical discussions do not often view Criseyde’s virtue in light of her role as daughter. This article explores that role, focusing on how her father Calkas is described by the characters as having authority over his daughter’s body in the marriage market. This will later enable them to use him as an excuse for Criseyde’s failure to return to Troy and thus preserve her status as virtuous. However, the characters …

Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments For An Ill-Used Past, Ana C. Núñez

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

When Feminism Isn't Enough, Monica H. Green

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

An invited “retrospective” on Monica H. Green's career in medieval studies.

Mothers, Space, And Power In Athelston, Kirsty Bolton

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

The late fourteenth-century Middle English romance Athelston explores the extent and propriety of monarchic power. Integral to this exploration are the characters of two women in the text whose enactments of motherhood reveal the very human failings of the divinely elected king and contribute to the romance’s advocation of law and the church to temper monarchic power. This article focuses on the use of space in relation to power, authority, gender, and motherhood, arguing that the writer of Athelston uses the disruption of gendered spaces, particularly in relation to pregnant women, to comment on systems of power and authority in …

Superior Women: Medieval Female Authority In Poitiers’ Abbey Of Sainte-Croix, Alexandra Verini

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.