Theory and Criticism Commons^™

Reconstructing Art And Evidence: Forensic Architecture In Institutional Settings, Makenzie Smith

University Scholar Projects

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a London-based multidisciplinary research collective and human rights agency that uses digital modeling, architectural and spatial analysis, and open-sourced images to investigate and present visual evidence of human rights violations committed by state governments, militaries, and corporations. The team of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers, collaborates with civil society groups, witnesses, and victims to establish a counternarrative in the service of human rights and social justice, exhibiting their investigations in institutional settings as varied as legal courts and parliamentary tribunals, citizen assemblies, mass media, universities, and art museums. My research focuses on …

"Homesick For You:" An Archival Analysis Of Love Letters From World War Ii, Cambria B. Acheson

English (MA) Theses

In this project, I cherish and explore a collection of correspondence exchanged between a married couple during World War II. Applying an embodied research approach that incorporates archival, historical, and cultural studies, I analyze key elements of these letters with special attention for themes of love and family, valuing their insights to touching personal stories that nuance the dominant narratives of history. I contend for the preservation and discussion of these letters and similar artifacts, advocating for their lasting significance within both past and present contexts and their irreplaceable contributions to the cultivation of collective memory and empathy across generations.

Double, Double, Toils And Troubles: Analyzing The “Magical” Relationships Between University Leaders’ Personality Traits And Their Self-Efficacy In Leadership Situations, Fay Ludvine Boudreaux

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This present study investigated the relationship between higher education leaders’ personality traits and their self-efficacy in leadership situations. A total of 151 leaders employed across the nine institutions within the University of Louisiana System completed a survey that prompted them to identify their personal values, traits, and skill sets, as derived from the online Pottermore quiz, the official Harry Potter Hogwarts House sorting instrument. This niche personality metric was chosen to cater to higher education’s evolving landscape, as it welcomes an influx of Millennials into leadership positions. Participants’ responses were eventually recoded to “sort” them into their respective Houses: Gryffindor, …

“Re-Storying” Anne Shirley And The Adhd Child: A Crip Genealogy Of Anne Of Green Gables, Darian Aleyna Wilson

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This thesis explores the contested nature of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), focusing on its cultural and historical constructions. While ADHD has been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders since 1980, its legitimacy remains a subject of debate across medical, disability studies, and historical scholarship. Using Eli Clare’s critique of diagnosis as a tool rather than a fact, this project examines how ADHD is both pathologized and re-storied within societal and medical discourses. It highlights the tension between medical classifications and lived experiences of those diagnosed with ADHD, particularly in the context of girlhood.

The central …

Reconstructing Art And Evidence: Forensic Architecture In Institutional Settings, Makenzie Smith

Honors Scholar Theses

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a London-based multidisciplinary research collective and human rights agency that uses digital modeling, architectural and spatial analysis, and open-sourced images to investigate and present visual evidence of human rights violations committed by state governments, militaries, and corporations. The team of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers, collaborates with civil society groups, witnesses, and victims to establish a counternarrative in the service of human rights and social justice, exhibiting their investigations in institutional settings as varied as legal courts and parliamentary tribunals, citizen assemblies, mass media, universities, and art museums. My research focuses on …

Pedro Aceves Mfa Thesis, Pedro M. Aceves

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

My Work is about looking at Cruising through a queer decolonial lens. Using multiple mediums such as photo, glass, Augmented reality, and film, I explore these queer histories and aesthetics through not just an anthropological approach but also an artistic epistemological approach weaving together narratives of prehispanic and modern queer Latinidad.

The Hodgepodge Creation: Amalgamated Adaptation In Video Games, Tom Chen, Tom Chen

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Amalgamated adaptation is a concept that involves blending multiple sources into a hodgepodge creation. This practice has become commonplace among game creators in recent years, yet it is neither readily covered nor explicitly mentioned in current video game scholarship. My previous research highlights the profound application of amalgamated adaptation to older texts, particularly myths and sacred texts from various cultures or communities. This method grants creators the autonomy to reinvent these texts in bold and extreme ways, achieved by melding borrowed ideas that complement and, at times, synergize with one another. I argue that single-source adaptations of myths, when reshaped …

Held On By A Thread, Annie M. Hutchins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist, Annie Hutchins, discusses her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Held on by a Thread, which was installed at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, TN, from March 6, 2025, through March 28, 2025, with a public reception held on March 7, 2025. The exhibition is a collection of textile works containing repurposed material artifacts of the life she shared with her maternal family since childhood. The artwork incorporates found objects from the artist’s home, including domestic textiles, clothing, handmade sewing projects, family photographs, and sewing notions. The artworks are made using the printmaking technique of photo emulsion screen …

The Evolution Of The Divine Feminine: How Religious Upheaval Changed Female Devotions, Nicole M. Honeycutt

Institute for the Humanities Master's Papers, Projects, and Capstones

The transformation in the depiction of women in Christian religious art from pre-Reformation through the Counter-Reformation mirrored and molded shifting theological, cultural, and gender paradigms. While much scholarship has addressed the symbolic and doctrinal significance of female figures in sacred imagery, less attention has been paid to how such portrayals influenced women’s own devotional experiences and sense of spiritual agency. This study argues that the religious imagery was not merely a passive reflection of male-dominated ecclesiastical values, but an evolving communicative medium through which women could engage with and reshape their spiritual roles. By analyzing key artworks, patronage trends, and …

Beatrice Wanjiku: A Portrait Of Human Vulnerability, Suzanne R. Vuoncino

Theses

Abstract artist Beatrice Wanjiku uses an anatomical composition to illustrate a sense of vulnerability, an element of human identity, in relation to one’s social environment. Going beyond the skin, Untitled excavates the mental and emotional aspects of the human condition and gives expression to experience. By observing her figural composition, examining the foundation of identity theory, and interpreting her use of abstraction, I will describe how Untitled speaks to a message of connectivity through a portrait of human vulnerability. This thesis argues that one’s environment affects the individual and exemplifies how vulnerability is seen as a pervasive aspect of human …

Presence Through Absence: The Ark Of The Covenant And The Aniconic Image Of God In Early Israelite Religious Art, Natalie Rivas

Theses

This thesis investigates the Ark of the Covenant as a paradoxical visual and theological artifact within early Israelite religious art. While the Israelite tradition has long been characterized as aniconic (eschewing anthropomorphic representations of the divine) the Ark occupied a central role in ritual, worship, and religious identity. Prior scholarship has focused either on the Ark’s narrative function in biblical texts or its formal attributes as a cultic object. However, limited attention has been given to how the Ark embodies divine presence through the visual strategy of absence. This study argues that the Ark does not merely avoid figural representation …

Tel Jezreel's Medieval Crusader Cemetery: A Case Study In Contemporary Burial Practices And Necroviolence Against Infants And Children., Autumn Koehling

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The 1990s excavation of the archaeological site of Tel Jezreel in the modern nation state of Israel yielded the remains of fifty infants and children, associated with the contemporary Medieval Crusader Church. The Church, built by Knight’s Templar from the Frankish Kingdom served the occupants of Tel Jezreel from the 11^th to the 13^th century and introduced Western Christian burial practices to the local Syriac-Palestinian Christian inhabitants. Burial practices from the surrounding region of the Levant and beyond, into Crusader European cultures, show different forms of burial treatment for infants and children that can be used to understand …

The Horror Of Memory In The Southern Gothic, Caelainn Robertson

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Scenes of expansive cotton fields and rotting Manor houses lined by moss covered oaks where strange fruit once hung induce an acute sense of horror from an audience familiar with these relics. The genre of “Southern Gothic” spans literature, film and music and is built on themes of cultural repression in the Southern United States. This tradition explores fears rooted in lingering memories of human enslavement and patriarchal domination. In a culture marked by racial violence and class oppression, evil is, often, identifiable by markers of wealth and white skin. Historical memories only exacerbate suffering. Many contemporary works use the …

Parody And Mis-Unda-Stendings In Comics Art World: Bridging The Gap With New Criteria, Yannis Koukoulas

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

The word parody and its many cognates such as appropriation, adaptation, pastiche, travesty, forgery, homage, tribute, swipe, etc., have often been at the centre of fierce debates within the traditional Artworld and various criteria have been proposed for the critical evaluation of visual and literary works. In particular, parody as a dominant practice in postmodern art is a concept that is subject to misunderstandings as to its content and meaning. In Comics Artworld, however, within which recontextualizing practices are very common, often with humorous content, the attempt to describe artists' works and intentions by the criteria applied to other arts, …

Painting The Other: Mary Cassatt's Spanish Portraits And The Feminine Gaze, Delaney Batter

Undergraduate Theses in Art History

The historical viewing of women artists, in conjunction with Mary Cassatt’s biography and later depictions of women and children, suggests that Cassatt's gender is identified within the art historical canon as an essential component to the interpretation of her work. The language attached to Cassatt's work is most often taken from discourses surrounding female-produced artwork of the nineteenth century, attaching passive and stereotypically feminine attributes like 'delicate,' 'light,' and 'tender' to the style, composition, and subjects of her works. These characteristics were among the accepted nineteenth-century descriptions of artworks, with inherent femininity translating to inherent domesticity.

Rather than further reducing …

Deconstructing Ancient Allegories: Eleanor Antin’S 'Historical Takes' On Subverting Classical Motifs And Typologies, Lainey Tomasoski

Undergraduate Theses in Art History

The New York-born artist Eleanor Antin erupted into the male-dominated American conceptual photography art scene in the 1960s and 70s with feminist works that reimagined the female body in terms of representation and history. In congruence with the feminist and civil rights movements, conceptual photography represented a shift in how art was utilized to criticize the social and political institutions in which it is rooted. Antin and other feminist artists engaging in conceptual photography and video played with the embodiment of characters, performance of the body, and an intrinsic “self-reflexivity” of subject, viewer, and artist. However, Antin pivoted her work …

Uncovering Artemisia: Turning Rage Into Fame, Sophie Longo

Undergraduate Theses in Art History

During the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries in Italy - more commonly known as the Italian Renaissance and early Baroque periods - masters like Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio made a name for themselves and secured legacies through the widespread popularity and study of their masterpieces. As time progressed, however, more artworks have been found, and more histories, especially by women Baroque artists, have been explored. With the rise of women’s rights movements and social justice campaigns from the mid-20th century on, stories of female artists and figures have further emerged from the woodwork and hold greater precedence in …

Teaching Art Beyond The Hierarchy: How “Big Ideas” Combat Cultural Appropriation, Carlie Pearson

Institute for the Humanities Master's Papers, Projects, and Capstones

[First paragraph] As an art educator who has worked with children aged 5-18 in the public-school setting, I find myself constantly assessing and reevaluating my practices. When I was in high school and falling in love with the world of visual art, I had a teacher who introduced me to the beautiful and sacred art of mandala making. We learned about how Buddhist Monks create massive works with colorful sand, and I was shocked to hear that the pieces are traditionally swept away upon completion. When I started my first full time teaching position seven years ago at a high …

Hieronymus Bosch’S Dismantled Triptych As A Moralizing Guide For Reforming The Catholic Church, Heather Thurston

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis expands on the current interpretation of a dismantled triptych by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, which includes four extant panels: Ship of Fools, Allegory of Intemperance, Death and the Miser, and The Wayfarer. Current scholarship claims that the paintings warn viewers against various sins. This thesis argues that the triptych was specifically directed toward the Catholic Church and functions as a commentary on the potential consequences of their sins. This new reading will become clear by examining and connecting its unorthodox iconography to the tumultuous religious climate at the turn of the sixteenth century …

A Canvas Decolonized: An Exploration Of Haiti’S Colonial History Through Haitian Artists Philemon Obin, Jean Appolon, Sheilby Mecena, Flex Morisseau–Leroy, And Claes Gabriel, Dominique Dempsey

Graduate Research Conference (GSIS)

A Canvas Decolonized examines the complex realities faced by Haiti through the lens of its vibrant artistic heritage, highlighting the role of art in interpreting, preserving, and challenging narratives about the nation's history and identity. By exploring the works of Haitian muralists, photographers, painters, and poets including Jean Appolon, Flex Morisseau Leroy, Claes Gabriel, and Edwidge Danticat this study illuminates how these artists engage with themes of colonization, immigration, generational trauma, and cultural displacement. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of Frantz Fanon and Benedict Anderson, the paper argues that Haitian art provides a powerful medium to analyze and contextualize the …

What's The Art In Artificial Intelligence?, Emily Verla Bovino

Open Educational Resources

This workbook learns from Black and Indigenous artists working with Artificial Intelligence to confront issues of ethics and aesthetics in its technologies. It features guided learning activities with links to publicly available video lectures and online articles, and includes options for experiential learning through both a tutorial in Midjourney and a visit to the public art collection at York College in Jamaica, Queens. Featured artists include: American Artist, Rizvana Bradley, Beth Coleman, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Kite, Sondra Perry, Mimi Onuoha and Alisha B. Wormsley. Works by Martin Puryear and Maren Hassinger are explored in the Midjourney exercise.

About …

Shifting Perspectives: Valuing Art For Its Usefulness, Not Just Its Aesthetics, Morgan Hatfield

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Art is everywhere. From paintings, to entertainment, even to gardening and architecture, art is an essential part of society and culture. However, art can frequently be trapped in its own bubble, seen as something of not much use to “real” professionals such as physicians, therapists, or scientists. This line of thinking discredits the flexibility of art. It is only through the analysis of art’s impact on society that one can see the broad array of disciplines that art can affect and thus see the true value of art. Focusing primarily on visual art, I seek to place a value on …

Towards The Non-Spectacle: Responses To Necropolitics In The Artwork Of Teresa Margolles And Maya Watanabe, Leslie Anne Condon

Masters Theses

How do we engage with artwork that addresses complicated histories

of colonialism and political violence, specifically intangible and

incomprehensible violence? Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’ 2005 work, Lote

Bravo, is named after and composed of the soil from a mass grave site

discovered in 1995 in the southeastern corner of Ciudad Juárez, a city known

internationally for the femicide that has continued to haunt its streets and

peripheries since the 1990s. Peruvian filmmaker Maya Watanabe’s 2019 film

Liminal cinematically documents the official exhumation of two mass graves

in the Ayacucho and Huánuco regions of the Andes highlands, where

thousands of …

Arenas Of Resistance: How Oklahoma's Black Rodeos Preserved Environmental Wisdom And Community Power, Rorie Johnson

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores how Black rodeos in Oklahoma emerged from post-emancipation agricultural labor and ranching traditions, serving as powerful sites of cultural preservation, knowledge transmission, and resistance to dominant narratives of the American West. Through analysis of historical records, photographic evidence, and personal family narratives, this research demonstrates how Black Oklahomans developed unique relationships with land and animals that encompassed both the "ecological burden" of agricultural labor and the "beauty" of cultural expression and community-building. Drawing on theoretical frameworks including Kimberly Ruffin's "ecological burden-and-beauty paradox," George Lipsitz's "Black spatial imaginaries," bell hooks' "oppositional gaze," and Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," …

On The Nature Of Artworks: An Argument For Artwork Universals, Emma H.B. Rosenberg

Scripps Senior Theses

What kind of a thing is an artwork? Artworks are an extensive, complex category including all manner of media and content. This makes the project of determining what artworks themselves are a significant challenge. Nevertheless, there are many things we intuitively desire to say about what artworks are like and what value they offer. One underexplored theory which I will here argue successfully accommodates many of these features is that of artworks as universals.

It is not my aim in this thesis to compare this theory with other, rival theories of artworks. Rather, I will argue that the theory supports …

The Influence Of Japanese Art And Aesthetics On The Paintings Of Théodore Rousseau, Erinn Alexis Stuart

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Landscape paintings of Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau provide a unique perspective on the impact of Japanese artworks on nineteenth-century French painting. The examination of Eastern influences on Western art has been confined to Western urban popular culture, resulting in a narrative that restricts the understanding of modern art to the context of Western industrialization. This method of exploring cultural influences constructs a narrative of othering, confining the perception of its impact to the superficial and commercial, thus perpetuating an othering subnarrative, not only between the two nations but also between the different genres of Western art. Through an investigation into …

The Categorisation Of Different Periods In Indian Art & The Market’S Role, Devashi Jain

MA Theses

When one thinks of Indian art, a broad spectrum of types of art & periods come to
mind. Each period is marked by distinct differences in style, influence, medium and
more, yet a significant number of these periods are grouped together, despite the
differences. Indian art is traditionally seen on the market under the Antiquities, or
Modern & Contemporary category in spite of the distinguishable differences in the
aesthetic, and cultural context. These categories inform market perceptions, value of the works as well as preferences of the collectors, and hence it is imperative to have well defined categories. This paper …

Take Shrigley’S Word For It, Mary Gurley

MA Theses

This essay investigates the complexities of text-based art and contemporary conceptualism by focusing on David Shrigley’s work. By exploring the origins, evolution, and function of language-based practices, Take Shrigley’s Word for It emphasizes the artist’s use of text across various mediums, all of which occupy textual fields, blurring the line between commercial and fine art. Despite Shrigley’s extensive career, limited scholarship exists on his eccentric pairing of words and visuals, as well as his abundant spaces dedicated to sales. This paper also considers how Shrigley transformed the practice of text-based art by making it accessible and relatable to wide ranging …

Artistic Interventions In The Public Sphere: Keith Haring & Jenny Holzer, Matilde Sirolli

MA Theses

This thesis investigates the intersection of art and the public sphere in late 1970s and 1980s New York, a period characterised by significant socio-political and cultural transformations. Grounded in Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, the study examines how the unique historical phenomena of the period yielded unprecedented opportunities for artists to intervene in the public sphere. The research provides a comprehensive analysis of the period’s political, economic, cultural and sociological landscapes. It then delves into case studies of Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer, exploring their distinct approach to public engagement: Haring’s blend of art, commerce and populism, and …

Things Of Beauty: Madame De Pompadour, Patroness Of 18th Century French Arts, Mitaali Vohra

MA Projects

Things of Beauty: Madame de Pompadour, Patroness of 18th Century French Arts takes the shape of an exhibition that will be held at The National Gallery London, starting Thursday, December 12 2024 as a commemoration of a sophisticated, international icon of style, luxury and the arts - Marquise de Pompadour. The exhibition opens the following week of one of the most important decorative arts auctions of the year - Treasures London at Sotheby’s, which will be held on December 4, 2024 and present for sale, works of historical and bold scale, design and beauty, including a chance find of four …