Jaimee Comstock-Skipp
While Orientalism in French art has been extensively studied, its relevance to British art has received less attention. Jaimee seeks to fill this void by analyzing British paintings of Egypt during the colonial age. Her study involves face-to-face visits to the actual Cairene monuments and to their illustrated counterparts in English institutions. It will investigate the inclusion of Arabic script and details of Islamic art within select paintings as to determine cultural sensitivity or ignorance given the political climate. She anticipates that as time and cultural contacts progress, the art […]
Sora Yoon Han
Sora’s project promises to provide an important corrective to the stereotype of the “model minority” by giving voice to a generally silenced segment of the Asian American community. Through oral histories of incarcerated Asian Americans, Sora seeks to create a more complete and heterogeneous picture of the economic, social, political and cultural issues facing Asian Americans today. Sora will supplement her use of oral histories with more traditional research methodologies, in order to investigate thoroughly the situation and position of incarcerated Asian Americans and to improve our understanding of their […]
Charles W. Houston
To better understand the relationship between Native Californians and museology, Charles will visit five nationally known museums that house Native Californian cultural possessions, in order to research the techniques and methods employed in cataloging, storing and caring for Native Californian possessions. He will then critically analyze the data he collects, in order to explore the racialization of museum practices vis–vis indigenous possessions and to recommend more culturally sensitive methods for archiving them. He intends to submit the results of his study as his Native American Studies Senior Honors Thesis. Charles […]
Haley Mellin
Current Bio: Haley is a painter and land conservationist. Conservation is a central part of her art practice. She completed a residency at the Whitney Museum in New York City, and a PhD in Visual Culture and Education. Haley exhibits in Europe and in the United States and focuses on traditional painting techniques as they intersect with contemporary visual culture and technologies. In her conservation work, she created two non-profits, Art into Acres and Conserve.org. They involve people from the wider arts community in learning about large-scale landscape ecosystems, supporting millions of […]
Shanesha R. F. Brooks
Exploring the lyrical conversation between the jazz and blues poetry of Langston Hughes and contemporary hip-hop musicians, Shanesha will analyze the musical techniques and poetic structure of Hughess poetry and the lyrics of musicians Black Star and Jazzmatazz, musical poets who contribute to what she calls the New Poetic Genre. Identifying parallels between the socio-political and historical contexts of Hughes and of these contemporary musicians, Shanesha will research the consciousnesses conjured from resistance, the search for identity, and the subsequent struggle for self-expression. As a double major in English and […]
Kirstin Anne Jackson
Kirstin proposes to ethnographically record and explore the significance, negotiation, evolution, and intertwining of folklore, ethics and business practices in North American funeral homes, aiming in particular to understand the evolution of grief counseling, business interactions, etiquette, and rites of passage or rituals, such as embalming. While scholars and journalists have published many studies and exposs about funeral homes “manipulating” funeral folklore to take advantage of the grieving, few have explored what Americans as agents and actors have had to do with the stasis, evolution, and significance of their own […]
Samuel Pittman
In recent decades, artists and writers have created self-narrations that deliberately thwart the conventions of autobiography and question even the most contemporary conceptions of the self and self-representation. Inspired by these works, as his ISF honors thesis Sam will create an autobiographical installation entitled Parthenogenesis, a term meaning asexual reproduction, which refers here to effectively creating oneself due to the difficulty of remembering ones past in light of both having very few photographic mnemonics, as well as having faced numerous hardships during childhood which may have caused memory-blocks. In his […]
Trevor Hadden
Although historians have studied Elizabethan Englands social and aesthetic transformations of the built environment, little attention has been paid to the labor of its craftspeople. Scholarship on Elizabethan architecture and decorative arts has privileged the study of stylistic trends, written records of patronage, and named surveyor-architects. This approach fails to register the ways in which artificers participated in the visuality of the early modern period. To understand the production practices of Elizabethan artificers and to recognize how these workers shaped material culture, Trevor is pursuing a close examination of select […]
Kaci Faylee Elder
Kaci’s project creatively links a study of contemporary intentional communities with the rich history of nineteenth century utopian experiments in the United States. Kaci plans a road trip this summer that will take her to five very different cooperative living communities in Los Angeles, Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Oregon and the Bay Area. In order to dispel the popular notion that the “commune” was born as a concept in the 1960s, Kaci will investigate our national two hundred year history of utopian experiments-both actual and literary-to place her participant-observation studies […]
Peter B. Brownell
Through a combination of quantitative analysis and qualitative field research, Peter’s Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major Senior Honors Thesis will investigate the effects of the 1996 Immigration and Welfare Reform Acts on the flows of undocumented migration between Mexico and the United States. Focusing particularly on the differential impact of this legislation on women and families, Peter will be testing his hypothesis that the new laws favor single people over families, men over women, and working-age people over children and the elderly, with the overall impact of encouraging cyclical migration rather […]