2022 MAPH Thesis Awards

With the MAPH thesis serving as the culmination of the program, MAPH preceptors annually select projects to be publicly recognized for their excellent and innovative scholarship.

Click the bolded links to jump to each section.

CREATIVE
Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and more that demonstrate intentionality of form, control of craft, and thematic coherence

Winners: Celi Glastris | Yuehan Liu | Yu Zheng

Highly Commended: Tia White

CRITICAL
Nuanced, cogent and exciting interventions into contemporary scholarly conversations in the humanities

Winners: Claire Dettelbach | Caleigh Stephens

Highly Commended: Sophia Wang | Allison Zhou

INTREPID
Ambitious, public-facing thesis projects that cross between critical and creative modes

WinnersSophia Coyne-Kosnak | Jake Hansen | Saumya Malhotra

Highly Commended: Carla Nuñez-Hernandez


CREATIVE AWARDS

Celi Glastris | Advisor: Will Boast | Preceptor: Jessica Landau

“Molodietz (Mолодец): A Family Story”

My thesis was the beginning of a memoir I am writing about my upbringing as a competitive figure skater. It is a work in progress and much of it felt too personal to share, particularly as it is a draft, and some parts deserve multiple perspectives where currently there is only one. As a result, I present to you a selection of what I produced during MAPH. This memoir is a story about myself, my family, and the broader sport of figure skating. Often seen as glamorous, this memoir reveals the emotional and physical abuse that figure skaters must endure to succeed. Thematically, this book meditates on labor through a Marxist perspective without ever explicitly laying out this framework. Some questions I asked myself while writing were, ‘how are young figure skaters dehumanized through their labor?’ and ‘what is the labor of healing after being raised as a high-intensity athlete?’ Molodietz is a fragmented memoir written in vignettes. It uses multiple forms of truth including memory-based storytelling that is honest to the process of recalling one’s childhood and a journalistic method that acts as a counterbalance.

Preceptor Jessica Landau on Celia’s project:

To call something like a memoir brave can often sound a bit cliché, but I honestly cannot think of a better word to describe Celia’s thesis. Not only does Celia take on incredibly difficult and personal subject matter in this project, but they do it through experimental writing and the application of complex critical theory. The final product is both emotionally impactful and pleasurable to read. And, while the project is quite impressive, what I find most commendable about “Molodietz (Mолодец): A Family Story” is the amount of work and care Celia put into their thesis. Celia tirelessly drafted and redrafted, was willing to take risks and let pieces go, and was eager to receive and incorporate feedback in ways that demonstrate great maturity as a writer and thinker. This all, I think, comes through in the piece and its critical accompaniment and for that I couldn’t be prouder of them!

Yuehan Liu | Advisor: Stephanie Soileau | Preceptor: Agnes Malinowska

“To The Border”

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To the Border is a tale Yuehan Liu has always been looking forward to putting down in words. In the screenplay, the protagonist Yange seeks her way to the border between Myanmar and Yunnan province on a trip alone. Throughout the journey, the intensity developed in her different relationships ensnares her with confusion and repressed malice, and bitterness that seeps through pages in quiet turbulence. The story aims to explore the human-animal relationship regarding eroticism via the protagonist’s observations of animality, which comes about when she runs into animal copulation. As the journey goes on, and the backstory of Yange’s struggles slowly reveals itself, the script turns out to uncover more of her self-discovery — the instinctive natures she resists and submits to, and the unsettling urge that baffles and relieves her on this never-ending way to the border.

Preceptor Agnes Malinowska on Yuehan’s project:

Yuehan Liu’s exceptional screenplay, “To The Border,” is a bold, original, and truly thought-provoking meditation on a young woman’s fascination with peafowl eroticism. Yuehan’s screenplay stands out for its capacity to elaborate a complex psychological profile for its main protagonist from within a number of rich and provocative scenes and relationships in a way that feels delicate, lucid, and realistic. In other words, Yuehan manages to build a wonderfully intricate and intriguing subjective landscape that is deeply enmeshed in an equally fascinating external world—a holistic situation that never feel forced or artificial, that hits the reader with the sense of encountering a mysterious, inner layer of subjective experience that we may only rarely attend to, but that we intuitively sense as being central to all the weird complexities of what it means to be human. Yuehan’s piece is also extremely effective as a screenplay: From the beginning, the work is highly visual and atmospheric, even as it delves into the startling inner world of a young woman whose sexual fascination with peafowl seems intricately tied up with her complicated relationship with her mother. One feels immersed in the evocative, lyrical descriptions of the protagonist’s vacation travels, her time spent on the road with new acquaintances, in hotels, meandering through peafowl gardens, dance performances, festivals, and hospitals. “To the Border” reads like a strange and engrossing dream that one awakens from into a reality that has been reshaped in its contours.

Yu Zheng | Advisor: Margaret Ross | Preceptor: Megan Tusler

“Sing You The Reasons Behind Our Ancestors’ Trudge”

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Preceptor Megan Tusler on Yu’s project:

This creative-critical thesis takes on an extraordinary number of tasks to achieve its final product. Alex brings together an ambitious poetry translation, her own original poetry, critical reflection of translation methodology, and vernacular objects like family photography. While projects like this can sometimes suffer from abundance, Alex navigates her many tasks with tremendous creative discipline, demonstrating how creative-critical hybrid projects can bring unique expression to cultural objects. Furthermore, the work is meticulously constructed and technically masterful:  Alex is not just an excellent poet in her own right, she is also a masterful translator, highly reflective and conscientious in her adaptation of Yu Xiuhua (余秀华)’s original poetry. Alex brings together various media and methods in ways that are profoundly original and compelling, producing a short book not only profoundly deserving of the thesis prize but of wider publication.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Tia White | Advisor: Margaret Ross | Preceptor: Bill Hutchison
“Wonders of Unsung Black Life: A Poetic Interpretation on Living in Blackness”

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CRITICAL AWARDS

Claire Dettelbach | Advisor: Niall Atkinson | Preceptor: Alexandra Fraser

“Seeing and believing: Christ Crowned with Thorns and the Circumspect Viewer in Early Modern Rome”

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Fraser Orazio Gentileschi (1563 – 1639) created some of the most moving and emotive religious images of the early seventeenth century. His Christ Crowned with Thorns (1610–15) exemplifies the delicacy, care, and feeling with which Gentileschi imbued his pictures. This thesis places Gentileschi’s Christ Crowned with Thorns within its original context of reception by asking how its stylistic and formal elements would have appealed particularly to the complex viewing experience and expectations of the early modern viewer. I begin by carefully constructing the profoundly fraught religious and cultural milieu of Gentileschi’s viewers. This allows us to understand what these viewers would have wanted and expected from religious images. I go on to show how the style, composition, and forms of Christ Crowned with Thorns cultivate a viewing experience that appeals particularly to the circumspect, self-conscious, and highly selfaware early modern viewer. This thesis ultimately aims to reconsider how we approach early modern religious paintings. By carefully reconstructing the experiences and expectations of pictures’ contemporary viewers we open up myriad questions: what did the pious ask of sacred art? What did sacred art ask of its viewers? And how can we construct and understand the complex interactions between image, viewer, and context?

Preceptor Alexandra Fraser on Claire’s project: 

This thesis revisits a familiar type of subject—a large painting by Orazio Gentileschi from early modern Rome—and casts it anew, revealing fresh insights into the picture itself and possibilities of art historical writing. Claire problematizes the viewing dynamics of one work, returning again and again to an unsettling, even haunting, experience of viewing that she yokes to a pan-European culture of religious skepticism. However, this project’s greatest contribution is in the way that it internalizes the skepticism and doubt of its subject into its writing and method. Nuanced visual and phenomenological analyses propel a series of hunches and speculations as to the painting’s function, effect, and what it can tell us about Catholic reforms of the time. What emerges is a carefully executed and well-informed, but never outlandish, “what if?” In so doing, Claire asks the crucial question of how we might study historical subjects and practices that fall outside the archival record. Could there be another way to piece together experiences of the unrecorded? This thesis proposes a clever solution in the “coherent continuum” between viewer and work, and between the experience of seeing art works, religious belief, and historical change more broadly. After laying out an exceptionally well-researched argument, we are ultimately delivered back to a speculative but somehow deeply satisfying conclusion, confirming only that “viewing Christ Crowned with Thorns…compelled one to decide what to see, and therefore to decide what to believe.”

Caleigh Stephens | Advisor: Jennifer Scappettone | Preceptor: Chris Carloy

“‘Do not move! Just engage’: A Poetics of Metamorphosis in Hijikata’s Dance-Writing”

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This paper reads the dance notebooks of Hijikata Tatsumi, founder of the Japanese avant-garde dance practice called butoh, as poetic works—wresting the genre of dance notation free from its current static position and calling into question notions of objectivity in the process of inscription. Hijikata’s writings are sketchy and imagistic, functioning as crucial actors in the metamorphic choreographic process of butoh. His work from “Costume en Face”, performed in 1976, re-articulates the normative relationship between dance and writing, employing complicated forms of spatiality and temporality in text. Via a close-reading of the text, and consideration of the historical context surrounding both dance notation in general and Hijikata in particular—including the legacy of Rudolph Laban, the emergence of modern dance in Japan, and the deeply American postwar prominence of the Dance Notation Bureau—this paper argues for a political and literary reading of dance notation as a genre, positing Hijikata’s work as a specific rejection of artistic boundaries and of a postwar hegemonic culture. 

Preceptor Chris Carloy on Caleigh’s project: 

In this thesis, Caleigh Stephens fearlessly dives – through meticulous research and beautiful prose – into a reexamination of something that has long been seen as either fundamentally impossible or long-perfected: the written transcription of dance. The author presents an illuminating history of the intersections of dance and writing, before undertaking thorough analyses of the dominant (indeed, currently unchallenged) dance notation system of Laban and the avant-garde practices of Hijikata. In the enigmatic notebooks of the latter, dance and writing mutually inform each other, blurring the lines between not only writing and dance, but prescription and description, subject and object, dancer and reader. Through close analysis and interpretation of almost laughably uninterpretable texts, Caleigh gives the reader a sense of what it might feel like to dance across the page through the practice of reading and writing. This is a biographical work, a historical work, and a theoretical work – one that opens up possibilities in a long-unyielding corner of dance studies and practice.

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Sophia Wang | Advisor: Anselm Winfried Gerhard Mueller | Preceptor: Andrew Pitel
“The Unity of the Animal Soul in Aristotle’s De Anima”

Allison Zhou | Advisor: Jennifer Scappettone | Preceptor: Agnes Malinowska
“10 PRINT: “The Code is the Text:” Code Poetry’s Expressive Textual Procedurality”

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INTREPID AWARDS

Sophia Coyne-Kosnak | Advisor: Kiersten Neumann | Preceptor: Alexandra Fraser

“The Humanity of Ancient Egyptian Mummified Persons: Addressing Current Curatorial Practice and Proposing a Person-Centered Approach”

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In the 100 years that have elapsed since Howard Carter’s glamorized excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, “mummies” have occupied the popular imagination as Hollywood characters, Halloween costumes, and as decontextualized highlight pieces in popular museum exhibitions. Given this commercialization, it can be easy to overlook the humanity of the mummified person. Even in art and history museum exhibitions— spaces intended to present historical truths—mummified persons are sometimes presented as art-like figures or placed into entertainment roles. The humanity of mummified persons must be acknowledged if museums are to provide a space of historical authenticity, cultural authority, and inclusivity. Through a close analysis of three Chicago-based museum exhibitions displaying mummified persons from ancient Egypt at the time of writing—the Field Museum of Natural History, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Oriental Institute Museum—this paper argues that a person-centered approach to museum didactics can emphasize the humanness of mummified persons. Adjusting the language used to address mummified persons in the museum space both creates a more respectful environment for human remains on display and enhances the visitor experience and understanding. It is the responsibility of museums to present mummified persons from ancient Egypt for who they truly are—people who lived real lives, even though their lives were spent far away in time and place from modern, western viewers. 

Preceptor Alexandra Fraser on Sophia’s project: 

Sophia’s thesis truly demonstrates the possibilities of what a MAPH thesis can be. This is a dynamic study, combining real interdisciplinarity, marriage of close readings and public engagement, ambitious use of local resources, and a self-reflexive yet approachable stance on how the construction of historical narratives informs our immediate present. Through close readings of interpretive texts, the unstable etymology of the word “mummy” in popular culture, and extensive fieldwork in local museums, Sophia navigates critical debates on art and objecthood, colonialism, and museum ethics with remarkable skill. Ultimately (and brilliantly), she offers an actionable solution to a perceived lack of humanity engendered by current museum practices in revising the structure of language used to describe them to Western, museum-going publics. This “language-based means of emphasizing humanity” of mummified persons will have far-reaching consequences not only for Chicago museums, the historical center of Egyptological collections in North America, but also for fostering a sense of shared humanity in museums at large. In the words of OI curator Kiersten Neumann, “I look forward to integrating her recommendations into the wording we use for mummified persons at the OI Museum.”

Jake Hansen | Advisor: Hilary Strang | Preceptor: Darrel Chia

“Beyond the Family-Farm Paradigm: A Critical Response to Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan”

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This thesis constitutes a critical response to arguments put forward by Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan asserting a family-farm paradigm of food production as the ideal model to be striven towards in the realization of a sustainable agricultural future. The paper begins by elucidating the exclusionary contours of this paradigm, then investigates the ways in which it promises to perpetuate and promote patterns of economic inequity and class division. The remainder of the paper then moves beyond the paradigm, exploring other models of and orientations towards food production that have proven effective in the past and which promise broader, more equitable and more liberatory possibilities. Modes of collective agricultural action are first explored, both historical and contemporary. The possibility of play as a paradigm of production is then proposed and investigated, constituting the conceptual and theoretical heart of the paper. Finally, a response is provided to an anticipated posthumanist critique of Berry and Pollan. Ultimately, the paper attempts to offer a fresh theoretical orientation towards food production, emphasizing paradigms that operate beyond traditional modes of work and compulsion and advocating those that involve consumers more broadly and directly.

Preceptor Darrel Chia on Jake’s project: 

There were no ready templates for the kind of thing Jake wanted to write. It really was a process of figuring out a genre and style that could accommodate this cluster of interests, and of his bravely writing through uncertainty. Jake brought together a breadth of reading and thinking on theoretical clusters as varied as the pastoral ideal in alternative agriculture, posthumanism and the idea of the “interspecies commons”, and play and/as work. He convincingly argues that the dominant models for alternative agriculture today rest on certain assumptions about property (who has it, what it is for) and what constitutes “real” work. This results in specific erasures of alternate histories and prior models such as the Russian obschina system and black agricultural collectives. In the end, Jake produces a fascinating think-piece that graciously takes his readers on a journey and moves in unexpected directions. He draws out the possibilities for shared ownership and play as paradigms of agricultural production. In my view, the thesis encapsulates the spirit of MAPH in its searching curiosity, thoughtful interdisciplinarity, and generosity of spirit – all the easier to see when the final product is so elegantly written.

Saumya Malhotra | Advisor: Megan Tusler | Preceptor: Rowan Bayne

Hum Dekhenge (We Will Watch): Witnessing the Affective and Networked Life of Anti-CAA and NRC Protests”

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This creative thesis is a product of my discomfiting inability to categorize social activism as an impersonal, distant, and un-affecting phenomenon. On the contrary, the ripples of the emerging political unrest in my country have overwhelmed my personal, social, and familial reality. I have used auto theory as a form of creative expression in this thesis to communicate how the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Registry of Citizenship in India shattered the deceptive divide between affect, politics, culture, and community. Indulging myself in scavenging through familial and national histories, I have attempted to uncover what citizenship means for a country traumatized by the violence of colonialism, Partition, and religious antagonism. Furthermore, I explore how social media provided a peculiar window for Indians to witness the uncovering of previously camouflaged religious nationalism. Paying heed to the legacy of auto theory in feminist, queer, anti-racist, and anti-colonial writing, I also make space for the implications of the gendered and religiously motivated assaults on the protestors and dissenting voices. This thesis is a provocative demand that urges its readers to sit with the uneasiness of confronting their emotions, politics, and intergenerational trauma when challenged with questions of what it means to belong to a country, a nation, a community, and a people. It is also an exercise of self-reflection as I injure myself by poking at these questions and my experience of privilege, suffering, pain, and freedom in a country engulfed in rising authoritarianism.  

Preceptor Rowan Bayne on Saumya’s project: 

Saumya Malhotra’s auto-theoretical thesis is spurred by online mediations of protests in India against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), which single out Muslims for discrimination around questions of citizenship and national belonging. Saumya uses sharp readings of affect theory combined with personal, genealogical, and recent-historical reflections on the internet as a medium for political organizing, on anxiety and hope in contexts of collective action, on privilege and solidarity – on witnessing, in many ways, as the title “Hum Dekhenge (We Will Watch)” captures. At these intersections, Saumya’s project powerfully asks: “How is citizenship, a seemingly bland and bureaucratic phenomenon, so bound up with our emotions? What has affect got to do with any of this?” The writing is searching and raw – deeply felt and personal – while deftly navigating theoretical work by Sara Ahmed, bell hooks, Sianne Ngai, Ernst Bloch, and others. There’s an admirable urgency to Saumya’s project, in terms of both their own development and the public conversations around these recent discriminatory laws. As Saumya writes: “This project lives.”

HIGHLY COMMENDED

Carla Nuñez-Hernandez | Advisor: Megan Sullivan | Preceptor: Jessica Landau
“Rendering Opacity: An Exhibition Proposal”

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