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: Alisha Coddington | Margaret Rose Smith | Will Most | Jack Cramer
CRITICAL
Nuanced, cogent and exciting interventions into contemporary scholarly conversations in the humanities
Winners: Eleanor Cunningham | Sebastian Martinez-Montoya | Sherry Huang | Tony George
INTREPID
Ambitious, public-facing thesis projects that cross between critical and creative modes
Winners: Jennie Dawn Morris | Thomas M. Pflanz | Luh Natalia Granquist
EXTERNAL
Awards bestowed by UChicago departmental foundations onto critical theses that articulated timely topics within contemporary scholarship.
Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture:
Rena Lin | Leah Robins
Nicholson Center for British Studies:
Caroline Funk
Art History Department:
Yves Cao | Christian Bumala
CEAS M.A. Thesis Award in Japan Studies:
Sherry Huang
CREATIVE AWARDS
Alisha Coddington | Advisor: Stephanie Soileau | Preceptor: Sarah Kunjummen
“The Garden Wall: A Novel (Excerpt)”
All stories are about ghosts in the end. Except, of course, for ghost stories, which are really about love. And loss. To be haunted is to have been loved, once, and to have loved in return. The Garden Wall is not a ghost story, but it is about ghosts, and it is about love. For me, this story took root in 2020, though it was only with the encouragement and help of so many wonderful people that the idea grew into what it is today. My thesis consists of the first three chapters of The Garden Wall, a domestic horror and dark fantasy novel set in the rural Midwest and sprawls across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The novel will eventually follow the intertwined stories of two characters—Daan, a man cursed to take a monstrous appearance akin to that of a wolfman, and Amelia, a troublesome child forced to flee beyond the safety of her aunt’s back garden—who come to develop an unlikely friendship. Accompanying my creative thesis is a critical component that explores my influences and my creative process that unfurled over the course of 2023-2024. The Garden Wall is a story about love and ghosts, but it is also a story about home, the horrors of leaving home behind, and, perhaps, the greater horrors that await by staying.
Preceptor Sarah Kunjummen on Alisha’s Project
Alisha’s novel, a work that evokes both the gothic fantasy of Neil Gaiman and what she memorably calls the “domestic fantasy” of Diana Wynne Jones, follows a little girl and a man making lives for themselves in the aftermath of disturbing encounters with supernatural forces, and in the face of stark grief. One of Alisha’s throughlines for this project is the idea of what it means to be haunted, and she draws on her own experiences of growing up in a small Wisconsin town and of serious personal loss to craft this story of an alternately surreal and familiar Midwest. I think you’ll find, as I do, that Alisha’s narrative voice is rich, confident and, indeed, haunting. This is one of the two strongest creative projects I’ve advised in the past six years, and I think a worthy candidate for one of this year’s creative awards.
Margaret Rose Smith | Advisor: Stephanie Soileau | Preceptor: Alexandra Fraser
“The Midway Point: A Novel”
This project is born equally out of love for archival research and frustration with the canon of time travel stories. Time travel narratives usually feature a mad scientist or action hero blasted back to the past, on a mission to save the world from ruin. Rarely does the everyday academic, the humanist who would actually know all of the complexities and cultural idiosyncrasies of a bygone era, get to venture back in time. I wrote The Midway Point to grant that opportunity to a fictional humanities graduate student.
In the process of researching The Midway Point and its companion essay, I found myself vicariously experiencing daily life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through extant diaries found in the University of Chicago Library Special Collections. Beyond being my hometown, the city of Chicago offers a rich history as a case study for nineteenth-century life. To be a young woman in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century was to be both liberated and limited, and my critical essay explores the intersections between the culturally ingrained female conscience and increased independence for women through the practice of keeping a diary. As I researched, my fiction writing became far more emotionally complicated and nuanced, as well as more historically accurate.
Preceptor Alexandra Fraser on Margaret’s Project
Presented as the first eight chapters of a novel, The Midway Point engages deep research into archival diaries in Regenstein Special Collections as well as the particular conventions of the academic Humanities itself. The novel follows the story of a graduate student at the University of Chicago whose obsession with the subject of her historical research, the second wife of her great, great grandfather, ultimately leads her to face her subject—and the contingencies of history—face-to-face. Set in current-day Chicago and Hyde Park during the 1893 World’s Fair, the novel develops not through anecdotal retelling of major events or details of history– as is more commonly the case in Victorian historical fiction—but through the diverse, constrained, and complicated expression of individual women’s experience itself. Indeed, the most striking moments of the novel are those in which we come to see that the distance between broad historical change and the ever-present immediacy of personal experience are at once, sometimes maddeningly, enormously vast and unflinchingly, unrelentingly close.
This thesis is accompanied by a fully-integrated and exceptionally well-thought-out critical component which is offered as the main character’s PhD thesis on nineteenth-century women’s diaries. Demonstrating deft skills with sources ranging from novels and popular culture to critical theory, archival research, and visual culture, this thesis is a truly genre-bending, boundaryless foray into what creative, historical work can and might be. I have rarely encountered a piece of writing, creative or otherwise, that so brilliantly and convincingly maps the complicated web between the weightiness of historical change and the texture of experience. I hope you feel the same.
Will Most | Advisor: Hilary Strang, Julie Iromuanya | Preceptor: Megan Tusler, Darrel Chia
“Pitch Black Birdsong”
“Pitch-Black Birdsong” is a collection of short stories takes place in that moment of the “dawn chorus”, a time in the wee hours of the morning, before the sun is up, when birds start to sing. It’s a time that I’m familiar with as an insomniac, something I find simultaneously beautiful and upsetting. A day has arrived that I am ill-prepared for. The chirps and tweets are interrupting my increasingly limited attempts at sleep. These birds with their pea-sized brains can’t even mark the morning correctly. And yet, there’s no denying that the beauty and even hopeful nature of the birds’ songs. These stories aspire to capture that moment, all it’s conflict, beauty, and stupidity. They are filled with absurd objects that may make you feel delirious and sleep-deprived. They might make you consider your nature, your insecurities, and your desires. Most of all, I hope that they make you feel as conflicted as I do when I hear those birds start to sing.
Director Hilary Strang on Will’s Project
I would recommend reading the author’s statement first: “On Pitch Black Birdsong”, before you continue on to each of the short fiction stories. The very distinct sense of style in each piece reassures you that you are in the capable hands of a talented craftsperson. I can’t do these pieces justice by describing them, so I will borrow from the author’s statement:
“This collection of short stories takes place in that moment of “Pitch-Black Birdsong”. These stories are set in the close future that we aren’t prepared for. They are filled with absurd objects that may make you feel delirious and sleep-deprived. They might make you consider your nature, your insecurities, and your desires.”
Their handling of the ordinary and the surreal or supernatural is different from a lot of writing out there, and it insists on your making sense of them through re-readings. Every detail is carefully thought out in the world-building, for instance, in “Forms” note how precisely the writer mimics the language of the promotional catalog, and the puns involved in named characters, yet brings genuine pathos to the ending in its thinking of grief and attachment (one workshop student noted that they were in tears by the end). Bringing together so many layers of interest takes skill, and I’m in awe of these strange, arresting works and the demands they make on a reader to make sense of them.
Jack Cramer | Advisor: Augusta Read Thomas | Preceptor: Chris Carloy
“Lessons Learned: Reflections on a Year of New Compositions”
Lessons Learned is a reflection on a portfolio of musical compositions I have both written and arranged to be performed in the 2023-24 Academic Year. These pieces include: in6, one\man\band, edifice and ideology, and for the uninvited ones. These pieces are not strictly unified by a single compositional practice or development in music theory. Rather, they are unified in the practice of composition itself and my desire to focus on and develop these skills over the course of my time in the MAPH. Through my lessons with Augusta Read Thomas, I developed a compositional practice of crafting detailed objects, producing forms dialectically, and writing with a multidimensional lens, all of which allowed me to create an aesthetically diverse portfolio. My grounding of the thesis in practicality allowed me to develop the craft necessary to make my future compositional endeavors successful.
Following from this basis in practicality, the reflection itself is written in the form of a slideshow presentation. Slideshows are important resources for composers working at conferences, presenting at seminars, and applying for residencies and Lessons Learned will be an incredibly useful object to me moving forward. Writing this reflection allowed me to examine the variety of approaches behind each of my pieces and distill them, through the use of graphics, into processes I can utilize in later works. It also allowed me to reflect on many of the difficulties I encountered this year, whether in workshops, or my writing process. Similar to my work, my reflection is holistic, examining both the artistic and practical aspects of my life as a composer this year.
Advisor Chris Carloy on Jack’s Project
For his thesis portfolio, Jack composed four musical pieces, each with different stylistic, theoretical, instrumental, and/or performative principles and requirements. For the critical component of the thesis, Jack submitted a slideshow (a format determined through conversations with his advisor to be the most practical for future professional activities) in which he reflects on everything from the theoretical underpinnings of particular pieces to a range of specific creative and practical lessons learned throughout the process. Jack is honest about failures along the way and generous in sharing what he learned (“Revel in the rules that you have made. If you’re having fun with your system, you are doing something right”; “Be an active communicator with your collaborators. Do not be afraid to ask them questions,…”; “Sculpt each sound. Let each one be precious to you.”). The cumulative result is not only an impressive creative output, but a model for how to use the MAPH creative thesis process for artistic and professional maturation.
CRITICAL AWARDS
Eleanor Cunningham | Advisor: Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer | Preceptor: Tristan Schweiger
“The Haunting of Lucan’s Pharsalia: The Spectre of History, Cyclicality, and (Im)possible Futures in a Roman Historical Epic”
Lucan’s choice of topic, the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, has resulted in a notoriously difficult text that, in many ways, has manifested a scholarly civil war of its own and a ghost that refuses to be exorcised. This paper is a direct engagement with that ghost. I begin by discussing the poem’s expansive distortion of boundaries, in particular what I call the ‘spectre of history’: the ghostly displacement of a particular moment in time into another, (supposedly) present moment. Following the hauntological mode of Derrida, I argue that this results in a ‘presence of absence’ that becomes a question of the politics of memory, inheritance, and generations. I then argue that the author blends past, present, and future together into a simultaneity that antagonises the historical fictions of his own historical moment. In this reading, the narrative is critical not just of the mindlessness of civil war, but of the imperial regime in general. Lastly, I conclude that the nearly half of the poem that continues after its central event functions as a direct refutation of the imperial claim of teleological history, and deliberately breaks off at a moment that rejects the possibility of such a telos. As a result, the poem argues against a particular mode of historical narrative, and becomes a direct call for resistance against the imperial project.
Preceptor Tristan Schweiger on Eleanor’s Project
As a work of Classics scholarship, Eleanor’s thesis is remarkably sophisticated, managing not only expert translation but also insightful close-reading that places the essay’s argument in close conversation with prior studies of Lucan. It is also a theoretically rich analysis that produces important insights into the view of history that undergirds the epic. Lucan’s spirits, Eleanor argues, are not mere shadows of a lost past but present signifiers of a history that s cyclical and always unfolding. Thus, we have not only Latinists in this conversation, but also Marx and Derrida—an argument that brings to life Lucan’s epic to a much wider scholarly audience than might otherwise be the case. Eleanor writes, “I determine that the narrative Lucan develops is one that is critical not only of the mindlessness of civil war, but of the imperial regime in general.” It is compelling and engaging work that is richly deserving of a thesis award.
Sebastian Martinez-Montoya | Advisor: Michael Forster | Preceptor: Erica Warren
“Finding Our Own Values: Connecting Morality and Consciousness in the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche”
Preceptor Erica Warren on Sebastian’s Project
Sebastian’s thesis provides an original account of Nietzsche’s views on morality and consciousness and their relationship to language. The clarity of the writing and argument lead to an astute conclusion about the depth and significance of Nietzsche’s critique of morality. This thesis also marks out a foundational path for prospective projects, which might make additional interpretive headway from the connections, established herein, between seemingly disparate themes in Nietzsche’s works.
Per noted Nietzsche scholar Michael Forster, Sebastian’s thesis advisor, “It’s an excellent piece of work: not only well-informed about the relevant primary and secondary literature, but also quite original, especially in its insight that Nietzsche’s famous description of morality as ‘a sign-language of the affects’ does not only refer to language metaphorically but also signifies the linguistic nature of morality, and the implications of consciousness, conformism, and superficiality that this linguistic status carries, given Nietzsche’s more general account of language at Gay Science.”
Sherry Huang | Advisor: Michael K. Bourdaghs | Preceptor: Darrel Chia
“Pleasure in Pain: Sadomasochism and the Aestheticizing Gaze in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s ‘Shisei’ and ‘Shōnen’”
What does it take for literary narratives to create aesthetic pleasure through descriptions of experiences that may not be desirable in real life? This thesis approaches this question through an examination of the Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965)’s “Shisei” (“The Tattoo” 刺靑, 1910) and “Shōnen” (“The Children” 少年, 1911), two short stories which describe physical pain as instrumental to the arousal of erotic desire and aesthetic pleasure. I argue that Tanizaki’s narratives construct pain as erotic and aesthetic by establishing a narrative perspective that controls, Others and reifies lived pain and the body-in-pain. I call this narrative perspective an “aestheticizing gaze.” It embodies pain and describes it in vivid details, while simultaneously establishing a safe psychologicalchrist distance between the gazing, aestheticizing subject (the focal characters in the story, the narrator, the author and the intended reader) and the subject in pain (characters whose pain is described). The aestheticizing gaze uses references to pain, violence, humiliation, discipline and submission to describe and construct erotic desire and aesthetic pleasure by Othering the unbearable side of the experiences. The narrator and the intended reader are thus free from having to acknowledge the unbearableness of pain from the first-person point of view. The aestheticizing gaze is one that controls and disguises. It is in this sense sadistic.
Preceptor Darrel Chia on Sherry’s Project:
While reading Sherry’s thesis, I hope you, dear reader, notice its nuanced phenomenology that makes an original (and brilliant) connection between pain and aesthetic distance, with excellent close readings of Tanizaki’s stories. The argument is that there is something intrinsically sadistic about aesthetic enjoyment, insofar as it involves both sensual response to an object, and maintaining a remove from it. Professor Bourdaghs, her advisor, notes that this is: “an original and significant scholarly analysis of one of the most influential and difficult writers of the modern Japanese canon. This final draft builds on the strengths of the first draft, both by carrying forward some of the implicit stakes of your argument about the relation between aesthetic pleasure and sadomasochistic pleasure and in working in an extensive selection of previous secondary scholarship in both Japanese and English.”
Make no mistake: this is a real labor of scholarship, by someone attentive and genuinely curious, and really thinking about her object with sincere respect. This is not the flashy, vapid piece theorizing pleasure and pain and “aesthetics” – that I’m sure we could all imagine, and that this could have easily been. There were times in the process when she struggled to make complete sense of her object because of their difficulty. But she listened to advice, assiduously following up on every suggestion, and really taking time to figure out what was going on. As you will see, the amount of research and thinking she put into this was admirable. Even more impressive is that she is neither a native English nor Japanese speaker. Finally, she is also a truly gracious student: modest, despite her real ability; thoughtful to all her peers, reliable, and just amazing to work with. I cannot commend this piece enough.
Tony George | Advisor: Allyson Nadia Field | Preceptor: Chris Carloy
“Transgender Embodiment Through Genre in Singapore Sling”
This paper examines the film Singapore Sling (dir. Nikos Nikolaidis, 1990) and its intertextual engagement with the noir film Laura (dir. Otto Preminger, 1944). To untangle the dense relationship between these two texts, I turn to transness as a theoretical tool which allows me to address Singapore Sling’s investment in temporal and gender fluidity. My use of transness as a critical methodology stems from recent work in trans cinema studies that moves beyond an emphasis on transgender media representation, and towards an articulation of a trans cinematic aesthetic. What would it mean for trans cinema to consider form as the place where transness emerges? And how might this attention to form de-center appeals to authenticity through representation? Rather than argue for the film as ontologically “trans,” I instead argue that Singapore Sling’s intertextual deployment of Laura articulates the transness within noir itself. By attending to the formal relationship between temporality, gender embodiment, and the erotic in Singapore Sling, I argue that trans as a critical approach to genre theory offers an expansion beyond gender essentialism and representational politics to address the ways gender operates as a genre itself as an organizing framework of the cinematic image.
Preceptor Chris Carloy on Tony’s Project
In this thesis, Tony opens horizons of possibility for trans aesthetics as critical and historiographic method through a skillful analysis of two difficult films – the narratively and stylistically labyrinthine Singapore Sling (1990) and its intertextual Other, the classic film noir Laura (1944). As Singapore Sling exposes, amplifies, and collapses the ruptures, excesses, dizzying temporalities, and violent eroticisms of film noir, this thesis applies trans cinematic theory to make sense not only of Singapore Sling’s relationship to Laura, but of film history and historiography’s relationship to noir. Ultimately, the author proposes gender as a generic form, one that has long served as “an organizing framework for the cinematic image.” Crucially, these large-scale theorizations of gender, genre, and medium are firmly grounded not only in a deep engagement with, and cross-application of, the existing scholarly literature, but also a rigorously detailed formal analysis of Singapore Sling from the level of mise-en-scene and shot all the way up to the film’s overall narrative structures. It would take a great deal of work just to make Singapore Sling, Laura, and their relationship legible for a reader; to do this while simultaneously proposing exciting new directions for film theory and history is quite a feat.
INTREPID AWARDS
Jennie Dawn Morris | Advisor: Ben Laurence | Preceptor: Andrew Pitel
“Beyond Manifest Destiny: Cultivating an Ethical Approach to Space Exploration”
My thesis discusses the need to establish viable methods for governing space exploration in order to avoid replicating the worst aspects of capitalism and settler colonialism that we have experienced on Earth. I have always been fascinated by the idea of space travel and began to consider focusing my thesis research on the ethical questions it raises after my mom and I watched several documentaries about scientists hoping to discover habitable worlds with data from the James Webb Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. I was struck by the fact that these brilliant people seemed far more concerned with the question of if we could start colonies on other worlds than if we should. I noticed that the political discourse surrounding space exploration was saturated with terms like “manifest destiny,” and “American values,” fostering ideas of nationalism and advocating for a no holds barred approach to maximize profit, with little to no concern for the ecological integrity of extraplanetary environments or the harm that may be done to those humans not wealthy enough to engage in space capitalism. I also discovered that I was not alone in these concerns—the international community had attempted to address these issues in the earliest era of space exploration—attempts that were largely unsuccessful as visions of endless profit and national prestige had already taken hold of policymakers. I argue in my thesis that this abandoned idea, if expanded to include diverse viewpoints, could serve as a reasonable starting point for developing a sustainable approach. My interest in pursuing a well-rounded approach to the issue led me to engage with a variety of literature, including UN treaties and NASA documents, as well as the works of Indigenous environmentalists, human rights advocates, and canonical Western thinkers.
Preceptor Andrew Pitel on Jennie’s Project
This thesis is just the kind of thing I think of when I think “intrepid”– original, interdisciplinary bit of applied ethics/environmental ethics/ political philosophy on the ethics of space exploration, and research extraction. Jennie draws from a number of thinkers and traditions (e.g., Mathias Risse’s “egalitarian ownership” and Buddhist ethics) to develop an account of the ways in which space might constitute an environment that we have moral obligations to preserve, and proposes some guidelines for regulation of space exploration. Based on the account she develops, Jennie shows a serious knowledge of the history and current state of international treaties and regulations on space exploration, engages with legal and scientific literature, and makes a convincing case (mostly to silence my constant skepticism) that such exploration/extraction is something we could see in the not-too-distant future and that it is a worthy topic of serious philosophical reflection. It’s a totally original and ambitious project and she has managed to pull it off.
Thomas M. Pflanz | Advisor: Margaret Geoga | Preceptor: Darrel Chia
“Reanalysis of Ptahhotep Maxim 32: Homosexuality, Non-Mutuality, and Queer Egyptologies”
The translation and interpretation of the ancient Egyptian text, The Maxims of Ptahhotep, ca. 1985-1775 BCE, in particular Maxim 32 (P. Prisse 14.4-6) has commonly been suggested to proscribe homosexual activity. This is in part due to the prevailing interpretation of homosexuality in the ancient world, introduced into Classics by Kenneth Dover in 1978, then brought into scholarship of ancient west Asia and north Africa via David Halperin. This notion suggests that ancient homosexual acts were understood in the ancient past to be non-mutual, a process by which a dominant penetrator feminizes a submissive penetratee. Dover and Halperin are being critically reevaluated by scholars such as Konstantinos Kapparis and Stephanie Budin, and this reanalysis of Maxim 32 relies on interpreting against Halperins’s influence on Egyptology. This Maxim has a puzzling construction, hmt-hrd, which has been taken as a compound noun that includes the words for “woman” and “child,” conventionally translated as “effeminate boy” or “woman boy,” and referred to with masculine suffix pronouns. This unusual grammatical form has led to this figure being interpreted as a man that has been feminized through the process of bottoming.
In this work, I apply theoretical work from the subfield of queer Egyptologies, which entails both looking between the lines of the available data to identify people and populations that have been hidden, intentionally or accidentally, in the available ancient data, as well as suggesting that rigid definitions as applied be Eyptologists of the past have usual been lackluster, theorizing from a place of hegemonic power, in which the European, heterosexual, cisgender male experience was privileged as the standard experience, viewing any differences as deviations from the norm. By attempting to read against the grain for this standard interpretation of non-mutuality, this work provides a new translation and interpretation of these lines and suggests that hmt hrd has been translated according to Western, heterosexist biases and not according to actual attitudes or practices in ancient Egypt.
Preceptor Darrel Chia on Thomas’s Project
Thomas worked closely with Professor Geoga of NELC and ISAC, on this project – especially on the translation aspect (which I am not qualified to adjudicate). What stands out about this thesis for me is how compelling it is to read – even for someone without any prior background in Egyptology. This is an incredibly technical piece with lots of historical (and theoretical) context, but written in a way that makes it accessible and inviting. It draws us into this story about an ancient manuscript and its many translations from the New Kingdom, and questions the assumptions about sexuality that its modern translators (since Halperin) have “retrojected”. It gives a sense of the author’s deep expertise in this historical field, and how nicely they draw on their object to contribute to larger debates within Queer Egyptologies and translation studies. The research is meticulous, the prose intelligent and lively, and the arguments carefully constructed.
I confess my evaluation of this thesis might be slightly colored by what a joy it was to work with this student, who met every timeline, listened to advice, and attended every meeting prepared and with genuine enthusiasm and curiosity.
Luh Natalia Granquist | Advisor: Carl Fuldner | Preceptor: Erica Warren
“Reframing Trance and Dance in Bali”
Western visual culture of Bali has long subjected the Balinese dancer to a sexualized lens. In the ethnographic film Trance and Dance in Bali, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson punctuate an exotified depiction of women with a pathologized spectacle of Balinese trance. My thesis traces how this compounded racial and patriarchal bias coalesced within the film. Funded by the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox (schizophrenia), the celebrity anthropologists set out to study “schizoid” and “maladjusted” people to discover a solution to the mounting issue of mental illness in the United States. With affective distance, Mead and Bateson likened the Balinese mother to the monstrous Rangda–a mythical figure already subjected to patriarchal obfuscation in Balinese society. By blaming Balinese women for a societal schizoid disposition and by capitalizing off fantasies of semi-nude women, Mead and Bateson manipulate the portrayal of female dancers, casting them simultaneously as monstrous mothers and exotic South Sea maidens.
Interweaving critical insights from Mead and Bateson’s archival ephemera, while utilizing psychoanalytic theories of abjection and the monstrous feminine as a framework, this paper aims to chart how the Balinese woman is both sexualized and vilified in this “landmark” contribution to ethnographic film. Concluding with Cok Sawitri’s feminist recuperation of Rangda’s narrative and Gung Ama Gama’s redemptive WALU NATA photographic series, this paper endeavors to excavate hidden herstories as feminist projects of kinship and healing. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s mode of critical fabulation, I conclude my writing with Sawitri and Gama’s alterities to a prevailing patriarchal landscape and the enduring legacy of Mead and Bateson’s ethnographic gaze.
Preceptor Erica Warren on Natalia’s Project
Natalia’s project draws on revelatory archival research to stage an unflinching critical re-assessment of American cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead’s ethnographic documentation of Balinese people and dance rituals of the 1930s, which she made with her husband and research partner, Gregory Bateson. What immediately struck me in advising this project was the scope of Natalia’s ambition. While students were still formulating their topics during Autumn quarter, she was seeking a research subvention to visit the imposing Margaret Mead Papers at the Library of Congress. Alongside her adept historical study, she planned a collaboration with a contemporary Balinese photographer, Gung Ama Gama, that reframes the colonial gaze that dominates so much of the Bateson/Mead material through a creative process of historical reimagining. She was able to bring that project to fruition as a highly compelling exhibition currently on view at the Logan Center (which, it should be mentioned, also required financial support to realize that she herself secured through multiple campus partners). In sum, not only does this multi-part thesis make a highly original contribution to the overlooked colonial legacies of American cultural hegemony in the twentieth century, but its impact is carried forward through multiple channels and interpretive modalities, all of which stand as testaments to Natalia’s diverse talents and resourcefulness as an emerging scholar.
EXTERNAL AWARDS
Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture
Nicholson Center for British Studies
KARLA SCHERER CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF AMERICAN CULTURE
Rena Lin | Advisor: Mee-Ju Ro | Preceptor: Tristan Schweiger
“Temporal Potentialities: The Immigrant Family and the Epistolary Site of Resistance in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous“
This thesis takes On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a 2019 epistolary novel by Ocean Vuong, as its critical object. It examines the temporal binaries of Americanization and the assimilative obligation in the text, which consign Vietnam to the past and advance America to the projected future of the immigrant child. The rupture that follows such binaries further destabilizes the structure of the family, which, for the Asian American subject, is already complicated by the effects of history and displacement. The novel’s epistle emerges as a letter from a son to his illiterate immigrant mother, the most interesting facet of its form. What is the purpose of the letter, if it does not mean to be read at all? Because it’s written in English, where does it fall along the continuum of coercion and potentiality? I argue that the letter’s disruption of time is offered as a hermeneutic site of resistance against the myth of American exceptionalism.
Preceptor Tristan Schweiger on Rena’s Project
The strengths of this brilliant project are many. It is grounded in a theoretical discourse that is simultaneously deep and quite broad, incorporating postcolonial theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, in addition to literary criticism. Moreover, it is supported throughout by extremely insightful and sophisticated close readings. And it pursues interesting formal questions, making sense of Vuong’s choice to write the novel in epistolary form, with the addressee a recipient who cannot read the letter. In this essay, Rena explores the way Vuong interrogates temporality and racial, ethnic, and national belonging in the Asian American immigrant experience: “[the main character] recreates the past into a new future, dispiriting the myth of the American dream and imbuing his own created future with another form of hope.” It is superlative work that is richly deserving of a thesis award.
Leah Robins | Advisor: Peggy Heffington | Preceptor: Agnes Malinowska
“Building Community with the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance, 1972-1994”
The Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) was a hub of lesbian community organizing for twenty-two years, making them the longest running lesbian feminist group in U.S. history. Unlike their more politically-oriented, short-lived counterparts, ALFA’s primary commitment was to building an intimate, safe, and vibrant community around shared spaces and social practices rather than developing radical political theory. While historians have tended to dismiss this controversial strain of the Second Wave, ALFA’s unique approach to lesbian feminism, as well as their unprecedented longevity and southern locale, warrants a reconsideration of generalized conclusions made about the movement. This thesis explores ALFA’s community-based approach to lesbian feminism, and its limits, to complicate and localize understandings of the ways in which the contentious sociopolitical theory was practiced.
Preceptor Agnes Malinowska on Leah’s Project
Leah’s thesis offers a history of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA), a hub of lesbian community organizing in Atlanta, Georgia for twenty-two years. Leah’s thesis masterfully excavates and displays ALFA’s huge and largely untapped archive to argue that the group’s unprecedented longevity can be credited to its emphasis on praxis over theory, and in particular on community building. I am very impressed by Leah’s ability to research and locate an important and genuinely under-researched archive, to argue persuasively for its importance to gender and sexuality studies, and, most importantly, to her really tireless attention to the archival material itself. I think you can see even from just reading the introduction to Leah’s thesis that the writing is authoritative and lucid; that she is making a major and truly convincing intervention in the history of second-wave feminism; and that she has earned all of that authority and mastery. Leah has been a delight to work with this year, and I have rarely seen such commitment to a truly original and meaningful thesis project.
NICHOLSON CENTER FOR BRITISH STUDIES
Caroline Funk | Advisor: Ellen McKay | Preceptor: Tristan Schweiger
“Capital, Patriarchy, and Kinship: The Epistemological Evolution from Martial Risk to Communal Redemption in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda”
Engaging in the widely discussed debate on George Eliot’s intent in her final novel, Daniel Deronda, where she claimed “she meant everything in the book to be related to everything else,” this thesis explores the language of gambling, contract, and exchange to connect the dual narratives of Gwendolen Harleth and Daniel Deronda. Through analyzing and comparing the language of gambling and contracts in the protagonists’ respective marriages, this thesis investigates Victorian epistemologies of chance, risk, gain, and loss within the broader cultural frameworks of patriarchal and capitalistic exchange under modern British life. Eliot portrays Gwendolen’s marriage as a game of roulette, immediately tying her to capitalistic paradigms of monetary value and risk. Her husband, Henleigh Grandcourt, exerts such oppressive control over her that expands this capitalistic epistemology also into that of patriarchal subordination. In contrast, Eliot presents the selfless and spiritual union of Mirah Lapidoth and Daniel Deronda as an alternative system. I argue that this juxtaposition allows the novel to illustrate its central moralistic claim. Eliot moves away from the hierarchal nature of the gamble and toward a lateral sharing of power within community. In doing so, she deeply critiques the economic epistemologies of patriarchal marriage of her time and guides readers away from selfish exchanges toward a more altruistic, communal framework of familial bonds.
Preceptor Tristan on Caroline’s Project
Caroline’s essay does a phenomenal job in working to account for the complexities of Eliot’s enigmatic final novel. Building from the novel’s opening scene of Gwendolen Harleth at a gaming table, Caroline shows how the novel frames marriage under Victorian patriarchal laws and customs as an exercise in managing risk – but one that women do not undertake freely and with odds structurally weighted against them. By contrast, Deronda’s discovery and embracing of his Jewish heritage offers a way out of capital risk calculation via religious and ethnic belonging – but one that does not appear available to women characters in the same way. Deploying a robust body of Eliot scholarship, analyses of the rise of capital (Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic most prominent among these), feminist scholarship, and histories of risk, Caroline produces a remarkably sophisticated and well-grounded analysis that is highly deserving of a thesis award.
ART HISTORY DEPARTMENT
Yves Cao | Advisor: Christine Mehring | Preceptor: Erica Warren
“Eva Hesse’s Hang Up as Relational Form”
Artists and art historians alike acknowledge Eva Hesse’s lasting influence on contemporary art, though her “mature” career spanned only a few years before her early death in 1970. Countless feminist, queer, and trans artists from the 1970s to the present have explicitly cited Hesse as a formative influence. This thesis proposes a rereading of a major Hesse work—Hang Up, 1966—in ways that crucially shed light on more contemporary, queer artistic modes.
Building on the structuralist and psychoanalytic theories more familiar to the literature on Hang Up, I reapproach this seminal work from a phenomenological, materialist, and trans-theoretical perspective. I argue that scholars have long overlooked Hang Up’s material mutability due to the more obvious degradation of Hesse’s later latex sculptures. My materialist reorientation puts Hang Up in dialogue with the trans scholarship on these later works, allowing me to relate the piece’s carnal appearance and gradual metamorphosis to the unfixity of the trans body and subject.
I further argue that Hang Up refigures more established Minimalist phenomenologies, modeling what Sara Ahmed has called a “queer phenomenology.” This queer phenomenology, combined with my trans reading of Hang Up’s materiality, poses the transgender as a relational form or category—one which molds responsively to its environment and relationships, but queerly influences them in return. My thesis therefore proffers a trans-interpretive matrix that applies not only to Hesse, but potentially to the decades of queer and feminist artists who followed in her wake
Preceptor Erica Warren on Yves’s Project
Yves’s thesis examines and resituates an artwork (Eva Hesse’s Hang Up) that numerous scholars have grappled with since its facture in 1966. In turning their attention to this key work and its place in contemporary art historical and theoretical discourse, Yves carefully teases apart dense scholarly arguments, to articulate a remarkably nuanced claim about the need to engage with the discourse of Minimalism in order to fully apprehend this work and its ongoing importance. The project’s expansive perspective effectively and clearly identifies the lacunae in critical engagements with the work, and provides a robust phenomenological approach.
The scrutiny of the object, an obsessive attention that surfaces in a rigorous formal analysis, further demonstrates Yves’s meticulous attention to detail and the depth of their research. As Yves notes early in the thesis, the project “seeks more unfamiliar analytic modes.” With this new perspective and attendant analysis, which account specifically for the object’s material change over time, Yves argues, groundbreakingly, for the work’s significance as a foundational example of relational aesthetics.
Christian Bumala | Advisor: Christine Mehring | Preceptor: Alexandra Fraser
“Sound as It Ought to Be Seen: Looking at Sound Art Again through Christine Sun Kim”
If sound art distinguishes itself through aurality, why do we look to those noises we endeavor to hear? Despite directing their audience’s vision to the architecture of their surroundings, the works of Alvin Lucier, Max Neuhaus, and John Cage appear most often in critical studies of listening. This project looks to restore the aesthetics of sound originally motivating canonical moments in sonic art history by following the lead of contemporary artist Christine Sun Kim. Whether by restaging or resonating through these earlier artists, Kim redirects viewers’ attention to the margins of sound in works including 4×4 (2015), (LISTEN) (2016), and Captioning the City (2021). As such, sound emerges not through hearing alone, but rather through experiences of both sight and site. This argument draws from scholarship including the “non-cochlear sonic art” of Seth Kim-Cohen, the discursive senses of sound by Caroline A. Jones, and the “deafened moment” of Lennard J. Davis. This research recognizes Kim within a history of artists who read architecture and the built environment through sound, entangling optical and audible approaches to the urban fabric of our social spaces.
Preceptor Alexandra Fraser on Christian’s Project
This thesis is a remarkably sophisticated and beautifully crafted study on the work of a contemporary artist who has thus far been singularly cast as a deaf artist making work about being deaf. Christian sets aside those readings for a moment and instead positions Kim’s work art historically, in dialogue within a longer line of visual artists working with the representational limits of sound and sonic experience. The strengths of this thesis are multiple. It is comprised of penetrating phenomenological analyses, engagement with primary materials and a robust swath of current scholarship, and elegant critical writing that rests comfortably in contradiction. Christian even studied ASL with the goal of more closely apprehending the texture of Kim’s process and a “Deaf perspective” on sound itself.
However, what makes this thesis truly outstanding is the way in which it revisits just a handful of works by a single, somewhat overlooked artist as a lens, or way of reseeing, a familiar set of twentieth-century artistic practices. Represented here by the work of John Cage in Chicago, Alvin Lucier, and Max Neuhaus, sound artists are endowed with new critical complexity, sheer aesthetic appeal, and are found to engage an overlooked diversity of collective, (often) urban experiences and representational techniques. Indeed, Sound as It Ought to be Seen unveils an extraordinary, new order of complexity to Kim’s work, but also (and perhaps more importantly) represents a weighty and timely intervention into studies of art, sound, and the public environment that have long been defined by the limits of the medium, normative assumptions of its representation, and a surprisingly narrow view of its effect.
CEAS M.A. Thesis Award in Japan Studies
Sherry Huang | Advisor: Michael K. Bourdaghs | Preceptor: Darrel Chia
“Pleasure in Pain: Sadomasochism and the Aestheticizing Gaze in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s ‘Shisei’ and ‘Shōnen’”
What does it take for literary narratives to create aesthetic pleasure through descriptions of experiences that may not be desirable in real life? This thesis approaches this question through an examination of the Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965)’s “Shisei” (“The Tattoo” 刺靑, 1910) and “Shōnen” (“The Children” 少年, 1911), two short stories which describe physical pain as instrumental to the arousal of erotic desire and aesthetic pleasure. I argue that Tanizaki’s narratives construct pain as erotic and aesthetic by establishing a narrative perspective that controls, Others and reifies lived pain and the body-in-pain. I call this narrative perspective an “aestheticizing gaze.” It embodies pain and describes it in vivid details, while simultaneously establishing a safe psychologicalchrist distance between the gazing, aestheticizing subject (the focal characters in the story, the narrator, the author and the intended reader) and the subject in pain (characters whose pain is described). The aestheticizing gaze uses references to pain, violence, humiliation, discipline and submission to describe and construct erotic desire and aesthetic pleasure by Othering the unbearable side of the experiences. The narrator and the intended reader are thus free from having to acknowledge the unbearableness of pain from the first-person point of view. The aestheticizing gaze is one that controls and disguises. It is in this sense sadistic.
Preceptor Darrel Chia on Sherry’s Project:
While reading Sherry’s thesis, I hope you, dear reader, notice its nuanced phenomenology that makes an original (and brilliant) connection between pain and aesthetic distance, with excellent close readings of Tanizaki’s stories. The argument is that there is something intrinsically sadistic about aesthetic enjoyment, insofar as it involves both sensual response to an object, and maintaining a remove from it. Professor Bourdaghs, her advisor, notes that this is: “an original and significant scholarly analysis of one of the most influential and difficult writers of the modern Japanese canon. This final draft builds on the strengths of the first draft, both by carrying forward some of the implicit stakes of your argument about the relation between aesthetic pleasure and sadomasochistic pleasure and in working in an extensive selection of previous secondary scholarship in both Japanese and English.”
Make no mistake: this is a real labor of scholarship, by someone attentive and genuinely curious, and really thinking about her object with sincere respect. This is not the flashy, vapid piece theorizing pleasure and pain and “aesthetics” – that I’m sure we could all imagine, and that this could have easily been. There were times in the process when she struggled to make complete sense of her object because of their difficulty. But she listened to advice, assiduously following up on every suggestion, and really taking time to figure out what was going on. As you will see, the amount of research and thinking she put into this was admirable. Even more impressive is that she is neither a native English nor Japanese speaker. Finally, she is also a truly gracious student: modest, despite her real ability; thoughtful to all her peers, reliable, and just amazing to work with. I cannot commend this piece enough.