Undergraduate Student Research

 

Selected Undergraduate Theses

Tomas Gutierez Alea (2010)
Velazquez and his Mortal Gods: The Mythological Paintings (2009)
Symbolism in ‘Fin-de-Siècle’ France: Memory as Agent to the Unconscious (2009)

Recent Undergraduate Senior Seminar Topics

Paradigms Today (Spring 2011, Prof. Diaz)

The premise of this seminar is that there are new paradigms in cultural practice today (art, architecture, fiction, film, etc.) and competing models of history and criticism in the humanities. The purpose of this course will be to trace tendencies of my and your choosing, across the arts and humanities, that might be developed as a provisional map of the cultural present. Our tracking of these tendencies will be both individual and collaborative; the seminar will be run as a lab, with weekly experiments in reading, looking, and discussing.

Pictorial Narrative from Ancient Times to the Present (Spring 2010, Prof. Edwards)

The focus of the course is Pictorial Narrative, and it is through this lens that students will analyze works of art from antiquity to the present. How does an artist tell a story with pictures, whether a myth, a passage from the Bible, a battle recounted by a historian, or the autobiography of a victim of the Holocaust? Students will complete an annotated bibliography and a term paper on pictorial narrative.

Issues in Iconography: Narratives in Art (Spring 2008, 2009, Prof. Hazzikostas)

This course examines the interactive nature of the viewing process and studies the way artists from diverse backgrounds, cultures and time-periods present stories and myths. Emphasis is placed on how visual expression links artist and spectator through a shared vocabulary of symbols. Students research selected topics and present their findings in class.

Genre Bending (Spring 2006, 2007, Prof. Powers)

This Senior Seminar will trace the evolution of the "hierarchy of games" (history painting at the top, with genre painting such as scenes of everyday life, portraiture, landscape, and still life below) in European and American art since the eighteenth century, and the impact of photography on this construct.