Abstracts

Amy Cooper Robertson, Graduate Division of Religion
"He kept the measurements in his memory as a treasure": The Role of the
Tabernacle Texts in Religious Experience

           The object of study in my dissertation project is the description of the tabernacle found in the latter half of the biblical book of Exodus. This description has typically been treated either in light of questions surrounding the historicity of the subject (that is, was there ever any such tabernacle?) or by attempting to reconstruct the structure that is described. My study, instead, looks at the specific literary form of this description, and the ways in which that form creates a specific experience for the reader. Specifically, I think that the characteristic literary features of this text – repetition, formalism, and ambiguity - create an experience for the reader that is similar to that created by ritual performance, much like the ritual visualization exercise that surrounds the modern practice of mandala construction.
           The final chapter of my study will consider the subject (rather than the form) of the text: that is, why is the tabernacle an appropriate focal point for the type of experience engendered by these literary features? How do the subject and the form complement one another? What does it mean to focus such intent religious and literary energy on an art object at all, let alone one that is so profoundly absent? How does our experience of the object being described differ because, rather than being visually available, it is guided through writing – a mechanism through which the author controls not only the order in which certain features are “observed,” but in this particular text, controls (through repetition and lacunae) how long we “look” at any given aspect of the space? It is this final chapter that will most benefit, I believe, from the Mellon  Dissertation Seminar.

Elizabeth Cummins, Art History
"Beds in New Kingdom Egyptian Art"

           In both modern western cultures and ancient Egyptian society the bed is associated with the notions of sleep, death, and sexual activities.  However, these similarities end upon further inspection, as these concepts held different meanings in the framework of Ancient Egyptian society when compared to those in western thought.  I have found evidence that indicates the Egyptians perceived the bed as a locus for transitional states, including the act of procreation, the liminal state of sleep, and a place for rebirth in the afterlife. I propose to examine two and three-dimensional examples of the bed in order to better comprehend its significance within the contexts where it is represented. While narrowing the focus of my study to the art of the New Kingdom (1540-1070 B.C.), I will collect images of beds from tomb and temple reliefs as well as looking at beds that appear as tomb equipment and within excavations of settled areas.
           Through this study, I hope to develop an understanding of the role that the image of the bed played in the ancient Egyptians’ concepts of sex, sleep, and death. These three ideas were intertwined within the Egyptian consciousness as sleep and death were often compared as liminal states and sexual activity in the Egyptians' view not only led to birth into this life but also the next. Therefore, the bed signaled to the viewer that the occupant was in a transitional state, with the bed becoming a vehicle in which to successfully transfer its occupant into the next realm or protect the individual on the uncertain thresholds of sleep or conception.

Susan Ludi Blevins, Art History
"Architecture and Sculpture of the Emperor Cult in Rome"

           This study will be the first comprehensive architectural and sculptural investigation of temples and associated religious sanctuaries dedicated to the worship of a deceased emperor or member of the imperial family deified by order of the Roman senate. After considering the implications of Greek hero cult, Hellenistic ruler cult and Republican ancestor veneration, chronologically this study will begin with the Temple of Divine Julius and will end with the Temple to the Gens Valeria. With a few exceptions, some material related to each monument included in this study has been excavated resulting in documentation of location, plan, architectural forms and/or sculptural decoration. Significant additional evidence related to the monuments as well as emperor cult ritual is available from literary sources, coins, inscriptions, and relief sculpture. Surprisingly, approaches to these monuments have generally been limited to reconstruction, typological studies, or inclusion of individual monuments in studies of the art and architecture of a particular period. In contrast, evaluating the monuments as a group related specifically to emperor cult practice and crossing chronological boundaries, enables a thorough investigation into the formal elements, sculpture and ritual that brought individuals and monuments into active dialogue. Rather than viewing the meaning of sacred architecture as static, this study will start from the premise that meaning is fluid and dynamic, changing over time. The goal of this investigation is twofold: first, to understand and define the role of architecture and sculpture in constructing the divinity of the Roman emperor and perpetuating and transforming the emperor cult within the specific cultural context of the city of Rome; and second, to reconstruct viewer/participant response through the lens of reception theory.

Kate Wilkinson, Graduate Division of Religion
“Spectacular Modesty: The Ascetic Self-Representation of Noblewomen
in the Context of the Pelagian Debate”

            The aim of this dissertation is to prove that traditional feminine virtue, modesty broadly understood, was a creative and performative mode of being for late antique Christian ascetic women, that it was a site for women’s political and spiritual agency.  Following on suggestions from historians concerned with women in the early Christian period (Cooper 1996) and theoretical work in feminist anthropology (Mahmood 2005), I argue that the focus on resistance and re-inscription of norms in much of the academic work on ascetic women of this period elides ancient subjects with the contemporary subject of liberal, progressive politics.  This elision causes scholars to ignore traditional or conservative feminine virtue as an arena of active self-formation and self-representation. 
           In order to highlight formerly unasked questions and suggest new interpretations of data, I will use contemporary ethnographies and late ancient funerary representations, in both sculpture and inscription, as lenses through which to reconsider the patristic literature concerning the women of the gens Anicii in the early fifth century.  The writings of Jerome, Augustine and Pelagius to this group of three wealthy ascetic women provide a case study for the re-evaluation of modesty.  As much of the literature to the Anician women directly concerns theological debate over the freedom of the human person to will and accomplish virtuous action, the opportunity arises to interrogate the contemporary concept of agency in the terms of the ancient debate.

Christina M. Parker , Comparative Literature
"Modernity’s Feminine Supplements & the Anxiety of Artistic (Re)production: Gautier, Wilde, Villiers, Hitchcock"

           Created in the image and from the body of man in order to be his nature’s perfect complement, we identify Eve as mankind’s first feminine supplement.  However, after committing sin in the Garden of Eden, God curses her with “a fatal wound,” the burden of biological reproduction.  Ovid’s story of Pygmalion, wherein the male artist sculpts a female figure who comes to life and then becomes wife, both recalls and reverses the Biblical account of Eve’s creation in two major ways: the male creates his own feminine supplement from the purity of marble, thus usurping female reproduction and simultaneously covering over nature’s “fatal wound.”  This dissertation posits a critical reconsideration of the Pygmalion narrative, retold as narcissistic fantasy of (re)production by modern male artists.  Post-revolutionary French authors, interested in the sculpture’s mimetic effect, adopted “Pygmalion, as a fable of fantasy and mastery centering on an artist’s relationship to his own production, serv[ing] as an intersection of the negotiation of gender as well as generic domination.” Accordingly, the modern Pygmalion aesthetically renders his feminine supplements, both the texts and the female figures animated within them, as hybrid forms of gender and genre.
           Modeling the female as signifier of man reveals that repeated fantasies of Pygmalionesque reproduction seek to restore a psychic lack, as well as to represent the changing and problematic relation between the ego and the modern world.  Equivalently, the nineteenth-century male artist (re)produces his feminine signifier doubly as antique ideal and modern muse, participating in an image-making method of “drawing the ancient into a dynamic and disquieting relationship with the modern – a relationship which [art historian Aby] Warburg described as ‘the afterlife of antiquity.’” Tracing the reconfigurations of feminine supplements throughout nineteenth-century French literature exposes crucial ties between the fantasy of aesthetic reproduction and what Shoshana Felman designates “femininity as a fantasy of man,” a relationship wherein the creation of literary woman acts as a metaphorical strategy to rehabilitate man’s precarious subjectivity.
           Actively engaging Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, this dissertation interrogates the perpetual reanimation of literary, feminine supplements across the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements in France, with the following foci: Thèophile Gautier’s conte fantastique, Oscar Wilde’s Symbolist Salomé and Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s L’Eve future.  Fictively employing Thomas Edison as inventor of the female android, an ideal love object in the pursuit of love degree zero, Villiers’ text will bridge this literary aesthetic and the birth of the cinema.  Villiers’s Eve of the future serves as textual prototype of the cinematic body coded feminine, thus introducing a space wherein the camera can literally transfer the female in endless replication for visual pleasure.  The latter part of this project emphasizes the modernist imperative of classical film “to give plastic form to the language of the poets” particularly within Hitchcock’s canon, focusing on Vertigo as a parable of Pygmalionism. 

Jennifer Hughes, English
"Telling Laughter:  A Cultural History of American Humor, 1830-1900"

            In “Telling Laughter,” I trace a history of humor in the nineteenth-century United States out of a set of convergences among popular culture, political history, and literary production.  During the antebellum era, a boom of comic production both supports and counters the movements of the day — it celebrates and questions Jacksonian democracy, supports and opposes the rise of temperance, women’s rights, and abolitionist reform movements.  This contradictory simultaneity dramatizes how popular amusements articulate interrelated American anxieties about mental and physical health, citizenship and human rights, and the pursuits of both pleasure and morality. 
          Thanks to a Peterson fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, I have studied antebellum promotional imagery and language in comic almanacs, magazines, gift books, the flash press, and broadsides for comic shows (laughing gas exhibitions, minstrel shows, and lectures) in order to formulate a “bottom-up” perspective of what Americans believed laughter was, and what they believed it did to them psychosomatically. Beliefs about laughter display social dynamics, as can be seen by the conventionalization of who could laugh at whom, and who could laugh at all.  Typical, healthy laughter was conceived as something pursued and purchased by ideal citizens, and therefore something most appropriate to male, financially-solvent, white citizens. 
          Other laughters — female laughter, black laughter — were, by default, strange and irrational.  “Telling Laughter” then probes literary moments of laughter in the works of writers such as Henry Clay Lewis, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain.  A widow’s hysterical guffaws in Lewis’s Odd Leaves in the Life of a Louisiana Swamp Doctor, little Pip’s “crazy-witty” laughter in Melville’s Moby-Dick, and angelic Satan’s nihilistic hilarity in Twain’s “The Chronicles of Young Satan,” are used to consider how laughter in the nineteenth century marks insanity and debility in marginalized persons, but also, subversively, illuminates otherwise-invisible personal trauma and social failures.  In my final chapter, I examine Paul Laurence Dunbar, Maria Luis de Burton, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain’s personal confrontations with the challenge of writing what Twain called “books that laugh,” since the unstable history of laughter itself endangered the radical political aims of these humorist writers.

Sarah R. Kyle, Art History
"The Carrara Herbal in Context:
Imitation, Exemplarity, and Invention in Fourteenth-Century Padua"

           My dissertation explores the unusually veristic botanical imagery in the Carrara Herbal manuscript (British Library, Egerton 2020, ca. 1400) by examining it within the spectrum of familial commissions across the Carrara reign of Padua. Investigating the place of the Herbal within the patterns of Carrara patronage enables me to excavate the Herbal’s imagery from the confining narrative of preceding scholarship that situates it within a trajectory of stylistic development toward verisimilitude. Instead, my research roots the Herbal’s imitation of nature in the material evidence of contemporary artistic production in the particular cultural and intellectual matrix of Carrara Padua.
           Regaining Padua from Giangaleazzo Visconti in 1390, Francesco ‘il Novello’ da Carrara (signore 1390-1405) expressly focused his patronage on rebuilding the famed Carrara library, seized by the Visconti in 1388. In doing so, he modeled his identity as ruler and patron on that of his father, Francesco ‘il Vecchio’ da Carrara (signore 1356-1388), who was lauded as a present-day ‘illustrious man’by Petrarch. Following Petrarch’s celebration of the contemplative life and its role in the amelioration of self, Francesco il Vecchio integrated his self-image as a public, active leader in the tradition of the great Romans with the ideal of contemplative study for personal enlightenment. He actualized the latter image by building up his library, while emphasizing the former through its content. In the new Carrara library, Francesco Novello used his manuscript commissions to engage this rhetoric of exemplarity played out in Francesco il Vecchio’s patronage.
           He also looked to the patronage choices of his more distant forefathers to reestablish a distinctly Carrara Padua. Their numismatic and tomb commissions show an early concern for lifelike, if idealized, portraiture that Francesco Novello resurrects in his own currency and in the portraits he commissioned to adorn Pier Paolo Vergerio’s Book of the Carrara Princes and Their Deeds, a familial biography written in the tradition of Petrarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men. 
           Both the Herbal and its imagery participate in a greater discussion concerning imitation and exemplarity unfolding in Padua across the Carrara reign. The Herbal’s corporeality and its imagery’s artistic artifice connect it to the larger trajectory of familial patronage that advances an image of the Carrara as modern ‘illustrious men’.

Rachel Foulk, Art History
"Roman Landscape Painting:
Pictures, Power and Place in Imperial Rome and its Environs"

           The ancient Romans were among the first to privilege landscape as a distinct artistic subject which could provide fantastical views onto vast fields, thick forests, or serene harbors.  In my dissertation, I focus on landscape painting in and around the city of Rome in order to formulate a synthetic study of the subject in the capital and its environs.  By analyzing the iconography, style, and context of landscape paintings, I explore how the genre of landscape communicated ideas about the meaning of place and the power of imperial patrons that reflect a distinctively Roman character and invention.  I propose that that the depiction of landscape in and around the city of Rome explored, probed, and reiterated the capital’s relation to the Empire, and thus represented an important political and cultural expression. 
           My goal is to examine landscape paintings in relation to the actual topography of Rome and to determine how this unique urban context affects their meaning and interpretation. This examination engages in fundamental issues including the relationship between art and nature and the association between image and literature.  Since painted representations of landscape were often juxtaposed with outdoor vistas near windows, doors, and porticoes, comparisons could easily be drawn between painted and living scenes.  Therefore, I stress the experiential nature of viewing landscape painting, in relation to both architectural and garden space.
           My dissertation argues for the centrality of the city of Rome in the development of the genre of landscape painting and how the landscape of the city itself was highly influential in the Romans’ understanding of place.  By examining the commissions of imperial patrons alongside other depictions of landscape from the capital and from the Empire at large, I argue for the fundamental role of natural, constructed, and depicted landscapes in creating a distinctively Roman identity.

Matthew Edwards, Spanish and Portuguese
"Historical Constructions, Sexual Memories"

           Historical Constructions, Sexual Memories explores the implications of accessing the past through narratives that favor chaos over narrative cohesion.  Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (Barcelona, Spain, 1976), Copi’s  Le bal des folles (Paris, France, 1976)and María Moreno’s El Affair Skeffington (Rosario, Argentina, 1992) all recognize memory as central to the historical endeavor and essential to introducing temporal confusion, silence, contradiction and absence into the narrative expression of a queer (homosexual) past.   In each case, the author reveals that alternate spaces and temporalities can only be rendered adequately outside of the narrative order presented by traditional history.
            While Foucault’s The History of Sexuality provides an example of subjectivity’s inseparable relationship to historical narratives, Puig, Copi and Moreno ground their tales upon the memory of sex.  The incoherent nature of “sexual memory” validates an unclear relationship with the past and places subjectivity itself within one of many historical fictions.  Following the theoretical work of Samuel R. Delaney, Judith Halberstam and Lee Edelman, this dissertation insists on further opening the discussion of alternate spaces and temporalities, in order to address narrativity as central to the formation of a queer Latin American subject.  

Peter W. Milne, Philosophy
"Decision and Procedure: Kant, Lyotard, Derrida"

           My dissertation’s argues that the ethical and political significance of recent French thinkers Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida is best worked out in terms of their respective relationships to the thought of Immanuel Kant and, to a lesser extent, that of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl.  On the one hand, Lyotard and Derrida will be shown to oppose the structure of what is called the “Idea in the Kantian sense” as it gets its definition both in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his philosophy of history, and as it appears in Husserl’s historical rationalism.  In both cases, this Idea (“God,” “humanity,” “nature,” or the idea of a moral purpose or rational end to human existence are all Ideas in this Kantian sense) acts to regulate human action and understanding and to organize history.  Such Ideas provide norms for thinking and for intellectual, communal, and ethical engagement.  Both Lyotard and Derrida are suspicious of such norms and critical of the philosophical and art historical presuppositions at work in them. This leads them to question categories such as the human subject, nature, the beautiful or sublime, and even art itself (taken, for instance, as a paradigm of human freedom and creativity, even of its “divinity”).  Each tries to unveil what is implicitly at work in these writings in order to subject them to a critical re-examination and reinterpretation.
           On the other hand, both thinkers follow Kant’s reluctance to “close” his system in any absolute way.  This “openness” (which is seen as a necessity for ethical and political judgement) is found in Kant’s writings on aesthetics.  The basic notion in both Lyotard and Derrida is that of the “event,” by which each means something very similar: an event is that which comes only once, for which the mind is unprepared, but which nonetheless demands to be judged.  In Kant, an aesthetic judgment takes place in the interruption of our normal, projective manner of looking at the world in terms of purposes or ends.  One must judge here without clear rules for deciding the issue.  It is thus a moment of crisis both in the sense of the interruption of norms and in the sense of timely judgment or decision.  Taking their lead from Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit or “deferred action” (in which an “event” takes place an understanding of which can only come later), both Lyotard and Derrida read this interruption in terms of a responsibility, particularly an ethical or political responsibility, to think and judge in respect of that which does not immediately appear as “well formed” – with all the risks and limitations that such judgment entails.  For each, any judgment worthy of the name is one that calls for us to judge in this way, and both see this to be the primary demand not only of art, but of ethics and politics in a multi-cultural and “global” community.  Through an analysis of their engagement with an essentially humanist aesthetic and political tradition, then, my aim is to provide the ground for a reconsideration of these two contemporary thinkers that simultaneously allows for a comparison of their respective works and a re-evaluation of the aims of at least certain of the authors of so-called “postmodernism.”

Delinda Collier, Art History
"Art in a State of Emergency: Producing the Angolan Nationalist Present, Figuring the Chokwe Past, 1975-2007"

           Angolan artists have had to contend with a war for independence from Portuguese colonialism that developed into a thirty-year civil war, both of which reduced the entire country to physical and psychological ruin. From the fractured condition of the state, a nationalist art developed  in search of a common visual language to represent Angolan society, and to create an identifiable past from which to build a united future. My dissertation traces Angolan art from Angola’s 1975 independence to present. Specifically I examine the large corpus of nationalist artwork that incorporates pictograms of the ethnic Chokwe of northeastern Angola. First, why are the Chokwe the primary symbol of Angolan nationalism? The Chokwe developed an extensive pictographic repertoire that appears on masks, in tattoos, in sand drawings, and on wall murals. Post-independence Angolan artists repeatedly use the pictograms in their art. Second, what makes the form of the pictograms adaptable to contemporary art production? I examine how the Chokwe ideas of social order are adapted in contemporary Angolan media.  And lastly, what might the use of the Chokwe symbol in nationalist artwork illuminate about the relationship between art and the Angolan state? Angola’s socialist history compels us to examine the Chokwe pictograms in nationalist art as an ideological apparatus of the state. However, I argue that the persistence of nationalist art in the face of the state’s catastrophic failure suggests that its role is much more than just celebratory. Instead I portray the disasters of bad governance as the conditions that challenge artists to imagine social order.
            I trace the genealogy of the Chokwe pictograms in two periods of nation building: the post-independence years of the late seventies and early eighties and the post civil war period of today. I narrow my analysis to two major artistic projects in each period. For the immediate post-independence era I examine the artwork and visual theory of Vitor Manuel Teixiera. Teixeira is a founding member of the state-run art school União Nacional dos Artistas Plásticos [UNAP] and a major proponent of Angolan nationlist art. He incorporates Chokwe pictograms in his art and writes that Chokwe art is a model for nationalist art. For the present post civil war moment I focus on Fernando Alvim and his “collective art project,” the international art exhibition Trienal de Luanda (2006-2007). Though the Trienal exhibits an international selection of art, its stated purpose is to heal the psychological and physical state of Angola. Their “Lunda Tchokwe” exhibition brands the Trienal as Angolan.  As the Chokwe were the most visib
le population to be exploited by Portuguese colonialism, both projects communicate anti-colonialism with the Chokwe pictograms in order to unite the Angolan nation-state. The pictograms, which are still produced to teach Chokwe social norms, are a common symbol in Angola as Chokwe art is abundant in ethnographic collections. I examine the relation of Chokwe art to Portuguese colonialism and how nationalist artists symbolically reverse Portuguese colonialism through their re-appropriation of Chokwe pictograms.