Last Friday, eight MAPH students presented their ongoing thesis research at our annual Works in Progress Conference. Working on topics ranging from Art History to Linguistics and Music Philosophy to Cultural Studies, each of our presenters shared fascinating, nuanced projects that are well on their way to becoming impressive MA theses in the spring. You can find summaries of the conference papers and photos from the event below.
Kate Schlachter
Kate Schlachter‘s project focuses on a tapestry and performance piece by artist Indira Allegra entitled “Saint Davis of Savannah”, and explores how we can use the concept of witnessing as a framework for considering the elastic relationship between presence and event in trauma.
Nick Rekenthaler is currently working on a creative thesis project which takes the form of a fiction novella. The analytic component to Nick’s thesis draws on the philosopher Ian Hacking’s concept of ‘making up people’, a process of creating new categories of being through assigning a specific label to a person.
Nick Rekenthaler
Sam Grayck‘s thesis is a comparative endeavor to break down the relationship between two major First World War literary texts, Undertones of War, by Edmund Blunden, and Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel. Sam argues that each ostensible “memoir” is actually a highly crafted creative work, comprised of three dominant layers: real events, artistic rendering, and collective memory.
Nic Holt focuses in his project on the video artist Juan Downey’s 1973 performance installation Plato Now, which is loosely based on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Nic examines the ways in which Downey simulates and diverges from this source material in an attempt to provide a re-conceptualization of the Platonic Idealism the allegory was originally devised to illustrate.
Panel 1 Q&A Session, L-R: Moderator Matt Hauske, Kate Schlachter, Nick Rekenthaler, Sam Grayck, Nic Holt
Julia Gantman
Julia Gantman‘s thesis project explores images of sight and vision in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Julia considers how these images relate to language drawn from Joseph Priestley’s eighteenth-century accounts of optics and light in Vision, Light, and Colours.
Trevor McCulloch’s project looks at the visual construction and architectural spaces of two films directed by Nicholas Ray: Rebel Without a Cause and Bigger than Life. Trevor focuses on the domestic spaces represented within the two films in order to uncover how their unique visual approaches to architecture constitute and reflect the anxieties concerning gender identity in 1950s America.
Trevor McCulloch
Sarah Welch‘s project is an examination of a merge between gerunds and participles in the syntax-semantics subfields of linguistics. Whilst linguists agree that the two word types appear to be merging, Sarah argues that the two have certain fundamental differences.
Jake Mecham is working on a project in Music Philosophy. Jake claims that the problem of music’s capacity is what of music remains after layers of symbolism have been stripped. As part of his project, Jake dissects semantically over-determined musical examples to show how our musical outlook changes as we grow from infancy to adulthood, and, more importantly, how it stays the same.
Panel 2 Q&A Session, L-R: Julia Gantman, Trevor McCulloch, Sarah Welch, Jake Mecham
Thank you to Kate, Nick, Sam, Nic, Julia, Trevor, Sarah and Jake, and to Matt, our moderator. Moreover, thanks so much to all of those MAPH students, preceptors and faculty who came out to support our presenters.