A&H Hoopes Prize Winners 20-21

Constance Bourguignon
'No Way to Speak of Myself': Lived and Literary Resistance to Gender in French
Romance Languages & Literatures and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

“What we currently think of as standard French has exactly two grammatical genders, feminine and masculine, and the latter is systematically given primacy over the former. Until recently, there were no ways to speak, read, write or think French that didn’t reinforce both this binarity and this hierarchization of gender. This is no longer the case: the present thesis explores how non-binary francophones in Quebec and five contemporary francophone fiction writers have turned the tables and come up with languages of resistance. It explicates the origins of French’s current grammar and puts words to the personal harm caused by being invisible in one’s language. It describes the alternative linguistic practices created and used by participants to be seen and heard and highlights the challenges they face in adopting them. It puts such lived experiences of language, gender, and their intertwining in conversation with two approaches taken by francophone fiction writers to free language and its users from exclusive gender ideologies. From the dialogue of these two sources of knowledge emerges a plea for multiple, fluid ways of speaking and writing French, for practices that draw constant attention to the artificiality of its code and make space for all its locutors.”

Angie Cui
Diplomas for Diplomacy: Foreign Students in China and the Soft Power Question
East Asian Studies and Government

“This thesis examines the impact of international higher education exchange on Chinese soft power, as measured through its public favorability and level of influence abroad. Specifically, I focus on China’s investments in education exchange as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an infrastructural development and overseas investment strategy that has been at the center of Chinese foreign policy since its introduction in 2013. I focus my research on the experiences of the over 300,000 students from countries involved in the BRI who are currently studying abroad in China. I argue that their education, from the scholarships they receive to the classes they attend, is part of China’s larger effort to project a more favorable image of itself to foreign publics. Using policy analysis and results of an original survey distributed to BRI students in China, I assess the overall effectiveness of China’s investment in conducting diplomacy through education. This thesis contributes to a growing field of study on the rise of China by situating education exchange within China’s public diplomacy efforts. It also addresses the effects of the politicization of education on students, university systems, and national policies, a question central to contemporary education studies.”

Gabriel Fox-Peck
Glorybound
Comparative Religion

North Carolina-native Gabriel Fox-Peck ’20 is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer whose recordings combine delicate vocal harmonies, soulfully understated production and intimate, off-kilter lyrics. He studied Religion and Music at Harvard under the mentorship of Cornel West, Vijay Iyer, and Esperanza Spalding, and received the Hoopes Prize for his creative thesis “Glorybound.” In 2019, he broke through as a producer, working with fellow songwriters Joshuah Campbell and Cynthia Erivo to create the Gospel-infused anthem “Stand Up” for the film Harriet, which would go on to earn Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Song. Fox-Peck first began writing songs at age 9 on his parent’s upright piano, recording them into GarageBand alongside his older brother Elijah Fox. Throughout his teenage years, Fox developed both as a writer and music producer, recording demos and selling CDs at school. In high school at Durham School of the Arts, Fox started a hip-hop/soul-collective called Young Bull with his classmate Tahmique Cameron, releasing projects that have gone on to amass millions of streams on Spotify and YouTube, touring across the country while opening for the likes of Erykah Badu, Masego, Big Freedia and more. In 2018, Fox released his first solo single “Rockaways” which was placed on Spotify’s “Fresh Finds” playlist and set the stage for his follow-up release, “Unusual.” His eponymous project, Solomon, is set for release in 2020.

Joyce Fung
To My Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Art, Film, and Visual Studies

"This studio thesis is a body of works created from and for the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the modernist architect Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and home to the Department of AFVS (VES) since 1963. The principle of this thesis is care. Its form includes counterfeit vitrines, pedestals, and information sheets that exhibit Carpenter’s unofficial histories; cubes made to the measurements of my body and painted the precise colors of this site; and circular concrete casts installed outside the site in the mode of photography. Non-exhaustively, this thesis is intended to function as a site-specific intervention into the lived experience of Carpenter as a material and social space; as an institutional critique of its modernist architecture from a feminist, post-colonial subjectivity; and as a dedication to the faculty and staff who have made home at this site, and made this site a home. As such, this thesis is situated in the traditions and practices of artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Renée Green, and Katarina Burin, all of whom have created works from and for Carpenter."

You can view Joyce's work in the online AFVS Senior Thesis Exhibition.

Jamie Halper
‘Imagination Joggers’: Women’s Fight to Eliminate Sex-Segregated Classified Advertisements from American Newspapers, 1964–1973
History & Literature

"This thesis tells an expanded history of the effort to put an end to discriminatory job advertisements in the 1960s and 1970s, with a specific emphasis on examining the social and legal strategies women employed to do so. It makes use of archival research in the Schlesinger Library focused on women’s own narratives, rather than relying upon the government documents that have largely underlaid existing histories of this effort. The project frames popular strategies like consciousness raising not only as a means to private transformation, but also as a form of public protest; it recognizes legal advocacy as an integral but incomplete avenue for creating social change on a large scale. It also traces women’s rights advocates’ reliance on strategies developed within the Civil Rights Movement and reveals how incongruencies between the two movements inhibited feminists' ability to overlay these tactics perfectly on their own work.”

George Liu
A(BD)SMR
Art, Film, and Visual Studies

“Emerging around 2007, ASMR videos set out to soothe an audience that is stressed, sleep-deprived, and lonely. ASMR videos address the viewer directly and intimately, similarly to some 1970s American video art. However, these two instances of personal address function differently. While early video art disrupts television broadcasting’s social conditioning, ASMR videos elide the economic and social mandates underpinning their production, consumption, and circulation on YouTube. In my project A(BD)SMR, I explore through a video art lens how ASMR’s remote intimacy is fraught with violence, control, and uncertainty. I respond to the power relationships between ASMR viewer, performer, camera, staging, and the marketing algorithms which circulate said videos. Under the username ASMRonald, I made ASMR videos in bad faith and published them on YouTube. Rather than soothe the audience by replicating a conventional relationship between ASMR viewer and performer, I invite discomfort to examine the limits of the performer’s power within domineering systems of surveillance and control. My videos offer critical modes of inhabiting Harvard’s institutional architecture. My diagrams situate my videos in spatial relations to found videos on YouTube, offering an aggregation method distinct from marketing algorithms. These gestures grapple with smothering technologies of control and their embodied effects.”

You can view George's work in the online AFVS Senior Thesis Exhibition.

Hillary McLauchlin
State of the Art: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Age of Surveillance
History & Literature and East Asian Studies

"This thesis examines depictions of surveillance in fictional film, documentary, and installation art produced by contemporary Chinese artists in the 2000s and 2010s. Despite anxieties surrounding the rise of a Chinese “surveillance state” in international media and politics, less attention has been paid to Chinese art in the limited, but rapidly expanding, body of surveillance-focused media studies literature. Consisting of case studies and close-readings of pieces by Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Shengze Zhu, and Xu Bing, this thesis evaluates artistic portrayals of surveillance as both products of unique Chinese cultural histories and of a globalized art world. This thesis argues that art has the distinct capacity to reveal the complexities of surveillance, identify its limitations, and undermine its power. While examining how works of art help construct the public’s understanding of surveillance, this thesis also demonstrates how surveillance itself impacts the production of arts, its mediums, and artists’ social responsibility."

Gavin Moulton
Şişli Mosque: The Changing Aesthetics and Politics of Mosque Building, Restoration, and Calligraphy in the Turkish Republic, 1923– 1957
History of Art & Architecture and Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations

“As a discipline, art history has a deeply violent past. To study artworks in museums many scholars advocated for their removal from original sites, often through imperial power structures and exploitation of economic crises. I am interested in shifting to a community-centered art history; I want to explore what art and architecture mean in literary, political, aesthetic, ecological, racial, ethnic, spiritual, and sociological dimensions. Putting architecture in a white cube is incredibly reductive to this vision. My thesis chronicles the story of the construction of the first mosque built after the establishment of the Turkish Republic and gave me the opportunity to apply my ideas for the future of art history into academic practice. Working with staff at the Şişli Mosque Foundation, calligraphers, Turkish and international scholars, libraries, museums and research institutions across the globe I pieced together a more comprehensive narrative of the mosque’s complex history and legacy. I look at how trees were used to complement its architecture, how ascendant business owners influenced Quranic verse selection for calligraphy, and how photographic archives enabled reproduction of Ottoman designs. Much of my research focuses on revival of historic forms, a topic that has great resonance in contemporary Turkey and the United States. I hope that when other students read my work, they feel empowered to challenge the dominant ways that knowledge is valued and constructed in their fields to enact positive changes.”

Alejandro Quintana
Local Migration in the Arsinoite Nome of Egypt during the Early Principate
The Classics

Alejandro explores how interdisciplinary methodologies centered on textual sources inform our knowledge of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. His thesis explores the understudied topic of local migration in Roman Egypt as revealed by the vast number of papyrus documents which survived in its territory. From the starting point of an edition of a previously unpublished Roman document in U.C.-Berkeley's collection, he demonstrates the importance of small-scale migration in the province on local societies and reveals the paradoxical way the Roman administration accounted for the phenomenon.

Daniel Rosenblatt
‘Deìjame que te cante yo tambieìn’: Constructing Working-Class Puerto Rican Identity in New York City, 1917–1936
History & Literature

“My thesis traces the social and political history of interwar Puerto Rican New York. It aims to document an inclusive history of labor activism that takes account of grassroots and at times unorthodox forms of political activism. The project draws upon archival documents from the Centro Library at Hunter College and considers how intersecting histories of migration, labor, empire, and racialization shaped political discourses within the Puerto Rican diaspora."

Isabel Ruehl
Growing Up, Aging Out: Autism across a Lifespan
English

“This thesis merges two modes of nonfiction, journalistic reportage with personal essay, to examine the place of autism in contemporary American society. My brother Nicholas, 24, is on the severe end of the autism spectrum, and his story traces the long, uneven arc from child to adult services. This trajectory is important to capture because, in the public imagination, autism is a disorder of the nursery; there exist many programs for children, but hardly any for adults. So what happens when all those kids grow up? In my preface, I lay out this problem within the context of the ever-increasing prevalence of autism spectrum disorders, today a staggering 1 in 59 U.S. births. The struggles of Nicholas and my family, as we help him achieve a fulfilling life, are in many ways representative of struggles that others across the spectrum and country face. By combining investigative journalism with memoir, this thesis aims to illuminate a grave problem — that, upon entering adulthood, a large population remains excluded from society — while celebrating the manifold ways that Nicholas and others like him are able to contribute, still. Together they reveal autism as an overlooked yet vital force in society.”

Lauren Spohn
Poetics of a Dyspeptic Prophet: Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, and the Forms of Thomas Carlyle’s Life-Philosophy
English

"Few figures in the history of English literature are as problematic as Thomas Carlyle. A Scottish historian and philosopher hugely influential in the nineteenth century and largely forgotten in ours, he was a Calvinist without theology, a revolutionary reactionary, and a Victorian sage whose rhetorical style is considered one of the most difficult in the English language. Current scholars, however, have broadly overlooked Carlyle’s literary achievements in the effort to recast him as a timely sociopolitical thinker. This thesis reframes the scholarly conversation by arguing that Carlyle’s poetics are essential to understanding his career-long project: converting the nineteenth century to a new kind of secular religion, Carlyle’s own life-philosophy of work, wonder, and belief. The paper offers a philosophical reconstruction of this “new mythos” that Carlyle developed across his early writings from 1815 to 1841. It then moves into a literary analysis of his most influential works, Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution, to demonstrate how both texts use similar structures and rhetorical strategies to convert audiences to Carlyle’s cosmic vision. The paper ends with recommendations for advancing the current scholarship, alongside reflections on Carlyle’s broader cultural legacy."

Sarah Toomey
Keeping Score
English

“How do you find fulfillment in the present moment when your past doesn't feel like your own? When trauma erodes memory, how do you self-define-- how do you structure a full notion of who you are? ‘Keeping Score' is a book of poetry twenty-three years in the making. Conscious of many different forms of loss endured at an early age, each poem in 'Keeping Score' is doing near-impossible work: building a puzzle despite knowing full well that many pieces are missing.”

Jordan Virtue
A Civil War of Universities: Harvard and the ‘Harvard of the South’ in William Faulkner’s Novels
English

“William Faulkner was a college dropout. Yet the university is a pivotal — and seriously understudied — institutional setting in Faulkner’s writing. For Faulkner, two universities rise above all others: the University of Mississippi and Harvard College. My thesis argues that Faulkner stages a ‘civil war of universities’ between these dueling universities, even invoking a much older Oxford-Cambridge rivalry. The paper focuses on three novels — Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and The Mansion — and contends that Faulkner sees the university not only as a literal Civil War battleground or a battleground over Civil War memory, but also as a potential site for national and racial renewal. This thirty-year literary enterprise puts Faulkner at the vanguard of intellectual efforts to better understand the relationship between the university, the Civil War, and slavery. Faulkner said that ‘to understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.’ I learned the deep truth of that statement: as it turns out, you have to understand a place like Mississippi in order to understand Harvard.”

Lisa Zheng
Yes She Can: Female Artistic Production in Parisian Art Markets, 1737–1820
History of Art & Architecture and Statistics

“Art historians have traditionally assumed that institutional and social constraints in the early modern era radically limited women’s artistic production. This project challenges this assumption. By combining statistical methods and art history to examine over 200,000 works of art sold on the public market in Paris from 1737 to 1820, this thesis demonstrates that not only have there been many more professional women artists than previously assumed, but also that these women sold their works at a higher price point than men. This paper further investigates the similarities and differences between the artistic practices of women and men. The newly discovered commercial success of women artists calls for a reexamination of the role of gender in artistic production and of women’s professional status in the era. Furthermore, the methodology I employ points to the unsuspected potential of combining art history and statistics. This opens up possibilities of future research situated at the intersection of these two disciplines.”

Eric Zhou
Virginia Woolf’s Critique of Sympathy
English

“Literature is widely understood to involve or expand our capacity for sympathetic imagination. Virginia Woolf’s writings, however, complicate that assumption. Woolf, I show, trenchantly criticizes sympathy and its demands on the artist, most explicitly in her short story “Sympathy” (1920), her essay On Being Ill (1926), and To the Lighthouse (1927). She reveals that different kinds of sympathy are often at work in the writer’s imagination, not all of which help the reader or writer. Rebutting arguments by critics like Kirsty Martin and Monica Jean Miller who use Woolf to valorize the benefits of sympathetic reading, I argue that sympathy is deeply associated with motives or interests that imperil the pursuit of truth in art. Literature does not always make its readers more altruistic or offer sympathetic characters as vehicles of relatability. I argue that Woolf instead champions a specific kind of sympathy that is ideally disinterested, or shorn of personal attachments and sentimentality. By recovering Woolf’s nuanced critique of sympathy through a literary-historical study of her work, my thesis proposes that we can better understand how interpersonal imagination and the disinterested contemplation of truth might coexist in the reading and writing of novels.”

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