Humanities and the Arts

Plantation Genres: Race, Labor, and Literature in Imperial Borderlands, 1850-1950
Chandrica Barua, English Language and Literature, Barbour Scholar

My dissertation theorizes the colonial tea plantation as a key material and discursive site that configures race, labor, and social reproduction in South Asia from the nineteenth century to the present. Using a comparative plantation framework, I demonstrate that this transimperial site of capitalist production, violence, and resistance shaped multiple genres in the nineteenth century, namely romance, history, ethnography, theory, and advertisement, and the postcolonial residues of these discursive worlds continue to haunt present geo-political and racio-economic landscapes. Analyzing an expansive, multilingual, as yet understudied archive of what I call ‘plantation literary cultures,’ including Anglophone, vernacular, folk, and colonial literatures that emerged in and around the plantation, I excavate the infrastructural logics and rhetorics—coerced consent, hierarchized capacity, environmental alienation, and exploitable debility—that inform both the material site and its cultural productions, and I track their far-reaching mobilities and effects across routes of imperial trade and racial capitalism.

Unvirgin Steppe: The Queer Ecologies of Central Asian Postcolonial Cultural Production
Azhar Dyussekenova, Slavic Languages and Literatures

My dissertation, Unvirgin Steppe: The Queer Ecologies of Central Asian Postcolonial Cultural Production, examines the works of Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik writers and filmmakers who critique Soviet imperial policies and the exploitation of the region’s natural resources. I propose a novel genealogy of Central Asian postcolonial literature and cinema spanning from the 1960s to the 2020s. As I show, native steppe and desert landscapes—portrayed in these works as gendered and queered spaces—serve as a critical motif in the region’s art, forming the foundation of this genealogy. I situate the works of Central Asian writers and filmmakers within the broader contexts of the ecological impacts of Soviet industrialization, policies of Russification, and the history of Muslim women under Russian and Bolshevik rule. Finally, my research is the first to articulate the interplay between ecocritical and gendered narratives in Soviet and post-Soviet Central Asian art.

A Convergence Op. 14
Jeremy Esquer, Composition

A Convergence, Op. 14 is a three-movement double concerto for classical guitar and electronics, accompanied by a medium-sized ensemble, that explores a framework I call Representational Composition realized through Polytempic Polymicrotonality (i.e., the simultaneous use of different tuning systems and tempi). By converting representative scientific data into pitch, the piece seeks to depict the collision of two black holes, an event observed by the LIGO and Virgo collaboration on September 14, 2015. The first movement represents star formation, beginning with a stellar nebula and culminating in the birth of a star. The second movement portrays the star’s life and eventual death. The third and final movement depicts the black hole formed by the star’s demise and concludes with its collision with another black hole.

Politicizing the Past: Nahua Historiography Under Spanish Rule
Donghoon Lee, Romance Languages and Literatures Spanish

My dissertation examines how Indigenous historians of Nahua (Aztec) heritage in colonial Mexico developed political theories to reinterpret their pre-Hispanic past. I begin with Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Historia de la nación chichimeca, which challenges Spanish justifications for encroaching on Indigenous property rights, revealing the conquest of Mexico as an ambiguous legal basis for subsequent land dispossession. Next, I analyze Hernando Alvarado Tezozomoc’s Crónica mexicáyotl, which counters colonial racialized constructs of the “Indian” and exposes the arbitrary, terrorizing force underlying imperial rule. Finally, I argue that Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin’s Memoria breve de la Fundación de la ciudad de Culhuacan reframes Mexica origin myths into a narrative of an oppressed class achieving independence—a story with profound political resonance for the Nahuas of Mexico City under Spanish rule.

Black Digital SpaceTime: Content Creators Crafting Online Futures
Kyle Lindsey, American Culture

“Black Digital Spacetime” explores how Black content creators maintain intellectual and intimate communities amid tempestuous platform economies. As contemporary forces of political polarization and changing social media infrastructures have rendered the geographies of the internet unstable, users and tech companies seek to claim these fracturing spaces by undermining and misrepresenting the political and cultural contributions of Black people through plagiarism and harassment. By close reading digital artifacts and media accounts, I argue that Black content creators engage in critique to produce an accurate accounting of Black people’s contributions to digital spaces. In seeking to preserve their contributions, Black content creators fight not only to preserve Black digital spaces, but the temporality of Blackness online. “Black Digital SpaceTime” accounts for how these creators build a path to the future not from a mindless march on linear time, but from critical engagement with the present.

A Very Narrow Bridge: Jewish Americans and the Palestine Solidarity Movement
Alice Mishkin, American Culture

My dissertation studies the possibilities and limitations of Jewish American activism for justice in Palestine/Israel through an ethnography of IfNotNow. IfNotNow is an American Jewish organization that was founded in response to the American Jewish establishment’s support for the 2014 Israeli incursion in Gaza. I examine how Jewish Americans in this organization understand their own racial and political positionalities, how they are understood by others in the social justice movements they seek to join. Through an analysis of how American racial and activist frameworks constrain these movements, I demonstrate the interconnectedness between antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab racism, revealing how the contemporary impulse to read antisemitism and Islamophobia as antipathetic plays into the broader goals of White Christian nationalism. Through examining Jewish American activism, I make broader arguments about how American activism on Palestine often stems from one’s own personal or communal concerns rather than the material conditions of Palestinians

Belonging and Nostalgia: Medieval Spain in Modern Urdu Literary Imagination
Jaideep Pandey, Comparative Literature

My dissertation reads early-20th century South Asian Urdu literature about medieval Muslim Spain. Situating this corpus in the traffic of texts across Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and English in the Global South, I argue for a new understanding of literary modernities in colonial societies, beyond bilateral exchanges between Europe and the Global South. I argue that modern Urdu writers turned to a categorically Islamic topos by engaging with both Orientalist scholarship as well as contemporary and historical Arabic and Persian sources to articulate a literary modernity caught in multiple temporalities, geographies, and identity claims— between the “medieval” and the “modern,” the “Islamic,” and the “secular,” and pan-Islamism and India. Further, I probe its implications for the beginnings of “world literature” in the early 20th century, as one constituted as much through South-South interactions, as in relation to European benchmarks.

Creating a Casteless Khalsa: Contested Histories of Eighteenth-Century Sikh Society
Brittany Puller, Asian Languages and Cultures

This dissertation challenges scholarly assumptions of equality and castelessness as core Sikh values in its examination of the competing histories of the Khalsa, a martial Sikh order emerging in the eighteenth century. Using archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and literary analysis, my dissertation argues that Sikh texts and practices increasingly emphasized caste rank and hierarchy within the eighteenth-century Sikh community. Furthermore, my research demonstrates how low-caste farmers and menial laborers joined the Khalsa to elevate their caste status, many of whom became rulers in eighteenth-century Punjab. To counter these controversial realities of the Khalsa, scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to portray the Khalsa as an egalitarian order through selective readings, translations, and curations of historiography, which have shaped historical renderings of Sikhism, the Khalsa, and eighteenth-century Punjab to this day.

The Problem with Authorship: How a Wartime Control Mechanism Came to Define Literary, Visual, and Digital Media
Grace Wilsey, Film, Television, and Media

“The Problem with Authorship” is a transhistorical study of authorship in emergent media technologies from the printing press to cinema to AI text generators. It theorizes authorship as an adaptive system of power used to legitimize new forms of media and to integrate them into exclusionary social systems. This research will take a discourse analysis approach to archival research regarding problematic author figures including Thomas Hobbes, Woody Allen, J.K. Rowling, and Mark Zuckerberg. The four main chapters—titled “owner,” “artist,” “brand,” and “source”—each focus upon a thematic key term associated with these authors and the mediums in which they work in order to understand how authorship shapes cultural assumptions about media and how the history of authorship continues to inform legal debates about digital media today.

Translation Un/Bound: Transnational Ideologies and Orientalist Forms in Modernist Poetry, 1895-1955
Asa Zhang, English Language and Literature

Asa’s dissertation traces the ways a diverse group of Anglo-American modernist poets—Ezra Pound, Helen Waddell, W. B. Yeats, and Amy Lowell—reimagined notions of nationhood and selfhood in the West through their adaptations of East Asian materials. It discovers how these rewritings served varied needs of reassessment and intervention—in relation to nationalist, totalitarian, and imperialist ideologies—within English poetry’s widened domain of discursive power and sociocultural influence after the fin-de-siècle. Offering the first sustained study of translation-as-poetry as a means of political engagement in Anglo-American modernism, Translation Un/Bound shows transnationalism, translation, and Orientalism as converging fields of ideological contestation in modernist literature.