Senior Theses

Art history majors are encouraged to pursue, with faculty guidance, a senior thesis: the preparation, writing, and public presentation of a piece of advanced art-historical research in any area of art history. Previous theses include the following:

2023 — “Failure's Undeniable Appeal: The Legacy of the Greatest Film Never Made,” Melena Johnson
2023 — “Digging into the Surface: The Public and Private Relationship of Japanese Bodysuit Tattoos,” Kaya Matsuura
2023 — “Seeing through Machines, or 'What do we do with AI art?’” David Gales
2022 — “The Metamorphosis of Medium: Considering Maura Wilson Schneider’s I Heart You as a Digital Comic,” Hannah Beshey
2022 — “Trauma and Queerness in the Art of Francis Bacon,” Will Borda
2022 — “Comme des Garçons: The Role of Antifashion and 1960s Western Fashion in Creating Modern Androgynous Dress,” Azamat Fuller
2022 — “Fabricated Unity in 16th-Century France Represented through the Valois Tapestries,” Sohom Pal
2022 — “Out of Reach: Touch, the Viewer, and Eva Hesse’s Accessions,” Leah Steding
2022 — “Experiencing Grief through Goya’s Disasters of War Series,” Sophie Wojdylo
2022 — “The Trapped Empress: Elisabeth and Titania through the Interplay of Fantasy and Reality,” Rei Yamada
2021 — “Dark Academia and Knightcore: Reinterpreting and Reconceptualizing the Medieval,” Katie Buhman
2021 — “Keith Haring, Jean Michel-Basquiat and Andy Warhol — A Triumvirate,” Kevin Donahue
2021 — “Returning the Gaze But Not the Gift: Framing the Palace of Culture in Contemporary Polish Film,” Zoe Fruchte
2021 — “Interpreting Appropriation Art,” Inna Gjoleka
2021 — “The Sinicization of Mosques in Imperial China,” Xioyan Liu
2021 — “Subjectivity in Performance Art Pre and Post-Digital World,” Phinn Lloyd
2021 — “Zen Buddhism in Fusama Paintings and Contemporary Fusama �پ��,” Hinako Minagi
2020 — “Erotic Cloth Reconsidered: The Intersection of Erotic Aesthetics and Commercial Influences in the Production of Kikugawa Eizan’s Selections from the Brocade Quarter E-awase kingaisho,” Maggie Coleman
2020 — “The Dialectics of Early Sixteenth-Century Botanical Illustration,” Owen Daley
2020 — “Beyond the Calm Exterior: An Analysis of Santa Teresa de Jesús by Jusepe de Ribera 1591-1652,” Kaity Moore
2020 — “The Secret Lives of Things: The Use of Everyday Objects in Ilya Kabakov’s Art to Depict the Soviet Reality,” Nicole Rosengurt
2020 — “The Renewal of the Tifereth Israel Synagogue: A House of Study,” Kelly Yu
2019 — “Tracing Western Influence on Japanese Modernist Painting: A Study of the Bijinga �ұ�԰��,” Amelia Geser
2019 — “Statues in Fragonard’s Picturesque Gardens,” Jiayun Chen
2019 — “Disability in Greek: Hephaestus,” Vivien Makos
2018 — “From Graffiti to Market: Contemporary Artists and the Commercialization of Graffiti and Street Culture,” Chris Baumann
2018 — “The Narrative Textile: Paula Nicho Cúmez’s Weaving of Form,” James Caruso
2018 — “Inheritance and Reinvention in Zao Wou-ki’s Abstraction,” Claire Ma
2018 — “Subversion in Japanese Youth Culture: The Art Books of Yoshitomo Nara,” Sonja Spain
2018 — “Divine Sorrow: Ethics and Violence in Ana Mendieta’s Iowa Period,” Ellen Taylor
2017 — “Staging the Politics: A Life Portrait of Emperor Yongzheng,” YanYan Liu
2017 — “Cruel NightMares: The Role of British Print Culture in the Moralization against Horse Cruelty from 1750-1850,” Donna Brunnquell
2017 — “Hungry, Thirsty Roots: Exploring Victorian Female Appetite and Suppression Thereof,” Hannah Zucker
2017 — “An Affective Space: Lygie Clark’s Anthropophagic Installation ‘A casa é o corpo: penetração, ovulação, germinação’,” Murielle O’Brien
2017 — “Speculative Spaces: The Case of Marion Mahony Griffin,” Rebekah Rennick
2017 — “Mending the Gap: The Reconciliation of the ‘Lesbian’ and the ‘Female’ in Joan Snyder’s 1970s Paintings,” Lauren Toppeta
2017 — “On the Edge of Shanghai: Postmodern Critique in Andrew Cheng’s ‘Welcome to Destination Shanghai’,” Fenyi Wu
2017 — “From History to Heaven: Gold in the Church of Santo Domingo,” Xena Fitzgerald
2015 — “Early Sonia Delaunay: The Avant-Garde at Home,” Eli Harrison co-winner of Phi Beta Kappa, Beta of Iowa, Scholar’s Award, Spring 2016
2014 — “Portraying Jewish Identity in Dreyfus-Era France: Changing Approaches to Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein,” Hannah Safter
2014 — “Art in American Diplomacy: Fallacies, Phalluses, and Freedom,” Remy Ferber
2014 — “Wes Peters’s Pearl Palace: Expressing Nationalism in Modernist Persia,” Emily Sortor
2014 — “Zaha Hadid: Building the Unbuildable,” Kathlyn Cabrera
2010 — “The Depression and the Curve: American Streamlined Design at the Rise of Modernism,” Isabel Miller
2008 — “Higher Powers Commanded: Sigmar Polke and Painting after Painting,” Rex Unger
2008 — “Re-Framing Minimalism: Literalism and Illusionism in the Contemporary Gallery,” Jonathan Patkowski
2008 — “Self-Portrait of a Tahitian: Essentialism and Identity in the Work of Amrita Sher-Gil,” Stephanie Cox
2008 — “Ardengo Soffici’s Cubo-Futurism,” Liza Newman
2007 — “Socialist Realism and the Evolution of Stalinist Official Culture, 1920–1940,” Nicole Reiner
2007 — “Adelita: Enrique Chagoya’s Recast Heroine,” Julia McHugh
2006 — “T. J. Clark and the Postmodern Perspective on Manet’s Modernism,” Nicole Reiner
2006 — “Ambiguity and the Subversion of Ideology: Arte Povera, Luciano Fabro, and Michelangelo Pistoletto,” Patrick Waldo
2006 — “Towards Liberation and Abstraction: Haiti as a Trope of Resistance in Modern African American Art,” Alfredo Rivera
2006 — “In Volumes, Shapes, and Shades: Filming Abjection in Shirin Neshat’s Zarin,” Katherine Rochester
2005 — “Serving Structures, Transcendent Tapestries: The Power of the Prototype in the Architecture and Art of Modern Weaving,” Katherine Rochester
2003 — “It’s A Girl Thing: When Lesbian Art Met Culture in the 1990s,” Allison Dolan
2003 — “Fashion as the Language of Modernity,” Jenni Wu
2002 — “This Film Has Been Formatted to Fit Your Screen: Consequences of Frame Erasure in Visual Media,” Carrie Robbins
2002 — “Jolán Gross-Bettelheim: The American Prints,” Emily Stamey
2001 — “The Persona of Los Angeles Pop Artists in the 1960s: Negotiating Cultural Conflict with Business Cards, Tuxedos, and Motorcycles,” Elizabeth Ferrell winner of Phi Beta Kappa, Beta of Iowa, Scholar’s Award, Spring 2001

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Senior Theses

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