Senior Thesis Symposium

Monday 19th April, 10am - 2.30pm

Welcome! We are delighted to present a program of talks by those of our seniors who have written a thesis this year. We are also excited to welcome our Keynote Speaker, Prof. Marisa Solomon (Barnard College). Please see below for the full schedule of presentations.

After registration we'll email you a Zoom link to attend the event. We'll send it the day before the Symposium and then again one hour beforehand.

Program:

10am Welcome

10.10 – 11.00 Panel 1

Gabe Llano

Banjos, Anthologies, Recordings, and the Construction of an American Musical Stereotype

Teddy Michaels

Pandemic Grief: Anonymous Digital Mourning on Reddit

Kat Blackwell

War at Home: Economies of Violence, Love, and Affect in U.S. Military Communities

Discussant: Professor John Pemberton

11.10 Keynote presentation: Professor Marisa Solomon

Geographic Wounds

Toxicity is an ongoing consequence of chattel slavery, indigenous removal and the lines of violence the plantation drew in the soil. Across southern towns, like those that make up Cancer Alley, the economic interests of what Clyde Woods called “the plantation bloc” foreclose the conditions in which the subjugated are supposed to live (or die). Yet, even as toxicity sediments into the landscaped, embodied and spatial wounds cleaved by regimes of violence, it simultaneously produces a colonial archive. The afterlife of the plantation links scales of injury from the body, to the town to the region and beyond. Thus, how does one attune oneself to history's haunting of all Black towns, particularly in the South, when there is no “evidence” of injury? This talk focuses on Suffolk, Virginia, a small Black post-industrial southern town whose soil is seething with toxicity. By turning our attention to the exhausted soils of the post-plantation South, I ask where and how histories of violence are made material.

12.00-12.30pm lunch break

12.30pm – 1.15pm Panel 2

Madison Aubey

Visions Underfoot: Seneca Village and the Poetics of Remembrance

Kiran Zelbo

Inside Columbia University: What Remains (On University Interaction with Human Skeletal Remains)

Cecelia Morrow

Artifacts of Daily Life: Photography and Memory of New Orleans

Discussant: Professor Brian Boyd

1.30- 2.20 Panel 3

Charlotte Behrens

Trustroots in Europe: A Closer Look at a Non-Monetary System of Exchange

Ari Jones

The Virality of Black Women’s Violence: An Analysis on the Circulation of Misogynoirist Memes Through Social Media

Nada Zohayr

Don’t Change the Channel: A Study of Gender Norms and Social Expectations through Moroccan Comedy Television Shows

Discussant: Professor Lila Abu-Lughod

2.20pm

Reflections and goodbyes