abstract: My dissertation primarily investigates the vast literary corpus of “Qiantang meng” 錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living” complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape during the late imperial period. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2017

Uppsatsen behandlar karolinsk- och italiensk barockkonst samt dess historiska och kontextuella förhållanden. Syftet med uppsatsen är att analysera David Klöcker Ehrenstrahls monumentalmålning Yttersta domen ur ett ikonologiskt perspektiv. Uppsatsen behandlar komparativ metod, och ställer således Ehrenstrahls målning i komparation med Michelangelos frescomålning Ytterst domen samt Pietro da Cortonas takplafond Providentia Divina. Uppsatsen tillämpar ikonologisk teori med utgångspunkt i Michael Baxandall’s teoribildning och analyserar främst det bibliska motivet Yttersta domen i relation till samhälleliga- och sociala förhållanden under karolinsk tid samt jämför det katolska och lutherska formspråket.

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<p> This paper examines the cultural and material history of early Modern Britain as demonstrated through the art acquisitions and art and architectural commissions of the Earls of Pembroke at Wilton House in Wiltshire.</p><p> By examining the collection of the 4^th Earl, it is demonstrated that the cultural authority was firmly in the hands of the monarchy. With the Civil War and subsequent execution of Charles I in 1649, the previously held power of the monarch as central artistic authority was diminished. This is demonstrated in the collection of Philip&rsquo;s grandson Thomas, 8^th Earl of Pembroke. The nature of Thomas&rsquo;s collection and role in the scientific enlightenment in England suggest that cultural authority has shifted away from the monarchy to science and the academy.</p><p> The examination of the primary source materials for this project is supported by the usage of Omeka, a web based archiving and presentation tool used by archives and museums field of digital humanities.</p><p>

The present dissertation, titled "Imperial Doors of Assyria," aims to examine the artistic form and cultural value of Neo-Assyrian architectural doors as highlighted by the three concepts of monumentality, spatiality, and rituality, using the three bronze-banded wooden doors from Balawat as a case study. Having introduced the materials and questions to be raised in this dissertation in the introductory Chapter I, Chapter II on the "monumentality" of the Balawat doors explores the commemorative value of the Balawat doors respectively through material, image and text. The scale and material was the "vehicle of conveyance" for monumentality. The commemorative value of the Balawat doors as Assyrian imperial monuments lies also in their ability to tell stories through historical narrative relief imagery on decorative bronze bands, and cuneiform texts accompanying the reliefs. Chapter III on "spatiality" engages with a spatial reading of the door-band programs, and argues for a "spatial schema" governing the historical narrative on both the closed and the open door. When closed, the program reflects a "center -- periphery" schema, implying a political order between the Assyrian king and his conquered lands; when open, it changes into an "inside -- outside" schema, indicating an ideological order between the god, the people, and the king in-between as an intermediary connecting the two. Either way, the "spatial schema" encapsulates the essence of a clearly Assyrian-oriented world order, with the king always at the center/inside as the maintainer of such order. Chapter IV on "rituality" examines how the monumental doors interacted with people, and how the monumental space was then transformed into a "ritual place." Owing to the architectural function and commemorative value of the Balawat doors, their "rituality" lies in both their constructive roles of ritual events enacted at the doors, and reflective roles of ritual activities depicted on the doors. These two aspects would have cooperated and interacted with each other, and constitute a self-referential system which then reinforces the effectiveness of the ritually-meaningful images on the door. The final Chapter V concludes by highlighting the case of the Balawat doors as an important disclosure of the rules that manifested the syntax of the artistic, architectural, and social expressions of imperial Assyria. As visual metaphors for the Assyrian proto-imperial system, the door-band decorative programs demonstrate the ambitious world view of an expanding territorial state, soon to become one of the strongest empires in the ancient world.

The dissertation looks at architectural theory in early modern Italy through a history of its drawings. It examines a group of early-sixteenth-century drawing books, made in and around Rome, that comprised reproductive drawings based on circulating drawing exemplars from the late fifteenth century. The drawing books are identified as study tools made by artisans who aspired to the practice of architecture. The study illuminates the broader shift toward drawing as the primary means of architectural design. The first chapter contends that the distinctive drawing practices of architecture arose from the merging of the representational traditions of figural and mechanical drawing, identifying this progression in architectural texts by Cennino Cennini, Leon Battista Alberti, Filarete, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Leonardo, and Raphael. The next chapter reconsiders the “treatise-books” of the 1510s-1530s as copybooks for architectural draftsmen, analogous to the commonplace books created by humanist scholars, using the Codex Coner (Soane’s Museum, London) as a case study. Chapter 3 looks at the widespread phenomenon of drawing and copying architectural details and tracks its development from detail drawing series made in the fifteenth century to the precisely measured images of the early sixteenth century. The case study is the Codex Fogg (Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge). Chapter 4 traces the empirical development of orthographic section drawing as an established component of the drawing palette of the architectural draftsman, taking the Codex Mellon (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York) as an example. Chapter 5 investigates the circumstances that influenced the end of the architectural copybook phenomenon in the late 1530s-40s. Two examples demonstrate the transition, the Codex Lille by Raffaello da Montelupo (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille) and the Codex Campori App. 1755 of Giovanni Antonio Dosio (Biblioteca Estense, Modena). / History of Art and Architecture

My dissertation concerns the networks of production of early modern books of city views. Its focus is the emerging national and regional identities of the makers of the views in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1544-1628) and competing French city books from the same period. To study the networks I have adopted an interdisciplinary approach that aims to give a measured attention to all individuals involved in the production of the views (cosmographers, patrons, artists, draftsmen, woodcutters, printers). I analyze (1) national myths to which patrons and artists aligned their views, (2) patrons’ depiction of territory and genealogy in their views, (3) national symbols depicted on the views by draftsmen and woodcutters, and (4) draftsmen’s intentional application of “Deutsch” [German] or “Welsch” [French/Italian] styles. Finally, I have mapped views of the all editions of the city books in GIS, in order to visualize and analyze their networks of production over time. It emerges from this inquiry that a necessary condition for the collaborative production of books of city views was the alignment of the diverse interests (scientific, political, dynastic, economic, artistic) of all parties involved along a single unified goal, here the production of a shared national identity. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation asks how, in the context of elite medieval Japanese painting, matter could constitute meaning. This is attempted through a case study of one of the last great medieval illustrated handscrolls (Jp. emaki) yet to receive full treatment, the Genjō Sanzō-e (Illustrated Life of Xuanzang). Produced by the atelier of the enigmatic court painter Takashina Takakane (fl. ca. 1309–1330), the Genjō Sanzō-e has long constituted the mysterious jewel in the crown of the genre known as kōsōden emaki, or illustrated handscrolls of the lives of eminent monks. The work relates the life of the seventh century Chinese monk Xuanzang (ca. 602–664), who made an epic seventeen year pilgrimage from China to India to obtain sutras for translation into Chinese, thereby changing the course of Buddhist history in East Asia. The Genjō Sanzō-e comprises twelve illustrated scrolls that cumulatively measure almost two hundred meters. It was sequestered for hundreds of years at the spiritual heart of the Daijō-in imperial cloister of Kōfukuji, Nara, where it served as both icon and relic. This history of hermeticism led to the generation of an auratic narrative of a hermetic handscroll that turned on the perverse charisma of the invisible object. Already intellectually quarantined as a “very special object” by virtue of its emaki format, the scroll’s ontological complexity indirectly contributed to its further art historical isolation. Its first ever full exhibition in 2011 catalyzed this study, which interrogates the composition and function of illustrated sacred biography on both the hermeneutic and non-hermeneutic levels, as both text and sacred object. Micro-readings of the scroll texts and paintings against a constellation of self-indicated lexical and pictorial sources reveals that the source of the scroll’s efficacy as a numinous object lies in an exquisitely choreographed analogical mode of explicitly intertextual composition, producing a self-canonizing object that manipulates the expressive plasticity of the picto-textual handscroll format to deliver a customized re-telling of the life of Xuanzang. These findings challenge the conventional history of medieval Yamato-e painting, the category of kōsōden emaki, and Euro-centric conceptions of iconicity and the autonomy of the artifact. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

The dissertation explores the centrality of the Platonic Solids, and polyhedral geometry generally, to the artistic and mixed-mathematical cultures of Renaissance Germany. Beginning with Albrecht Dürer’s groundbreaking treatise on geometry, the Underweyung der Messung (1525), the dissertation redefines sites of early modern experimentation to include the graphical spaces in which new geometrical knowledge was practiced, invented, contested, manipulated, discarded, and presented. The research describes the historical contexts and development of the practice of polyhedral geometry over the course of the 16th century, expanding from Dürer to the lesser-known textbooks for practical geometry that his work inspired in Germany, and continuing with epitomes of the polyhedral genre, namely Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Perspectiva corporum regularium (1568) and the drawings of the Augsburg artisan Lorentz Stöer. The dissertation then follows the migration of polyhedra into intarsia and turned-ivory artifacts used for teaching applied geometry to European aristocracy, and concludes by addressing the polyhedral cosmology of the astronomer Johannes Kepler. By tracing the lifespan of polyhedra from their use as perspectival tools and pedagogical devices in Renaissance workshops into courtly Kunstkammern and onto the precious surfaces of domestic objects, the dissertation uncovers the influence that the decorative arts had on the conceptualization of geometrical knowledge and its new engagement with materials and concepts of materiality. / History of Science

My dissertation examines the emergence of photographic portraiture as a vehicle for illuminating the experience of European exiles and their cultural migrations under the threat of fascism. I anchor my study in the works of three women European émigrés, each of whom produced a series of portraits while in exile: the German-born French Gisèle Freund (1908-2000), the Austrian-born American Lisette Model (1910-1983), and the German-born American Lotte Jacobi (1896-1980). Despite different working trajectories and methods, each photographer grounds her work in an idiom of traditional portraiture that was subject to testing, revision, preservation, and critique. My dissertation demonstrates that exile granted these artists a double vision, leading them to turn to the human figure to address the end of European modernism (and its attendant form of subjectivity) and to assess the new mass culture and subjectivity on the rise in the United States. Chapter One considers Gisèle Freund's volte-face from the portrayal of collectivities in interwar Frankfurt to the depiction of individual faces of French intellectuals in color during her period of exile. I describe this abrupt turn to individuality and color - the latter of which was an emblem of American mass culture - as Freund's attempt to address the joint failures of leftist politic in Weimar Germany and the French Popular Front in its fight against fascism's spectacularization of culture. Chapter Two discusses how Lisette Model adapted the caricature style in her portraits, using it as a means to critique the French bourgeoisie in interwar Europe. This is followed by a discussion of how the photographer later used the caricature style to articulate the conditions of the American lumpenproletariat in 1930s and 1940s New York. Chapter Three reads Lotte Jacobi's close-up portraits of the mass-mediated personalities in Weimar Germany as a symptom of the transition from a bourgeois culture of secrecy and autonomy during the nineteenth century to a culture of spectacle in the twentieth. This is followed by a consideration of the aesthetic and commercial “failure” of Jacobi's work in the American visual market during her time of exile, which I argue resulted from a lack of mnemonic space in post-war America. As a whole, this dissertation addresses how the gaze of exiled photographers created new ways to conceptualize the representation of the human form as the specific instrument for transmitting exiles' experiences of dislocation and continuity. / History of Art and Architecture