The purpose of this study is to seek out, examine, and analyze the relationship that Emily Dickinson shared with her sister, Lavinia, and with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson. All of her letters and poems have been carefully considered, as well as the letters and diaries of friends and relatives who might shed light on the three women.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Düsseldorf, 2008. / Mixed media. Includes bibliographical references. Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-238).

Zugl.: Düsseldorf, Univ., Diss., 2008

For my MFA internship requirement, I currently serve as an acting intern at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in Partnership with UCF. I was cast as Lavinia in OST’s spring production of Titus Andronicus, and I will use this as my thesis role. It will be the very last show of my MFA career, and it will provide an exceptional opportunity for me to utilize all the skills learned during my three years of MFA classes and training. Jim Helsinger, Artistic Director at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida, will direct the production. I intend to approach this role in a manner very similar to my MFA coursework: through vocal work, physical work, and research. Lavinia is a Shakespearean character; Shakespeare is immediately associated with language. However, Lavinia is interesting because the role’s vocal work will require both verbal and non-verbal experimentation. I will be able to utilize the various language tools and techniques I have learned in my MFA voice classes to approach Shakespeare’s text; but Lavinia has her tongue cut off halfway through the show, so I anticipate additional vocal, non-verbal contributions to make the role unique. Physicality will also play a large part of my acting work in this particular role, more so, perhaps, than in a typical Shakespearean ingénue. Because Lavinia is verbally silenced, her body must also speak. No approach to a Shakespeare role would be complete without character work, and research will play a large part of this role in particular. Mr. Helsinger encourages his interns to watch other productions of the same character and to perform visual research from which to pick iv and choose. I also plan to do research on violence against women and its significance in both the play and real life in order to better inform my vocal and physical choices. By delving into this role, I plan to explore several questions. What exactly makes up the voice, as heard or interpreted by an audience, of a Shakespearean character? How has my graduate study prepared me for this role? What techniques work for my own personal process as an actor? How do the voice, mind, and body combine to inform a character’s arc, and which of these will prove most powerful to an audience’s understanding of that character’s journey? Is it possible to retain the audience’s attention in a Shakespearean, text-oriented, production without using words? I hope to answer these questions through the process of combining, in one character, all of the aspects of my MFA journey.

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Artemisia Gentileschi's self-portrait, Allegory of Painting, painted in 1630, has activated a complex discussion of female artistic identity in which performance is tied to concerns with status. This thesis addresses an earlier history of development in allegorical self-portraiture in the work of the sixteenth-century Bolognese artist, Lavinia Fontana, and her seventeenth-century successor, Elisabetta Sirani. I argue that the female artist's negotiation for status was played out in the transformation from a more official mode of self presentation, such as Fontana's Self-Portrait at the Keyboard , to a deliberate performative shift of embodied personification in her self-portrait as Judith with the head of Holofernes and her later self portraits as St. Barbara in the Apparition of the Madonna and Child to the Five Saints. This negotiation of artistic status continues with Sirani's self-portraits in Judith and the Allegory of Painting, and as what I suggest are more ambiguous and ambitious representations of anti-heroines, Cleopatra and Circe. I also discuss the important role that the emerging genre of biography plays in the female artist's struggle for status. The thesis explores the shift in visual conventions in relation to discourses of artistic identity, gender and genre---such as the donnesca mano---that circulated in Renaissance historiography in Italy, and more specifically, in the cultural milieu of Bologna.

The aim of this essay is to examine how the biblical Queen of Sheba has been depicted in a selection of artworks. The main focus is on how her otherness has been visualized, in relation to King Solomon in particular but also to the Western, European, christian and white self-image at large. The material that has been analyzed comprises the following artworks: Solomon and the Queen of Sheba by Nicholas of Verdun (1181), Procession of the Queen of Sheba; Meeting between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon by Piero della Francesca (ca 1452-1466), The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon by Lavinia Fontana (1599) and The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon by Edward Poynter (1890). In examining the artworks Erwin Panofsky's three- step analysis model has been applied in combination with a theoretical framework consisting of postcolonial studies and critical white theories.  The results show that the Queen of Sheba has been depicted in a variety of ways. In the artwork by Nicholas of Verdun, the Queen is black, carrying the symbolic notion of sin; in Piero and Fontanas artworks she is depicted as white. In Piero's depiction, only small signals, such as clothes, marks her status as “the other”, in Fontanas case, her signs of otherness seem in contrast completely absent. Poynters artwork contains a spectacular display of exotic elements and the Queen has been given a sensual appearance in line with the image of the erotic Orient. One conclusion that the author reaches is that, as Edward Said has argued, in attempting to represent “the other” the Occident documents itself. This is also similar to how the dichotomy between black and white is constructed and how whiteness in relation to black individuals in these pictures gathers its strength and is, rather than being neutral, imbued with meaning.

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