archives@tulane.edu / The purpose of this project is to consider how medieval devotees experienced a specific set of reliquaries and their holy contents as well the obstacles they faced in doing. By placing these objects in dialogue with contemporary theological discourse on the nature of vision as it relates to access and knowledge of God, I will attempt to reconstruct and identify the meaningful connections one could have formed in the presence of relics and reliquaries. I aim to challenge reductive ways of framing medieval thought and experience by attending to and attempting to understand the experience of the medieval viewer. / 1 / Madeline Brown

This thesis views Lermontov’s novel "A Hero of Our Time" as centered on images, glances and vision. In his text Lermontov conveys a persistent fascination with visual perception. The attentive reader can read this language of the eye—the eye can be seen as a mirror of the soul, a fetish, a means of control, and a metaphor for knowledge. The texts that form the novel are linked together by a shared preoccupation with the eye. At the same time, these texts explore the theme of visual perception from different angles, and even present us with different attitudes towards vision. Some are guided by literature, some—by science and physiognomy, and some—by spiritualism and imagination. Since imagination—the lack of it and more often an excess of it—is a persistent motif of the novel, this thesis also explores metaphorical blindness in "A Hero of Our Time."

Amplifications in photographic production and the increased access to images in the 21st century uniquely position photography to articulate and intervene in social structures of power and provide new opportunities for civic engagement. In particular, photography has the potential to articulate and resist what can be understood as a politics of disposability, or the ways in which particular populations are rendered superfluous to the economic and social logic of neoliberalism and channeled out of society. I assert that neoliberal violence must be understood, in part, as a visual problem: the particularities of representation and visibility must be examined in light of the need to consider neoliberal social and economic policies as something other than an inevitability. This dissertation explores the ways that photography can serve to make visible not only the people and discourses that have been marginalized and suppressed, but the structures of disposability itself. Developments in artistic practices and departures from traditional documentary genres converge with precarious labor conditions for cultural workers to widen the parameters for photographic production. The resulting work engages both with the ontological questions of what documentary photography has become as well as with its ability to operate as a potential site of activism—rather than mere representation—through new modes of mediation. This dissertation examines new photographic work that addresses the multiple facets of a neoliberal politics of disposability, the effects of which are compounded by race, class, and gender: police violence and domestic militarization, the skyrocketing rate of women’s incarceration, and the institutional threats to youth and activism in the public sphere. These emergent photographic practices employ new strategies of visualization in order to complicate the viewer’s relationship to representations of violence, contributing to a discourse that broadens the possibility for a critical and productive use of photographs, and imagining alternatives to the material and ideological conditions of neoliberal disposability. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines the ability of emergent modes of documentary photography to articulate and resist social and political violence that is characteristic of neoliberalism, for example the domestic militarization and increased incarceration rates, the shrinking of access to the public sphere, and the particular ways in which certain populations become especially vulnerable to such violence. Shifts in photographic production thanks to new media platforms and the reconfigurations of traditional photography genres have produced photographic strategies that are crucially poised to address such issues. The photographers and projects explored in this dissertation employ new ways of visualizing violence, speaking back to the ways that photography can be used to stultify discourse and misrepresent populations, and harnessing innovative modes of proliferating their work to produce new photographic and political communities.

By critically analyzing trends in museum fashion exhibition practice over the past century, this thesis defines and describes the varied representations of historical fashion within museum exhibitions in Britain and North America. Evidence collected through archival research on past exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bath Fashion Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the McCord Museum, and supplemented by media reports, academic reviews, as well as secondary theoretical literature, suggests that the discourses of historical fashion exhibitions have been heavily influenced by the anxieties and values placed upon fashion more generally. The discipline of fashion curation is deeply rooted in and dependent upon much earlier display practices in museums, galleries, and shops. The interplay between personal and world-historical narratives in exhibitions, the celebration of consumerism and corporate brand identity, as well as claims to aesthetic universality and quality, continued to surface across historical fashion exhibitions in all the institutions studied over the period 1913 to the present. Moreover, historical fashion, as it has been displayed in the case study institutions, also reflects the function of the museum institution itself, especially its visual marking of time and social contexts. This thesis contributes to a growing literature on the history of museums and on fashion curation and provides a historical framework for exhibitions of historical fashion to both disciplines. The worksheet generated during data-gathering provides an objective vocabulary for evaluating the physical and intellectual content of a historical fashion exhibition, and is a potentially useful tool for future researchers. Furthermore, as this dissertation investigates the role of display as a means of communication about material culture, it provides new and original insights into this important aspect of museum practice and therefore, also contributes to theoretical debates within the larger field of cultural heritage.

This research explores the visual culture surrounding liberal arts women’s colleges. This visuality is dependent on gender, and specifically how femininity is ingrained in the existence of women’s colleges. The outdated foundations and the current implications of these college’s prohibit the optimization of an inclusive academic environment. Through the architecture, layout, apparel, and online presence, women’s colleges capitalize of the femininity of the students, while the students are more apt to prioritize their education then the femininity of their peers.

abstract: "Bringing-before-the-eyes": Visuality and Audience in Greek Rhetoric examines how Greek rhetorical theories are understood through the lens of visuality and the ways in which orators accounted for audience knowledges and expectations in the creation of rhetorical texts and performances. Through a close reading of Greek rhetorical texts from the classical period, I develop three heuristics for analyzing the ways in which rhetoricians invite and encourage visualized images through rhetorical practice. By exploring (1) language cues that orators use to signal visualization, (2) the ways in which shared cultural memories and ideas allow orators to call upon standardized images, and (3) the influence of stylistic choices and audience emotions related to the vividness of rhetorical images, I argue that it is possible to analyze the ways in which classical Greek orators understood and employed visual elements in their rhetorical performances. I then conduct an analysis of the visual aspects of Demosthenes' On the Embassy using these heuristics to demonstrate the ways in which these three aspects of visuality are intertwined and contribute to a greater understanding of the relationship between the verbal and the visual in rhetorical theory. My findings indicate that Greek orators readily identified the influence of visual ways of knowing on rhetorical theory and presented early hypotheses of the ways in which sense perceptions affect social practice. This project complicates the ways in which rhetorical theory is categorized. Rather than considering visual rhetoric as a distinct field from traditional, verbal text-based rhetorical studies, this project explores the ways in which visual and verbal modes of thinking are interconnected in Greek rhetorical theory. By bridging these two areas of rhetorical study and arguing that verbal rhetoric can instantiate internalized, visual phenomena for audiences, the dichotomy of verbal and visual is problematized. By focusing on the rhetorical theory of classical Greece, this project also invites future research into the ways in which dominant, Western historic and contemporary systems of epistemology are influenced by the co-mingling of verbal and visual in classical Greek philosophy and education. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

Magister Artium - MA / There is the growing recognition that literary works are not independent, but have often been impacted on by various other media. Complex intersections arise between printed text and other media such as photography, film, music and visual arts. The central theoretical concept underpinning this thesis is a study of intermediality, which interrogates the various ways non-literary media are used as a resource or reference. This analysis will be explored in the novels of Lauren Beukes, and will focus on the intermedial meaning-making and influences of both analogue photography and digital visuality in the dystopian society of Moxyland (2008). Furthermore, it will examine visual art in Broken Monsters (2014) and delineate visuality in terms of “bodies”, as is evident in the depiction of ruin porn and contemporary art.

This practice-led thesis explores ways in which to integrate art and material culture studies as a manifestation of philosophy’s process thread. In doing so, its goal is to generate a praxis which is able to come to holistic terms with the fragmenting dualism of subject-object binaries. By seizing my own subjectivity in its representation of this problem, the thesis develops a performance-led practice which seeks to overcome the barriers that its divisive ‘I’ presents to process. This interdisciplinary project is an explicit response to the figure of Friedrich Nietzsche; his bearing helps to constitute its methodology and repertoire as his presence is creatively teased from the pages of his own books. Part One of the thesis discusses how the mimetic aims of artistic representation were harnessed to challenge my own subjectivity’s singular sense of authority. Thereafter, Nietzsche’s pre-modern temperament comes to enable a holistic consideration of the perceptual ambiguity within Jacques Lacan’s geometric model of ‘seeing things’. Part Two engages with representation as a method of making difference for the bridging of subject-object divisions. This occurs as subjective experience and is extended to some inorganic others, producing creative outcomes which aim to access a cosmological principle of affect that is identified with Nietzsche’s thesis of will to power. The third part of this thesis aligns the research aim, of making apparent the oneness of the cosmos, with the shamanic dimensions of some vintage slapstick cinema. In its development, it comes to terms with the subjective gaze and identifies process-led strategies for challenging and changing its outlooks. This provides a background for Part Four, which marks the beginning of my attempts to engage the gaze of other people in processes that procure and ideally affect their perspectives. While the first four parts of the thesis demonstrate the progress of the research project through the deployment of art and its affecting capacities, its final two parts put the work of philosophy into aesthetic effects, and represent artworks that constitute elements of the thesis itself. Part Five evidences my art practice re-engaging with the world through a project which holistically involves the outlooks of subjects, whilst nevertheless challenging their perceptual precepts. Part Six discusses a performative experiment that consolidates and tests the research findings in a potentially affective structure, expressed through Laurence Halprin’s RSVP cycle. Finally, as it reflects on the potential healing capacities of my practical research and the possibilities for ‘doing’ philosophy, the thesis details how an art-making that embraces both visual and material cultures through the eventness of performance might be able to overcome the problematic perceptual divides that limit the progress of process logics.

This dissertation has examined the narrative genre of tanci in late imperial China while keeping a close eye on the theme of women's self-empowerment. I have analyzed three voluminous tanci works, Destiny of Rebirth; Dream, Image, Destiny; and A Histoire of Heroic Women and Men, respectively published in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. I have proposed that these tanci works, by depicting women's crossdressing, self-portraits, and homoerotic sensitivities, presented a transgressive potential to disrupt dominant social and cultural discourses of womanhood in late imperial China. Particularly, tanci works present women who leave their cloistered lives and travel while crossdressed as men. These women are the very opposite of the Confucian feminine ideal (the filial, chaste, and obedient woman who follows the prescribed codes required of a daughter, wife, and widow). Writing such challenging stories was itself a transgressive act for late imperial women authors, whose literary practices were under strict social regulation in the patriarchal society. For women readers of the time and for those of the contemporary period, reading these stories was and is an empowering experience. By identifying with the heroic protagonists, historical and contemporary readers alike may be inspired to envision a life of autonomy and freedom outside the domestic space. Tanci works, I propose, validate women in their immediate historical and cultural landscapes and project rich possibilities for women to reform social reality. The historical task of contemporary readers of tanci is therefore three-fold: to retrieve the voices of earlier authors from obscurity, to empower themselves with the help of these voices, and to integrate the predecessors' insights into a vision of new possibilities of social change.

Today, computers enabled architects to represent their ideas in a fast and more efficient way compared to making drawings by hand. It enabled architects to visualize their ideas in a way that hand drawings cannot. This thesis is an attempt to make digital reconstructions to provide the visual experiences of the ancient city Aphrodisias in western Asia Minor and its temple dedicated to divine emperors known as the Sebasteion of Aphrodisias. Its aim is to show that by using common architectural softwares one can overcome the possible problems of graphic representations in the history of architecture. Moreover, this study focuses not only on the interpretations of the data at hand but also demonstrates how the missing information defines and shapes the digital models in order to convey the meaning of the buildings.