This project analyzes films that challenge and reconfigure the apparatus of colonial picture-making in order to construct a self-reflexive understanding of contact. Looking at Trinh T. Minh-ha's Shoot for the Contents, Chris Marker's Sans soleil, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Hu…
This thesis, “Exotic Journeys: Exploring the Erotics of American Travel Literature, 1840–1930,” focuses on the interrelations between eroticisation, sexuality, race and travel discourse as they converge in American travel literature. Defining travel literature as a hybrid of the…
The subject of this dissertation is the role which a collection of ivory objects from North Syria played in the formation of royal identity during the Neo-Assyrian empire, the entity based in northern Mesopotamia in the ninth through seventh centuries B.C. This dissertation sugg…
This thesis examines how medieval Byzantium is represented in French epics, romances, and chronicles of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries within a discursive triangle formed by Exoticism/Orientalism/Otherness. Despite their geographical proximity with the Muslim world, …
Bringing the Tiger into the Parlor: The Consumption of Exotic Objects in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel considers the ways foreign objects are exotified through consumption and display in the domestic settings of novels by Susan Ferrier, Benjamin Disraeli, William Makepeac…