Humanity currently lacks direction for the future; society must fundamentally change its ways of living and existing. Societies have shifted away from their agrarian past, and many cities are confronted with densification to accommodate an endless flow of new urbanites. Cities a…
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This critical/theoretical history of performance art investigates the relationship between the body of the artist and the infrastructure of the city in Los Angeles and New York City between 1970 and 1985, with specific attention to how performance art resists, renegotiates, and …
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is home to one of the largest independent school police forces in the nation. Until recently, the Los Angeles School Police Department commanded a 70 million budget and possessed a weapons arsenal that included grenade launchers, M-16s…
Korean American Creations and Discontents looks at Korean American subjectivity in Los Angeles after the 1992 Riots/Uprisings. This project begins with the LAPD beating of Rodney King and ends with the fatal Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. This dissertation is necess…
This dissertation has two primary aims: to demonstrate how women guitarists have been the primary advocates for the construction of a guitar-specific institutional landscape, and — with a specific focus on American guitarist Vahdah Olcott Bickford (1885–19890) — to narrate the h…
The present-day neighborhoods of Silver Lake and Echo Park, historically known as Edendale, contain a significant concentration of historic resources associated with Los Angeles’ Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) communities from the early to late-twentieth …
This dissertation project identifies the anti-colonial and anti-racist traditions that Black and Brown Angelenos have created, specifically the artworks expressing cultural pride and solidarity with each other. While other scholars have looked at Black and Latina/o/x Los Angeles…
This essay examines the notion of the real as it pertains to images, experiences, and the paintings that result from them. I advocate for a way of painting that I refer to as indexical and I surmise that painted moments derived by way of indexical marks subvert the polarized cat…
This project seeks to address how silence, noise, and spectacles are represented in relation to foreclosing natural and economic systems and what they might signify as either fuel for, or a drain on, imaginative reverie in three main texts: Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927), Karen Ta…
The marches of Alberico De Caprio are themselves a history of the early 20th century American West, and the archetypal immigrant story long missing among famed American bandleaders. Significant pieces include the official anthem of the Los Angeles County Fair, Portland Rose Fest…
In efforts to transform schools, federal- and state-driven agendas often disregard students as viable producers of meaningful educational space. Some scholars have centered the experiences, actions, and voices of students in transforming their unequal education, establishing tha…
This dissertation examines contemporary Los Angeles-based artists whose identity and work engages with issues of diaspora. I combine visual analysis of the artwork with interviews with the artists to look at the ways in which they utilize several visual and theoretical concepts …
In the early 1990s, authenticity become a buzzword in the heritage tourism industry as the characteristic that sets historic sites apart from other tourist attractions such as amusement parks. Scholars have examined–with much skepticism–sites such as Colonial Williamsburg and ot…
This dissertation is an ethnographic and historical study of Iranian exiles in Los Angeles who, for the past thirty years, have created popular music and media that both directly criticizes the state and realizes secular, sensual, and cosmopolitan iterations of Iranian-ness that…
This research study investigates the perceptions, identities, and typecasting issues surrounding Asian American commercial dancers in Los Angeles through personal and historical contexts. My own experience as a commercial dancer in Los Angeles has led to questions about typecast…
This dissertation examines the role of spectacle events in global cities and the elite-driven transformation of the Olympic Games into producers of the urban image, with implications for determining who has the power to envision the urban future. While the spectacle of the Olymp…
This dissertation explores the impacts of resource procurement on economic growth and urbanization in a county through a historical case study, moving on to discuss the welfare impacts of resource-sharing in two regions. The first two essays explore the impact of the Owens Valle…
Duke Ellington was already an international celebrity recognized for his seventeen-piece “Famous Orchestra” and their decade-long string of three-minute radio hits when he arrived at Los Angeles’s Union Station from New York in January of 1941. New York’s Harlem had been a seemi…
Previous research studies regarding acculturation of Iranian immigrants include adaptations and revisions of scales and inventories designed for other ethnic populations. This study was designed to investigate the acculturation of first-generation Iranian-Americans residing in L…