This dissertation studies the work of artist Margarita Paksa (1933-2020) during Argentina’s military dictatorship. Unlike other Argentinian artists who left the country and enjoyed commercial success or security in the postwar art world, Paksa never left Buenos Aires. While livi…
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As archaeologists integrate digital media into all stages of archaeological methodology it is necessary to understand the implications of using this media to interpret the past. Using digital media is not a neutral or transparent act; to critically engage with digital media it i…
This thesis is an archaeological and ethnographic exploration of historic military sites associated with the Cold War. It takes a multi-sited approach to former radar installations in the UK and examines the range of meanings and values that surround them, as well as their media…
This research calls for a reconsideration of the notion of rubbish; one that does not consider disposal as the final act of the production-consumption cycle but, instead, appreciates the practices enacted around rubbish as constitutive of value creation. Drawing on Henri Lefebvr…
This thesis examines the materiality and practice of West African indigenous/'traditional' medicine through an archaeological ethnographic study engaging with contemporary healing specialists in a migrant community of Accra, Ghana. It makes an original contribution to knowledge …
This thesis tests the assumption that spatial methodologies may reveal deep underlying similarities in modernity across opposed political systems. In the USSR, the unexpected 'mis-use' of stadium spaces enabled fans to recast stadium space in ways meaningful to personal manifest…
This thesis looks at the function of signatures in visual art using the theory of Jacques Derrida and a series of paradigmatic historical examples. Specifically, it departs from ‘Signature Event Context’ (SEC) to establish signature outside the idiom of visual art as a social pr…
This thesis explores EU borders and bordering in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in the context of the 2004 EU enlargement, the 2007 extension of the Schengen zone and the 2004 Eastern Dimension of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) that, in 2009, was upgraded to the Easte…
This thesis proceeds from an anxiety about the effects of depoliticization in the context of a sovereignty rooted in the management of the material lives of its subjects and in a globalized world defined by risk and interdependence. It argues that the production of humanity as a…
This study investigates the landscape of early Islamic period Syria as a lens with which to examine the social dynamics of an emerging Islamic tradition. My investigation of the various dimensions of this landscape reveals that it was not the product of an essential Islamic spat…
This dissertation investigates one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century - the jewelry belonging to a female named Pu-abi buried in the so-called Royal Cemetery at the site of Ur in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq. The mid-third millennium B.C. a…
This project attempts to offer an extended discussion related to objects as an attachment, as body extension, as interlocutors in how the individual (the body) experience the world. It refers to the physical representation and the many attempts to understand the transformation o…
This study interrogates the ritual function of Aztec agricultural deities across various media to discover how material objects were perceived as animate and sacred. In addition, it addresses the following themes as they relate to the objects themselves: the instantiation of sac…
In the sixth-century, Gaul was undergoing a prolonged negotiation about how its communities should function, framed in terms of divine materiality, and it survives to us today in the period's most popular stories about itself: the Vitae of its saints. This thesis argues that hag…
This thesis explores moments of contact and touch within Paradise Lost in the context of Milton's much-discussed material monism. I argue that touch operates in the poem in accordance with Milton's monism as a process of unification and merging that occurs on both corporeal and …
This study tracks changes in how an identifiably Irish distilled liquor flowed through society in early modern Ireland. Ireland, as diagnostic grey area between colony and European state periphery, is a fruitful place to explore the intersection of colonialism and the emergence …
This thesis examines the ways in which the 1990s art practice of globally renowned artist Lee Bul (b. 1964) critically parodies the visual cultural legacies and collective memories of post-Korean war rapid development, authoritarian dictatorship, and nation-building. Using nontr…
This dissertation examines the dynamic relationship between written language and literary fiction in modern and contemporary Japanese-language literature. I analyze how script and narration come together to function as a site of expression, and how they connect to questions of v…
The purpose of this project is to consider how medieval devotees experienced a specific set of cross-shaped 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 o…