Graduate Profiles

The Western has long held an important place in American cinema, and its role has evolved with the changing culture of American society. Through a structural analysis of the HBO series, Deadwood, Ivan Boekelheide’s thesis argues that the Western no longer foregrounds the search for heroic morality, preferring to delight in social and moral ambiguities.

Cat’s senior thesis explores the relationship between cannabis and popular and counter cultures, as it provides the key to understanding the bipolar perceptions of marijuana in the United States. Legally, Americans envision cannabis as taboo, but in popular culture Americans relate marijuana to freedom, youth and community. As such, cannabis use became a physical way to express overt protest and dissatisfaction with American institutions. As many artists, musicians and writers romanticized and glamorized marijuana, a disenchanted young generation followed suit and sought refuge with cannabis, helping turn marijuana’s illegality into a political and cultural war.

Ramzi Fawaz’s honors thesis develops a visual history of the teenage superhero in post-WWII American culture. Ramzi argues that the teen superhero became a visual index of key historical crises in the postwar period that were metaphorized in the form of unruly superpowers and biologically unstable bodies, ultimately cathecting particular generational conflicts to the bodies of developing youth gifted with extraordinary abilities.

This thesis reconstructs the historical trajectory of the figure across time while also attending to shifting thematic concerns that run across the period of its greatest popularity. By charting the lineage of the thematic concerns of these texts, the cultural diversity of their characters, as well as the villains, dilemmas, and inter-group conflicts that motivated their narratives, Fawaz unpacks an important historical thread of youth culture that continues to affect our popular imagination to this day.