Graduate Profiles

Madelaine’s thesis research examines the history of healthcare policy in the United States and how this history was used to draft and pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Her primary goal was to explore how President Barack Obama employed historical discourse to overcome political backlash and to develop the Affordable Care Act.

Beginning in the 1970s, the womens liberation movement began to challenge traditional American cultural ideologies that stigmatized female sexual autonomy, and in the 1990s, this rhetoric began to be applied to teenaged girls in addition to older women. In her senior honors thesis, Sally Littlefield calls this phenomenon the teen female sexual revolution. With the advent of the teen female sexual revolution came an increase in portrayals of sexual teens in magazines, television, films, and popular music, signaling how impactful this movement was in American culture. However, not all of these portrayals were as feminist and sex positive as the original movement that sparked them. Though some indicated positive change, some narratives surrounding teen female sexuality presented by popular culture were indicative of a widespread backlash against this movement. In this essay, Sally examines the conventions of portrayals of teen female sexuality in American popular culture present in the 1980s, exploring how these conventions align with the longstanding taboos against teen female sexuality. She then discusses how American popular culture of the 1990s subverted these conventions, in ways both empowering and disempowering for young women. Sally argues that 1990s popular culture expressed both support of and backlash against teen female sexuality. The thesis concludes with the observation that much of the convention-shattering tropes of the 1990s that directly addressed teen female sexuality seem to have faded by the early 2000s, indicating that the teen female sexual revolution was short-lived.

Miriam Peraless thesis explores traditional medicine through the lens of curanderismo, and critiques historic gender and racial dynamics that equate science with masculinity and whiteness and witchcraft with femininity and ethnic otherness. Using ethnographic interviews, Miriam also examines how traditional healers base their methods in the spiritual, psychological, and social needs of their patients.

Kristen Wilsons senior honors thesis explores how Lemony Snickets (Daniel Handlers) A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999-2006) positions itself at the precipice of a new millennium, looking back to the Cold War and looking forward, towards 9/11 and beyond, as it seeks to offer child readers a framework for living as a noble enough person. With its dour, ironic tone, its approach to grief as a complex phenomenon that belies simple resolution, and its firm commitment to moral relativism, the Series offers a different path forward for American childrens literature and American society as a whole. This path only grows more starkly differentiated from that taken by the United States government following the events of 9/11 and the foreign and domestic policy taken up thereafter, Handler often challenging the basic assumptions of such policies directly, particularly the reliance on us vs. them binaries and the construction of extensive surveillance networks.

Handler, Wilson demonstrates, further challenges basic societal assumptions about the relationship of children to adults, highlighting the political, social, and cultural disenfranchisement that children endure, especially in homes without benevolent caregivers and most particularly in an environment of limited governance, when welfare programs designed to protect children are eliminated and replaced with inconsistent and inferior privatized versions that cater only to select groups. Expanding the relationship of parent and child to mirror that of state and citizen, Handler raises difficult questions about the existence of forbidden knowledge (classified information) and the outright lies which are so often told to comfort and even protect the child/citizen’s ignorance ever preferable to knowledge?

Musical theatre re-erupted as a mainstream on-screen trend in the early 21st century. Rosemarie Alejandrinos senior honors thesis explores how on-screen musicals like Disney Channels High School Musical (2006) targeted a younger audience, catering to the audiences taste by establishing a postmodern musical aesthetic. Within these early made-for-television musicals, a trend of homogenization of socio-cultural difference emerges and is exaggerated and solidified by FOXs primetime musical television series, Glee (2009-2015). The run-off success from these early made-for-television musicals and the Glee phenomenonalong with the Academy Award-winning precedent set by the film adaptation of Chicago (2002)fed into the success and blockbusterization of musical film adaptations. This shift in the early 21st century of musical theatre in mainstream popular culture is ever-evolving and impacts popular culture today, including the advent of the live television musical and the increasingly auteur-centric nature of the Broadway stage musical, such as Sara Bareilless Waitress (2015).

Over the course of Hunter Cobleighs thesis, the 2016 Netflix release of Marvels Luke Cage is explored as the revolutionary creation of a Black universe with a Black perspective and voice. The broader cultural, social, and political significance of the series is unpacked via close readings of character development and selected story arcs and scenes. In particular, Hunters thesis traces the development of the titular character from the 1970s era Power Man, a veritable side kick in disco attire to the black-hoodie clad 21st century avatar of #blacklivesmatter.

Miesha Garnetts senior honors thesis develops a close reading of reading of Black female identity formation in the Vampire Huntress Legend series of twelve novels by the late L.A. Banks. As she explains in her thesis, to counter the traditional erasure of Black women from vampire fiction, Banks writes a legendary, supernatural woman whose racial identity is the source of her power.

The Presidio of San Francisco was Americas the longest continuously operated military post until 1995, when the National Park and the Presidio Trust assumed control over this 1,500 acre site located at the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. As a part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the Presidio is a national park unlike any other. It hosts more visitors than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined, and more is expensive to maintain. Robert Gibbonss senior thesis examines the unique fiscal challenges The Presidio faces, the allegedly altruistic aims of its governing bodies, and the federal agencies and political forces that protect and enhance its natural lands, while enforcing the dual mandates of revenue generation and free social services. Public documents detailing development plans, expert testimony, and community input provide a well-rounded perspective to the most urgent challenge the Presidio presently faces–recognizing cultural and physical barriers that exclude already marginalized Bay Area communities from enjoying this new type of national park.

Allison Iveys senior honors thesis focuses on the life and premature death of Leland Stanford, Junior. Founded as a memorial to the beloved son of Leland and Jane Lathrop Stanford, Stanford University was inspired by his intellectual curiosity, love of collecting, and nascent scholarship. Through a careful examination of how wealthy Californians shrugged off the mantle of European imitation in favor of carving out a distinctly American, distinctly Western, and distinctly Californian lifestyle, Allisons honors thesis traces the development of the surrounding area from farmland to the global business center now known as Silicon Valley.