Vassar Scholarship

Under the cloak of a character who is as ignorant as he is conservative, Stephen Colbert delivers snaps-worthy "truthiness"-insights that often shine a light to mainstream systemic forms of oppression by embodying their very nature. In my thesis, I acknowledge...

Since 2009, Brad Troemel and Lauren Christiansen have run the Jogging, a blog on the popular social media site Tumblr in which they and others post a variety of sloppily rendered and generally silly images to be viewed and shared...

Real Madrid got its start in 1902, but it wasn't until the 1950s under Santiago Bernabéu as president and his squad of international superstars that the team began to make a name for themselves as the best, winning five championships...

My thesis is an exploration of the evolving relationship between the US State and the news media in periods of conflict, ranging from World War I to the War in Iraq, and how this relationship culminated in the practice of...

Everyone today seems to be a critic. As our online and offline lives become increasingly intertwined, we have never had so many sites that depend upon consumer opinion-making for content. User-generated media satisfies the needs of certain consumers, but consumers...

In this thesis, I explore the unique potential of political leaks to illuminate and critique the underlying power structure of the state. The primary motive of the institutional state is to maximize and preserve its own power; because of this...

This project explores a new register of language called 'textese,' which has developed as a result of text messaging via cell phones. I research how and why textese is being used, to understand how text messages are linguistically affecting the...

It is through storytelling, Walter Benjamin believed, that wisdom and experience are shared, letting open narratives achieve an amplitude that information lacks. And Charles Baudelaire considered the window-shopping flâneur to be the observant ne plus ultra of urban modernity. By...

As the Internet drifts away from being a novel technology, people have increasingly become fascinated by the sometimes-garish, comparatively rudimentary aesthetics of the early web. Using Walter Benjamin's reflections on the Parisian arcades as a framework, I propose that this...

This project provides an oppositional reading of ABC's popular <em>Bachelor </em>franchise, arguing that these reality dating programs present viewers with specific narratives of gender, sexuality, class, and race that contribute to greater hegemonic discourse that reifies heterosexual marriage. Through a...