An Example of an Honors Thesis Presentation

If you are thinking about going to graduate school, it is a good idea to consider doing an Honors Thesis, or any type of senior thesis/independent research project under the guidance of a professor. This will not only give you a feel for what you will be doing in grad school, but it will also give your professor(s) something to evaluate you with when they write your letters of recommendation. Moreover, many grad schools might not take you seriously if you have not done undergraduate research since most of today's applicants have done some type of research project.

You might remember Jane Arney's presentation last Spring at the Third Annual UCR Symposium for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity. Immediately after Jane's excellent presentation, Shawn Higgins presented his own Honors Thesis in a presentation titled "Materialism, Memory, and Self-Expression: Success in Caribbean-American Literature." Shawn graduated from UCR in the Spring of 2009 majoring in English and minoring in Asian Studies. He is now a graduate student at Columbia University.

Here is a recording of Shawn's presentation so that you can see what a great research project and its subsequent presentation looks like:

Shawn Higgins, "Materialism, Memory, and Self-Expression: Success in Caribbean-American Literature," UC Riverside Undergraduate from Shawn Higgins on Vimeo.

Drawn to Satire: John Sloan’s Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Paul de Kock

October 24, 2009 to March 29, 2010
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens

Art History Association co-founder and current UCR grad student Tia Vasilou was involved in curating this amazing exhibition at The Hungtington. Go if you get a chance!

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From 1903 to 1905, American artist John Sloan created 53 etchings to illustrate comic novels by French author Charles Paul de Kock. The books—satires of French society in the first half of the 19th century, full of slapstick violence—were a perfect subject for Sloan’s lively etching style of short, expressive lines and loose cross-hatching.


The project also seemed to inspire Sloan to look at 20th-century New Yorkers with the same satirical eye that de Kock trained on Parisians of the previous century. In the years directly following his work on the illustrations, Sloan produced a number of etchings featuring humorous vignettes of life in the streets, parks, tenements, and taverns of the busy metropolis.

A selection of Sloan’s etchings as well as related prints, drawings, and books will be on view in “Drawn to Satire: John Sloan’s Illustrations for the Novels of Charles Paul de Kock.”


The exhibition opens Oct. 24 and continues through March 29, 2010, in the Susan and Stephen Chandler Wing of the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. The works on view, part of a major promised gift of John Sloan material from Gary, Brenda, and Harrison Ruttenberg, shed light on an important but little known aspect of the artist’s career. The Ruttenbergs’ Sloan collection is rich in preliminary drawings and early versions of the de Kock illustrations, inviting close study of Sloan’s working methods as he was becoming a prominent member of the band of urban realist artists known as the Ashcan school.

Click here for official site.

FACING Questions: Index, Gesture, Portraiture

Work-in-Progress Presentation by Professor Jeanette Kohl

December 3, 2009, @ 5:10 PM in Arts 333
Part of the Art History Department’s Work-in-Progress Series

This paper will explore the role of the face and facial reproductions in sculpted Renaissance portraiture. While in painting the truthful representation of a sitter’s likeness is a result of a translation from three-dimensional corporeality onto the two-dimensional picture-plane, portrait sculptures address, reflect, and reproduce the human body in a fundamentally different way. In re-thinking the interrelated acts of making and perceiving portrait busts with regard to their role in the production of ‘meaning’, the concepts of “index” (as developed by Charles Sanders Peirce and re-interpreted by Rosalind Krauss, Roland Barthes and others) and “gesture” (Giorgio Agamben, in re-interpreting Max Kommerell) will be introduced to the discussion. The question is if and how these tropes might be of heuristic value in sharpening our understanding of early modern portrait sculpture and its often times ambiguous status as a complex medium of reproductive, iconic and symbolic functions - of representation, re-personification and, sometimes, de-personification.

Oil of Los Angeles

Planning Session for the First Annual Emory Elliott Conference

Planning Committee for the First Annual Emory Elliott Conference
November 17, 2009 @ 2:15 PM
History Department Library

All students, faculty, and staff are invited and encouraged to participate.

The major goal of our project is to put together a large scale colloquium of academic research by year’s end. The scope of the colloquium will be regional, with invitations sent out to all the institutions of higher education in southern California.

It is absolutely critical that we begin now if we are to have a successful venture this year--we already have support from crucial faculty members.

However, now is time for the student body to show its ability and interest in its own education, to take an active role in the university's future, and to foster the development of discourse and critical thought.

Interesting Talk!

New York City maps, history, and urbanism: