Women of the Grand Tour: Travel, Space, and Representation of Women in Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour Portraiture

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Anne Totten and Dr. Martha Peacock, Comparative Arts & Letters Introduction The Grand Tour was a quintessential part of eighteenth-century English culture. A trip that lasted from six months to three years, the purpose of this journey was for young men to supplement their education with exposure to the art and architecture of the Italian […]

Perception of Speech and Song in Religious Music: A Neurological Approach

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Dagan Pielstick and Francesca Lawson, Comparative Arts & Letters Introduction The relationship between speech and song has been an area of interest in evolutionary biology and neuroscience over the past two decades. Some evolutionary biologists have hypothesized that music and language descended from a protolanguage in early human communication (Brown 2000). At the same time, […]

The Pygmalion Project

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Sophie Determan, Roger Macfarlane, Comparative Arts & Letters The goal of my project was to assist Dr. Roger Macfarlane in developing the online index of the Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts which will be centered at BYU. The OGCMA is an important and widely-used index that identifies 30,000+ artworks spanning from the 1300-1900s. […]

The Birdcage as a Semiological Signifier for Submission in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Effects of Good Government

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Claralyn Burt, Elliott Wise, Art History/Comparative Arts & Letters Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco cycle, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1339), decorates the walls of the “Room of Peace” (Salla della Pace) in the municipal headquarters of the medieval, Tuscan city state of Siena. Traditionally celebrated for their secular subject matter, these frescos employ countless carefully […]

Early Orientalist Sentiments in Dutch Baroque Still Life Paintings: A Study of Harmen Steenwyck

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Maika Bahr and Professor Martha Peacock, Art History (Comparative Arts and Letters) Introduction : The relationship between the Dutch Republic and Japan during the seventeenth century provoked early Orientalist feelings that were manifested in still-life paintings. Harmen Steenwyck’s Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanitas of Human Life from 1640, depicts an intricate, Japanese sword […]

Postmodern and Early Modern Theology: Derrida meets Calderón The Derridean Parergon and Painting Theory in Calderón’s El pintor de su deshonra

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Camilo Mejia and Faculty Mentor: Matthew Ancell PhD, Comparative Arts and Letters Simone Heller-Andrist’s The Friction of the Frame ingeniously employs the Derridean parergon as a methodological approach to analyze the mechanisms involved in the reading process. In The Truth in Painting, Derrida uses the term parergon in the context of a frame in a […]

Antiochus IV and the Origin of Jewish Martyrdom Literature

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Allen Kendall and Faculty Mentor: Stephen Bay, Comparative Arts and Letters The study of ancient martyrdom literature has typically revolved around early Christian literature. Many scholars view the concept of martyrdom as a Christian construct, which borrowed only minimally from earlier literary traditions.1This assumption exists largely because Christian writers first used the term “martyr”—originally a […]

A Look at Peruvian Theater: A Translation of and Reflection on No hay isla feliz

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Rachel Draut and Faculty Mentor: Marlene Esplin, Comparative Arts and Letters No hay isla feliz (1954) is a significant part of Sebastián Salazar Bondy’s repertoire and a valuable work of Latin American literature that deserves to be known to the English-speaking world. The play’s author was one of most influential Peruvian authors of his time […]