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NEW JERSEY SCHOLARS PROGRAM 2002-3

During these Programs, the faculty noted below assigned several short papers and one major interdisciplinary research project to be handed in at the conclusion of the Program. This final project was the culmination of the Scholar's experience. The following gives an idea of the seminars and a few of those final research projects.

Gary Baldwin

The History portion of the program focused primarily on the multitude of causes and effects of the Industrial Revolution, which left in its wake a politically, socially, and economically transformed world. Along the way we discussed issues of imperialism, radical social activism, and the benefits and problems of urbanization, all of which have their roots in the industrial transformation of the nineteenth century.

Alla Berenshteyn         1984 and the Fall of Totalitarianism

Alex Curio                 How did the advent of mass production and developments in product packaging help change household shopping from a untilitarian task to a sensory experience?

Joel Harley         Failures of Empire and Europe's Heart of Darkness

Robert Heller         The Nazi Blitzkreig Against Modern Art

Ellen Leszynski                 How did the development of television and mass media affect the U.S., specifically in regard to the Vietnam War?

Adam Lovett         Artistic Censorship During the Cold War

Gerardo Tirado         Why were the European visual arts of the 1930s-40s labeled "degenerative" by the Nazis? What was the perceived threat to German culture inherent in the art?

Alexis Tucker         "Generation Y" and the Re-Marketing of America

Brian Daniell

The Art History portion of the Program focused on the birth of modern art, in particular on the break from Renaissance tenets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the subsequent move toward abstraction. Study included images oft the industrial world; the impact of new materials and techniques on modern art, architecture and design; and the effect of media saturation in the latter half of the twentieth century. We concluded with an introduction to architectural postmodernism.

Jon Au         How did the development of gas warfare in WWI lead to a change in the public opinion about warfare, and how were these changes depicted by artists of the time?

Marissa Fox         Jenny Holzer, Word Art and the Decline of Postmodern Poetry

Katie Hammond         Plastic Surgery and the Rising Quest for the Ideal

Kathryn Hartford         Women's Changing Roles Reflected in Twentieth Century Advertising

Xioajing Huang         The Aesthetic Foundations of the Environmental Movement

Tim Mein                 What role has photography played throughout the last century in the rise of athletes to national icons?

Alfia Sadekova         Marxist and Communist Ideology in Diego Rivera's American Murals

Nina Terrero         How did the changing economic situation of the middle/working classes affect styles of architecture in Trenton?

Katie Weber          How was the breakdown of the French Academy of Painting affected by the social and political climate of France at the turn of the 20th century?

David Munns

The History of Science segment dealt with understanding various historically specific scientific methodologies. From Darwin's thoughts on evolution, and the changing nature of medical practice in India, to the discovery of the structure of DNA, each class sought to understand the powerful social forces at work in claims of universal knowledge. The social relations of science are especially important view examined in an historical context. Overall, my section asked the question: What is Science?

Prudence Cho         The Influence of the Atomic Age Upon the American Psyche

Aileen Deng         Typhoid Mary and New Visions of Disease

Simran Dhillon         How has the debate concerning human cloning changed over time, from Huxley's time to our own?

Evan Fox                 How have scientific and mathematical studies of chaos opened the doors for news forms of art?

Trevor Rudge         Photography's Impact on History and Art

Vishal Shah         New Methods and Attitudes Towards Warfare: Remarque and The Great War

Jesse Soloff         On the Air: The Night Radio Shook Society

Jadwiga Radkiewicz

In the music section of the Scholars Program the students had the opportunity to examine the effects of the advancement of technology on 20th century music. On a micro-level, the course explored the concept of electronic music and its specificity, its history and esthetics. From a larger perspective, the development of new music was presented in a context of the evolution of music throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In such a context, the innovative and often challenging vocabulary of electronic music is viewed as an inevitable consequence of the quest for originality and novelty sparked by Romantic artists and relentlessly pursued by Modernists. This approach was also chosen in order to demonstrate that the perceived gap between today's "serious" avant-guard music and popular culture is only apparent.

Jeffrey S. Hall, Jr.         A Distant To Land Roam: How the Bluegrass Renaissance Served as a Reaction Against Rising Industrialism in the American Southeast

Cynthia Le                 What was the Theremin, and how was its inventor, Leon Theremin, affected by the Communist regime of Lenin?

Lauren Maksym         Soviet Communist Influence on the Creation of the Theremin

Veronica Slaght         How was Debussy's music a reaction to 19th century industrialized society?

Kelly Yu                 Music: The Social Conscience of the '60s and '70s

Wilburn Williams

The literature portion of this program focused on the displacement of traditional conceptions of divinity and humanity by new myths deriving their power from the authority of modern science and technology. Goethe's epic transformation of Faust from a blaspheming magician into the heroic man of science inaugurated a line of speculation that produced men with the power to create life (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein) and to make machines that think and feel (Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2). The celebration of human reason in these works was echoed in Romantic and modern poetry (Walt Whitman's "To a Locomotive in Winter," Hart Crane's "The Bridge," and A.R. Ammons' "Corson's Inlet," e.g.). These developments culminate in the cinema (another new technology), where the offspring of man's fecund ingenuity are simultaneously threatening (the murderous HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey) and consoling (the unconditionally loving Robot Boy in Steven Spielberg's A.[rtificial]I.[ntelligence]).

Jessica Avery         What are the causes for the various failures of European imperialism as reflected in the works of Joseph Conrad, and to what extent is his assessment accurate?

Minoah Finston         How did the diverse musical movements and new explorations of harmonic structure and style in the 19th and 20th centuries influence literary composition in the same era?

Laura Hicken         Ida Tarbell v. Rockefeller's Standard Oil: The Evangelical Crusade

Matthew Kopko         Individualism Under Siege: Ayn Rand's Anthem and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Derek Rudge         Doomed to Destitution: Spiritual Poverty in Hard Times, The Jungle and Fight Club

Gwen Snyder         Assembly Line Salvation: Mass-Produced Morality in A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Jeremy Steinemann         Science Attacks! The Allegorical Critique of Imperialism in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds

Katie White                 How did the social climate in the post WWII period influence the representation of political themes in film?

Justin Williams         Upton Sinclair, Forger of the Future