Dissertation Defense Schedule
Academic Excellence
Sharing original dissertation research is a principle to which the University of Delaware is deeply committed. It is the single most important assignment our graduate students undertake and upon completion is met with great pride.
We invite you to celebrate this milestone by attending their dissertation defense. Please review the upcoming dissertation defense schedule below and join us!
PROGRAM | Art History
Mapping Immigrant New York: Race and Place in Ashcan Visual Culture
By: Margartia Karasoulas Chair: Wendy Bellion
ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the racial significance of Ashcan School imagery in the context of period debates about immigration. This group of artists—which includes Robert Henri, John Sloan, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, George Luks, and George Bellows—has always been deeply linked with the perennial subject of their pictures: New York City. Art historians usually describe this relationship in terms of the close affinities between the art and the realities of urban experience. Gender and class-focused investigations of social problems in Ashcan art have been the principal concern of scholars to date. Yet issues of race and debates about immigration are just as crucial for understanding this body of work. Ashcan artists represented immigrants in a range of media and were deeply preoccupied with mobility and immobility, inclusion and exclusion––issues that were part and parcel of the immigrant experience at the turn of the twentieth century.
Organized along racial and spatial lines, each chapter examines a range of urban sites (parks, restaurants, and markets) in connection with specific immigrant populations (Italian, Chinese, and Jewish), locating the production and contestation of racial meaning in and through particular urban spaces. Chapter one considers Glackens’s representations of Italians in Washington Square Park in relationship to themes of mobility and assimilation. The second chapter analyzes Sloan’s Chinese restaurant scene through the lens of food and taste to explore the growing presence of immigrants and changing food culture within New York. Chapter three situates Luks’s Hester Street within the context of the era’s anti-Semitism to address the artist’s engagement with racial typing, stereotyping, and discourses of Jewish difference that proliferated during the long nineteenth century.
Drawing on the approaches of critical race theory and cultural geography, this study complicates familiar narratives about Ashcan School realism and provides a more richly textured picture of the artists’ relationship to their city. More broadly, it resituates Ashcan art within an emerging visual culture of immigration and in relation to contemporary discourses of race, national identity, and Americanness often attributed to artistic production of the interwar decades.
The Process
Step-by-Step
Visit our “Step-by-Step Graduation Guide” to take you through the graduation process.From formatting your Dissertation to Doctoral Hooding procedures.
Dissertation Manual
Wondering how to set up the format for your paper. Refer to the “UD Thesis/Dissertation Manual” for formatting requirements and more.
Defense Submission Form
This form must be completed two weeks in advance of a dissertation defense to meet the University of Delaware Graduate and Professional Education’s requirements.
