By Arianna Tartaglia, Fairfield University
Complex female characters are few and far between in Hollywood blockbusters, and those representations often come scantily clad as objects for the masculine gaze rather than as figures for women to relate to. The traditional male lens of Hollywood commercial film has influenced the cinematic representation of women, especially when it comes to female character portrayal and development.
Read MoreBy Jack Wolfram, Emory University
Recently finishing its forty-fifth season, NBC’s live television variety show Saturday Night Live (SNL) has developed a reputation for disregarding the comedic boundary “lines” that are rarely crossed when discussing certain issues concerning the sociopolitical world, current events, and pop culture. Over the past several years, SNL casts predominately focus the majority of their satirical skits and sketches on the inherent character of powerful, high-profile entities. Due to the live broadcast nature of the show, SNL actors are notorious for taking full advantage of this unique comedic platform where very little dialogue is censored. These comics’ performances every Saturday night resonate far beyond the simple guffaws of entertainment.
Read MoreBy Maggie Lu, University of British Columbia
As one of the most preeminent composers of the early eighteenth-century, Johann Sebastian Bach is associated most strongly with the height of the Baroque Era. Intricate polyphony and harmonic complexity remained defining characteristics of his style even toward the end of his life – features that were at times the subject of criticism from his own contemporaries. However, despite the view that Bach remained committed to the musical styles of the past during the emergence of the style galant, opuses from the composer’s mid-to-late career suggest that he was both capable and willing to adopt elements of the new fashion into select compositions.
Read MoreBy Tamiya Anderson, Pfeiffer University
The publishing industry is in a time of continuous change. Small presses, or independent publishing houses, sustain an independent or fully staffed publishing team that manages a smaller enterprise than big-name publishers. As the industry moves in a direction that endures several transitions and developments, this paper works to catalog the efforts of certain small presses in this time of technological, operational, and structural flux. Since the fifteenth-century development of the printing press, the publishing industry has endured several core operational shifts.
Read MoreBy Shefali Golchha, NMIMS University, Mumbai
With the global discussion surrounding human rights constantly expanding, people express continued concern about their own safety, vulnerability, and agency. This is reflected in the number of crimes against children, women, and minorities that surface each day and the scholarly work that is derived from these experiences. Patricia Uberoi, known for studying family, marriage, and kinship systems in India, mentions that, while the family is imagined as a safe space, it is also a site of exploitation and violence.
Read MoreBy Lauren Wilbur, the University of Texas at Austin
Historical archaeology attempts to understand cultures of antiquity by studying written primary sources in conjunction with archaeological analysis. The Crusades present a challenge in using this method because many physical spaces have not been excavated due to political strife, or they had only been excavated in a biblical context with little regard to any other period. However, the discipline has recently started to see some success in the areas that the Latin Christians occupied and material evidence is more readily available to fill in the holes of Crusader history.
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