Senior Thesis
The cornerstone of a Reed education, the senior thesis is organized as a year-long project in which students work one-on-one with a Spanish department faculty advisor to write a 50-70-page essay on a topic that they develop in consultation with the advisor. This provides an opportunity to consolidate the analytic and research skills honed in the Qual exam and previous coursework.
At the end of the first semester the student hands in a chapter that includes an introduction detailing the overall objective of the project, its critical approach, and the expected arc of the argument. This document is discussed with the advisor and the first reader in a 45-minute oral examination. At the end of the second semester, after the thesis is completed, there is an hour-and-thirty-minute oral examination in which the student explains the substance as well as the process of thesis and answers questions from a committee composed by four faculty members. Thesis grades are assigned by the advisor in consultation with the rest of the committee.
The thesis should present a clearly-articulated hypothesis and develop it through a consistent and well-supported argument. The aspiration for the oral presentation is that the student be able to explain in detail the intellectual importance and methodology of the project.
Themes of Recent Theses
2024
Leah Stievater, Reading the Doppelgänger through Bataille. (Comparative Literature)
Madeleine Grace Moore Coleman, Complexity in Comfort: the 21st-century American Weekly-release Sitcom. (English)
Rahoul Juan de Kobbe, Spanish Cinema Adapted: What Hollywood Changed and Why. (English)
Reese Schaffer, Imagining Digital, Queer Utopias: Queering the Map as Archival World-making. (Anthropology)
Sienna Otero, My Grandma Thinks I'm Digging in the Swamp: Nostalgic Practice as Survivance. (Anthropology)
Zachary Kasper, All They do is Sit and Talk About me: Representations of the Self in Queer Cinema. (Comparative Literature)
2023
Brewster Durbin, The Irishman and the Unspeakable. (English)
Genevieve Childers, Chasing an Escape: Cottagecore, COVID-19, Capitalism, and Climate Change. (Anthropology)
Joshua Park, Exploring Linsanity: The Model Minority Myth, Laboring bodies, and Asian American Racialization Through Sport. (Comparative Race and Ethnicity Studies)
Nicole Radlauer, Tending, Making, Breaking: Dyke Play as World Creation. (Anthropology and Studio Art)
Quinlan Evans, The Smoke of Our Motherland: The Aesthetics of Industrial Ruin in Three Works from Russian-Speaking Ukraine. (Russian)
Tyler West Stevens-Scanlan, Scales of Collectivity Among Systems on TikTok. (Anthropology)
2022
Alexander Fallow, The Familiar Face Flickers in the Crowd: The City and the Subject of the Soviet Thaw in I walk the Streets of Moscow. (Russian)
Anayanci de Paz, The Normalization of Power Relations within Celda 211 and Ciutat Morta. (Spanish)
Sascha Patrick, Self-hatred Networks: An Exploration of Online Embodiment in Pro-ed and Incel Forums. (Anthropology)
William Knight, Extended Gutters: Sequencing space and the narrative power of the panel in Watchmen.(English)
2021
Ana Zhvania, Overperforming the Mainstream: Zaniness as a Disruptive Practice. (Comparative Literature)
Megan Eley, Korrasami is Canon: Representations, Queerness, and Fandoms. (Anthropology)
Natalie Lasko, 4chan and Islamophobia. (Anthropology-Religion)
Paul Molamphy, Orisha Traditions Through YouTube: Virtual Interactions in Enduring Communities. (Anthropology)
Sky Ford, More than Tomatoes: a Political Ecology of Organic Farming in Taiwan, (Anthropology)
2020
Henry Conrad-Poor, A Multiplicity of canons: Authenticity, Affordances, and Commercialism in a Community of Fan Authors. (Anthropology)
Kavi Subramanian, World Between Bits. (Comparative Literature)
Raquel Díaz: “Love You for 10,000 Years: How Won Kar-wai Contextualizes Love and Desire in Three Films” (English)
2019
Libby O’Neil, “A voice and Nothing More": Technological Embodiment and the Artificial Female Voice. (MALS)
David James, Breaking the Mold: Un-Thinking Ecocinema. (Comparative Literature)
2017
Benjamin Landauer, Cyberfeminist Poetics in China and Taiwan: Zhai Yongming, Yin Lichuan, and Xia Yu. (Chinese)
Dylan Holmes, Seeing Between the Wander Lines: Elaborating the Communal Cinema of Fernand Deligny. (Comparative Literature)
2016
Edmond Soun, The Absolute from Nothing: Vladimir Kobrin’s Film Art. (Russian)
Ian Connelly, Remembering the Folk: Visibility and Bearing Witness in the Folk Memory Project. (Chinese)