Criteria and Requirements for Honors Designation in the Art History Thesis

The year-long thesis process is open to any student who is interested in conducting a rigorous research/writing project and has submitted a proposal, which has been accepted (see guidelines for thesis proposal). The year-long process gives students the opportunity to work closely with a member of the art history faculty to define a topic, develop a proposal, create a bibliography, conduct primary and secondary research, and write the paper. The undergraduate thesis allows students to delve into a specific topic within the field of art history, conduct research, engage with art historical methodologies, and present their findings in a coherent and scholarly manner.

An honors thesis demonstrates an advanced level of rigor, depth, and originality in research. The honors thesis sometimes involves travel to conduct primary research (department funds are available to support such research) and often involves a more extensive literature review and framing of the artwork(s), visual, or material culture under investigation. The honors thesis is a substantial and nuanaced piece of academic writing that showcases the student's writing and research abilities. Honors students conduct excellent primary research and first-order analysis leading to a contribution that may be further researched (in graduate school, on a fellowship, etc). The honors thesis is a distinguished achievement within the department and can serve as a strong foundation for students considering graduate studies or other scholarly pursuits in art history.

An honors thesis is a distinction of exceptional merit awarded by the Art History faculty at the end of the thesis process. It should be understood, however, this is not an expected outcome of the year-long project; all Art History faculty will carefully read a thesis under consideration for an honors designation and come to a shared understanding about the thesis designation.

At the honor's level, a student will demonstrate excellent self-direction and proaction in both process and product.

Process

• Find and analyze resources and archives.
• Articulate research questions appropriate for the body of work under investigation.
• Build and annotate bibliographic sources.
• Identify and apply proper methodology (using appropriate tools to realize these methods suitably).
• Meet deadlines jointly established with advisor (and be respectful of the thesis process with one's advisor, which will often include weekly meetings, drafts, discussion and analysis of visual materials).
• Provide second reader with a complete (if not polished) draft that includes properly formatted footnotes and bibliography.
• Respond to feedback (from advisor, second reader, and from comments during Oral exam/presentation) in a considered and substantive manner.

Product

• Insights and findings are consequential to the field, and the student establishes and communicates the significance of their/her/his contribution
• Thesis and argumentation are superbly sound and well positioned.
• Prose is polished (evidence of having revised and clarified body of thesis for language use and syntax).
• The final product follows guidelines for format and citation on the art history website.

The university's minimum eligibility for honors candidacy is a 3.000 cumulative grade-point average by the time of enrollment in the honors thesis courses. Students achieving honors will be recognized at the baccalaureate department awards ceremony and in the university graduation program. The "honors" designation will be indicated on the student's diploma and official transcripts.

Recent honors theses abstracts:

Ellie Penner '23, "Aesthetics of Independence: Life of Buddha paintings in the Ladakh Budh Vihar." This thesis aims to expand upon our understanding of mid 20th-century Indian art through the documentation and analysis of a set of previously unknown paintings referred to here as the Life of Buddha cycle. Each of these 18 paintings depict different moments throughout the life of the historic Gotama Buddha. In the year 1956, these paintings were commissioned for the Buddha Jayanti exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi, a government art institution in India. Together, six modern artists came together to create this visualization of the Buddha's life story. At the same time as these paintings were exhibited, a Buddhist Himalayan community fought to establish itself in New Delhi, seeking inclusion in the independent Indian government. Eventually, these paintings would become the primary painting program to adorn the walls of the Ladakh Budh Vihar, a colony of land in north Delhi, which was designated for these Himalayan Buddhists. From their original commission to their current display, the journey of the Life of Buddha paintings reflect the sensibilities surrounding the visual incorporation of Buddhism at the forefront of newly independent India. The Life of Buddha paintings exemplify how modern Indian artists connected to and reused Buddhist narratives and ancient styles from Buddhist archaeological sites in India as a way to establish and define its own aesthetic as an independent nation.

Elyssa McMaster'22, "Florence + The Machine: A Computational Approach to Florentine Liturgical Manuscript Illuminations from the Late Trecento." This thesis investigates early methods to use artificial intelligence to sort images of medieval Italian manuscript illuminations by workshop from 1360 to 1400. Sorted images were passed through a 2-dimensional convolutional neural network to train a computer to discern the authorship of an unlabeled image. The network reached a 78% rate of accuracy. Though the network did not achieve high enough accuracy to be consistently reliable, preliminary results indicate that this project has produced the first step to continue objective connoisseurial work on this dataset. This project indicates that Jacopo di Cione, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, and several of their assistants were the masters responsible for a body of manuscript illuminations previously attributed to a single figure named Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci.