The senior thesis represents the most sophisticated original research and writing that you will undertake as an undergraduate at Princeton. In many cases, the area and topic that you select will influence the direction of your future professional career, and the relationship that you establish with your thesis adviser will be important for your admission to graduate and professional school and job placement. Even if you do not pursue a career in art history or archaeology, the skills that you develop in producing a thesis will be immensely useful in writing reports, evaluating data, problem solving, making policy evaluations, and so forth.
Independent Work offers advice regarding your thesis including picking a title, working with an adviser, and formatting the paper.
2023
“The Bookkeeper-Magician”: Paul Klee and his Catalogue Raisonné
Prepared with Plumbum: The Socioeconomics of Lead Production in Pompeii
The Rebellion Of Ali b. Muhammad Reexamining The Zanj Revolt and its Place in Abbasid History
The Maiden and The Mirror: Considering Epigram and Image in Tandem on the Attic Grave Stele of Pausimache (390–380 B.C.E.)
Comb Back Home
“That Perfect Girl is Gone”: Walt Disney Studios’ Post-Princess Era and the Evolving Representation of Animated Disney Heroines
Monsanto as Image Maker: Feeding the World Lies
Suspension
Across Types: A Reexamination of the Sculpture of Charles Cordier
The Exposures of Francesca Woodman
Lenses of Partition: Remembrance and the Photograph
Petty Saint
“There is Nothing New Except in Recollection”: * How Kiefer’s Searing Holocaust Reflections in his Palazzo Ducale Installation Reinterpret Venetian History
Ego Death in Two Battles: 988 (1;800;273;TALK) and Living in the GAP
Dompas as Symbolic Object: The Passbook in Contemporary South African Art
Boxes and Building Blocks
First Impressions Matter: A New Behavioral Strategy to Model the Evolution of Cooperation in Everyday Trade in Ancient Pompeii and Viking Age Scandinavia
POST, HUMAN! Stitched Faces, Cyborgian Digital Embodiments, and Trans* Futures
MOTHER, HEALER, BARBARIC WARRIOR: The Multifaceted Role of Female Representation in Romano-British Religion and the Political Significance of Britannia Under Imperial Rome
2022
The "Private" Performance: Giovanni Boldini and Artistic Spaces
JUXTA-POSEUR: The Importance of Contemporary Art in Historical Settings
The Twelfth House
Rhythm Interiorized: Mondrian, Color and Swing
The Conscious Reflection: Convex Mirrors in Renaissance and Baroque Paintings
American Oxygen
This Wonderful Memory
Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken
Unicorn
The Artist as Financier: Damien Hirst and the Financialization of Art
Syzygy
Faith in Flux: Romano-British Religion in Archaeology and Epigraphy
Of Tigers and Men: Dissecting Narrative Illustration of the Mahāsattva Jataka Paintings in Mogao Caves 254 and 428
My Painting is an Act of Decolonization: Viewing Wifredo Lam’s Vision of a Decolonial Future
Folkscraft
"Pittore del Paradiso": Cultural Meanings of Whiteness in The Late Manner of Guido Reni
2021
Isis and the Virgin Mary: Pictorial borrowing or religious syncretism?
The Last Noel
Performing healing: rituals & repetition
“VROOM. VROOM.” - A Short Film Production Plan
POSTAL
omg so good
Reassembling a Nation Through Art: Korea’s Political and Institutional Approaches to Cultural Heritage, from 1945 to the Present
Drawing Connections and Sculpting Identities: Exploring the Effect of Art Therapy on Mental Illness and Disability Through Case Studies of Adolf Wolfli and Judith Scott
refractory planes
Conceptualizations of the Indigenous Body in Response to the Columbus Quincentenary
Chaff & light trash
Piece of Pieces
Seeing Through Google’s Eyes: Jon Rafman, Michael Wolf, and the Impact of Google Street View
From Cholera to COVID-19: A Framework for Analyzing the Visual Media of Communicable Disease Outbreaks
The Twilight of the Sublime: Museum Architecture and Identity in Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum and Jewish Museum Berlin
The Missing Form of Asclepius: An Analysis of the Remaining and Rare Material Culture Pertaining to the Ancient Greek God of Medicine
2020
The Art History of Damien Hirst's Natural History
From the Left
Talking Heads: What Zoocephalic Figures in the Tripartite Mahzor Say About Gender and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval Germany
nebraska warp/weft
A Sculptural Affair: How the Sculptures on the Theaterama at the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair Flourished as Public Art
Constructed Topographies and Ecologies of Slavery: An Examination of 19th-Century Plantation Landscapes in British Jamaica and the United States South
Both/And Compositions: Reconciling the Contradictions of Georges de La Tour
Live long, Madelief
(Mis)Understanding Hannah Wilke
as luck would have it
2019
Mortal Structures
"The Camera Speaks": Aaron Siskind, The Feature Group, and the Production of the Harlem Document
Unsaid
Canaries in a Coal Mine
The Art of the Toilette by Manet, Morisot, and Seurat
A Curated Life: Adolph De Meyer's Self-Fashioning into a Celebrity
"Where the Universe Sings": An Assessment of Lawren Harris's Nationalism and Spirituality in His Art
The Lady's Room
Landscape Painting, Urbanization, and the California Imaginary
The Making of a Magdalene: Caravaggio's Reconfiguration of Mary Magdalene's Image in Counter-Reformation Painting
"The Devil Wears Dada": Commentary on Fashion and the Fashion System in Dada
From Patchwork to Plane: The Quilts and Quilters of Gee's Bend
Carmesí
Van Gogh's Japan: Picturing an Unseen Land
origen
The Midnight
Re-Visions of Violence: Taboo and Transformation in the Paintings of Contemporary French-Algerian Artist Dalila Dalléas Bouzar
Holy
Made in Milan: Corporate Sponsorship in the Restoration of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II
Dazzle Camouflage / Cloak Cloak
Perceptions and Rejections of Pop, Pornography, and Americanization in the Art of Tom Wesselmann
Are We Postmodern?: The Architectural Exhibition in Late Twentieth-Century France
Elephant
2018
Ancient Greek Sculpture: How Has the Image Been Used in the Building of Societies?
i have to be a lonely warrior, tonight
"To be Great is to be Misunderstood": Reframing Gwen John's Portraits of Women from 1900–1914
$1.85
More than Fashion: The Early History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute
Ambitions
From Pottery to Polygons: A Reconstruction and Exploration of the Gigantomachy
"The Fire and Vapour of Flame Within": Pozzolana from the Campi Flegrei in Roman Maritime Concrete
Ground
I'm all Talk
Somatoscapes
Continuous Reward
Proconnesian Marble: Power Dynamics and Industry in Early Byzantium
From Pedestal to Playscape: Isamu Noguchi's Playground Designs as an Expanded Field of Sculpture
Winslow Homer and Cullercoats
Surface Anxieties: Vulgarity in the London Paintings of James Tissot
Fishing the Short Run
Can You Taste It?
"A PHENOMENAL PRESENCE THAT IS UNEQUIVOCALLY BLACK AND BEAUTIFUL": Redefining Beauty Through the Art of Kerry James Marshall
Continuing Chinese Shanshui Paintings in the West: 21st century artists Arnold Chang, Zhang Hongtu, and Xu Bing's Exploration and Transformation of Tradition
Collecting Alaska: Sheldon Jackson, Louis Shotridge, and the Pursuit of Northwest Coast Artifacts, 1879–1932
The Incorruptible Body
By the Many Protectors: Apotropaic Layering in Ancient Egyptian Fertility Objects
Ibeji
2017
Atlas of the Impossible: Mapping Commodity Forms in Still Life and Photography
은별
Martens Monoprint: Graphic Design as a ‘Ghost Discipline’
“objects w/feelings” with Simon Wu
Knot Knot
View from a Balustrade: Martín Rico's Orientalist Vision in Spain, Venice, and France
Uncovering Devotion: Interactive Flap Prints and the Crafting of Experiential Space in the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia
"Full of Company": The Cultivation of Social Identity and Structure in Thomas Gainsborough’s The Mall in St. James’s Park
G(oo/ew)
Finding Ground: Exploring the American Terrain of the Center for Land Use Interpretation
us, in part
Eden
Privacy Settings
Chasing Georgia
Talking to You is Exhausting
MADAME CITRON, a film by Chanyoung Park
Untitled
EXCESS
Culture Complex: Territory and National Memory in the Films of Roy Andersson
Place, Performance, and Possibility: Interconnectivity in William Sidney Mount's The Power of Music
Lumpy Projector
Painting as Metaobject: Reading Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still Life
Resistance Performed: Politics and Aesthetics in Myanmar
“Tell Them Everything”: Three Women Artists and the Northern Irish Conflict
2016
William Mills Ivins, Jr., and the Creation of the Prints Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bulking is a Feminist Act
For Your Eyes Only: The Integration of Monastery and Museum at Meteora, Greece
Engaging Dubois’s Veil as a Site of Black Agency from Ethnography, to Film, to Photography, and to Fashion
Content and Discontent: Locating the Viewer in the Work of Francis Bacon
Understanding the Unfinished: An Investigation into the Value of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Incomplete Works and Drawings
Seriously Funny: Humor and Medium in William Wegman’s Videos, 1970–1999
Ruins of the Revolution: Egyptian Archaeology in the Wake of Arab Spring
Sturtevant’s Feminist Reversals
Loving Lenses: Photography and the Erotic in Duchamps's Oeuvre
The Natural Devolution of Man in Response to The Modern World: Technology and Nature in the Work of Lee Alexander McQueen
It’s Lit: Light Sculpture in the 1960s and 1970s
Beautiful, Memory, Desserts
Time is a floating point number
The Development of Early Ceramic Traditions in the Americas: The Economic and Social Contexts of Valdivia, Ecuador; Monagrillo, Panama; and Puerto Marques, Mexico
Meaningful Beauty: Understanding Alfred Stevens’ Paintings
Rip the Dream
Modern Art in Modern Markets: Pablo, Paul, and the Marketing of the Avant-Garde
Petrichor
"A Redeemed City": The Plans, Politics, and Progress of Washington, D.C.’s Architecture and Urban Planning from 1790–1910
Hagiography as History: Creating Authority and Identity through Images of Anglo-Saxon Saints
2015
Yangon's Heritage: Between Nostalgia and Critique
War Posters: The Definition, Evolution, and Modernization of American Visual Propaganda
The Context and Legacy of Michelangelo’s Genius of Victory
An Architecture of Relations: Typology and Narrative Art in Early Christian Rome
Labor Against Waste
Nature and Artifice in the Arts of Japan
an exhibition
Disorientations
If Boiseries Could Talk: A Comparative Study and Museological Debate of the Contemporary Period Room Display Through the Lens of Eighteenth‐Century French Decorative Interiors
Social Surrealism in the 1930s and 1940s: Locating Atypical Bodies in the American Scene
All My Things Are Hymns
BENCH
Black Balance
I'm Not Sure How I Got Here
Maurice Denis: Mythology and Modernity
Akhenaten and Two Daughters: A Fragment of an Amarna Period Column in the Princeton University Art Museum
2014
Caught in the Window: A Photographic Study from the Other Side of the Glass
"On One Side of the Barricade": André Breton's Surrealism and the Arts of Africa
Back to the Future: Discourse in Contemporary Architecture and Cultural Identity in Hong Kong since the 1980s
Beyond Le Corbusier's Chandigarh: The Lost Voices of a Frozen City
A Critical Analysis of Mary Ellen Mark’s Ward 81 and Danny Lyon’s Conversations with the Dead
The Effects of War on Youth as Presented in Japanese Animation
From Wheat Paste to the World Wide Web: A Genealogy of Activist Art and the Development of Artist-as-Brand
Painting from the Caves: Joan Miró and Prehistoric Cave Painting
Roughened Language: Four Archetypes of 1970s American Architectural Sculpture
The Golden Mean in Dialogue: Xiao Lu’s Recasting of the Avant-Garde in Contemporary Chinese Culture
Boston's Government Center: The Simultaneous Successes and Failure of Urban Renewal
Places 2 | Do, Things 2 | Be
Panama Canal
Confronting Death through Appropriation: The Art of Yinka Shonibare
The Face of Painting: Images of the Artist in Early America
Finis Ghetto? Architecture and the Afterlife of the Jewish Quarter in Prague
Chrysalid
The Humor of the Bayeux Tapestry: It'll Leave You in Stitches
The Development of Views of Church Interiors in the Context of the Dutch Art Market during the 17th Century
Andrew Wyeth and the Matter of Time
Man think thai lady make house clean work love somuch cook everry time smile smile
2013
Specifically For Us? An Evaluation of Permanent Public Art Installed During the 1970s and 1980s in Lower Manhattan
Entwined: Humans and Plants as Complementary Opposites in Maya Art
Challenging the Edge: Analyzing Trisha Brown's Museum Commissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center
Altar
Vanbrugh's Ephemeral Style: Analyzing the Tradition of the English Baroque Country House
"Lack of Location Is My Location": The Impossibility of Black Identity in the Text Paintings of Glenn Ligon
Utopian for Beginners
The Office of the Digital Age: Contemporary Corporate Campuses as Agents of Organization and Domains of Elite Space
Mirroring Nature: Examining the Idea of Ocular Power in Samuel van Hoogstraten's Trompe L'Oeil Paintings
Artist, Subject, Beholder: Restaging Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
The Baburi Mosque in Ayodhya: A Study in Religion, History, and Architecture in Sultanate and Mughal India
Beyond the Walls: Locating "Community" in American Muralism Since 1930
Daring to Breed the Horse with the Cow: The Repaint Shan Shui Series by Zhang Hongtu
Avoid Toetal Loss
The Church of Monreale: A Golden Perspective into William II's Rule in Sicily
color | ed
2012
An Aesthetic War: The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 through Japanese Woodblock Prints
Garry Winogrand’s Women Are Beautiful: Revisiting the Feminist Critique
Inside that thing that is and is and isn't
The Crucifix and the Pen: Archbishop Federico Borromeo and the Catholic Reformation
The Quinoa Quandary: A Deconstruction of a Documentary
The Postclassic Maya Diving Maize God
Art Stronger than Stone: Marble Imitation in the Audience Hall of the Umayyad Palace at Bālis
Envisioning England's Unconscious: An Investigation of the Surrealist Movement and Mass-Observation from 1935 to 1947
Repositioning the Image in Postwar America: Wallace Berman, Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner
A Hidden City Emerges: Picturing the Industrial Identity, Civic Topography, and Urban Ethos of Newark, NJ, from 1800 to 2009
Between Two Worlds: Norval Morrisseau as a Case Study for the Shaman Artist
Queering George Bellows and the Question of "Gay Art"
Between Extremes: The Middle Class in Gustave Doré’s London, A Pilgrimage
Moan: The Monstrous Sublime
N. C. Wyeth’s Kidnapped Illustrations: From Bedtime Story to Fine Art
The Here and Now: How Stuart Davis Painted His Present
Painting the Child of the Neapolitan Streets: Antonio Mancini's Urchins and Entertainers (1865–1885)
Cultural Alliance and Political Display: The Distribution and Function of Ballcourts in the Petén Lakes Region
The Menagerie and Passenger
The Art of Collaboration: An Analysis of the Group Studio Model in Kampala, Uganda
Chinese Armorial Porcelain for the British Market
Warp Time: Amateurs and Obsolescence in the Digital Art of Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina
A Celtic Knot: Unraveling the Presentation of Irish Ringforts in Archaeology, Museums, and Sites
Beakers for the Dead: Glass Unguentaria from Nemea
The House of Tomorrow That Never Was: American Postwar Modern Houses in Promotion and Defeat
Conquering the Wall: The Impact of David Alfaro Siqueiros's 1932 Los Angeles Mural