Final Thesis Sbmission

 The submission of the final draft of my thesis marks the beginning of the end of my six-year long journey at RIT.  There have been many ups and downs, and at several points I did not think I would be able to reach the finish line.  Yet I have reached this milestone and it feels surreal.  This project was a massive undertaking, the biggest one in my academic career.  It presented many challenges, but I have gained so much from studying the topic of my hometown.  I have gained a new appreciation for Gloucester, its history, and its cultural heritage.  While I will miss a lot about RIT, I am excited to return home and take this new perspective with me.  

Final Thesis Reflection

​​Turning in the final thesis is a huge relief. Though it still needs to be approved, I'm glad that I've been able to make it up until this point. I am really appreciative of everyone who was involved, especially my advisors and the people I interviewed. I really enjoyed the opportunity this paper gave me to reach out to prison librarians and talk to them about their work. I initially joined Museum Studies in hopes of learning more about libraries while also applying my prior experience and knowledge as a Criminal Justice major. I'm glad that I was able to combine my two interests in my thesis and explore what I joined the MUSE program for. Though I've finished my research for now, I still have more to learn about prison libraries, and I hope that I can someday experience the impact of prison libraries in person by working in one myself.

End of the Year Reflection

    On our last day of thesis class, moments after sending in my final copy for approval, it now feels like my final year is winding to an end. While I know that I still have to finish work for my other classes and present my poster at the Capstone Conference, getting this thesis completed and submitted has been like a giant weight lifted off my shoulders. To think, at the beginning of this semester I could not imagine writing a 25-page paper about the Spanish Civil War and the Museo Reina Sofía, let alone the 64-page document (43 of which are writing) it became. It took countless hours of writing, re-writing, adding citations, inserting images, responding to feedback, and creating a SketchUp model to get to this point. While I might not have been happy in the moment writing the thesis, and in fact most of the time I was quite frustrated, it was all worth it. I am proud that I was able to finish this, and create a piece about something I am truly passionate about. While I might not want to read about the Spanish Civil War, the art works created during the time period, and the Reina Sofía for a little bit, I could definitely see it as a topic to pursue further in the future, potentially in grad school…? In all seriousness, I would not have been able to complete this thesis without the support of my advisors, Dr. Decker and Professor Monaco, and my thesis professor, Dr. Brown. Their feedback and advice helped to sharpen my thesis and get me thinking about my argument in a larger context (while also correcting a lot of run-on sentences and comma misuse). While I am glad to finally be done working on this thesis, I am a little bit sad the journey is over. No matter how much I struggled, it was a rewarding experience in the end.

Observing my own community from an outside perspective

In writing this paper, I find myself struggling to contain my excitement for certain things that are not as pertinent, while avoiding writing about the actual topic of my paper.  I want to focus on the fun details of Gloucester, her traditions and culture, her beautiful nature, and the countless writers, poets, artists, and inventors who have taken inspiration from her, and made Gloucester their home.  I want to talk about my experiences as a Gloucester resident, but I worry about biases.  I find myself wanting to write about overarching attitudes towards tourism, but stop myself as I wonder if these experiences are universal, or if they are only shared amongst me and my circle of friends and family.  

In writing this paper, I want to incorporate many different perspectives from people who are closest to the topic.  I think the best way to do this is by interviewing people from the organizations I am focusing on.  Due to my deep personal connection to the topic, I am constantly worrying about unconscious biases, and considering how to be aware of them.  Professors have suggested that I try to find people I am not related to for interviews, and while I understand where they are coming from, in a place like Gloucester this is far easier said than done.  Gloucester is a very close-knit community with a culture that deeply values family connections.  It is not uncommon for families to stay in Gloucester for many generations, passing their connections to other families in town on to their descendants.  In conversations between two strangers from Gloucester, one can expect the topic to quickly turn to what family they belong to in search of a common relative, going back several generations just to claim the title of “cousin”.  All of this to say that while I may avoid interviewing those I know personally at Cape Ann Museum, Maritime Gloucester, Gloucester 400, and the St. Peter’s Fiesta Committee, it is a challenge to avoid someone who knows me.  For even if they do not know Noelle Perry, they may know my family and have unconscious biases.  This is not to toot my own horn and imply that I come from some sort of exceptionally influential family with high social standing, this is simply the case for most people in Gloucester.  We are all connected, for better or worse.In the case of studying my own hometown, heritage, and community, achieving analytical distance is no easy task.  It begs the question, how do scholars study communities to which they belong? 

Thesis Update: How Much is Too Much?

There is no denying that the thesis writing process is tough. Now that we are a quarter of the way through the semester, I feel that while I am on top of the deadlines and making progress writing a draft, there are still a million other things I need/want to do with this paper, that I am not sure I will have time for. It was already a struggle to find a place to start writing for my first draft last week, due to the fact that I had so many ideas I wanted to incorporate but was not fully sure where to put them or how to organize them. What I ended up writing was a basic description of the gallery spaces I will be analyzing in my thesis, just to get the ball rolling and to give the reader a sense of the space. But as I was writing, I realized that I still have a decent number of things I need to research/write about in order to give the reader all the context needed to understand the gallery spaces and the works on display in them. While my concern of adding historical context was alleviated with the confirmation from my first reader and Professor Brown that I should add historical context, I now come to the question of how much to write. I do not want to go fully art historical in this paper, and argue the meanings of the symbols of Guernica, but I do want to give the reader the proper background for this thesis. That is what I have been working on recently, trying to find this happy medium of historical context. But I do need to find sources to back up any information I cite, which is taking up a bit of time, and time is something of a luxury right now. I am trying my best with what little free time I have to get all this work done, but at the same time, this is my last semester in college, so I want to enjoy it.

Thesis Progress

Right after today's class, I am interviewing Diego Sandoval-Hernandez, an outreach librarian from the Brooklyn Public Library who deals with prison and library services. I am looking forward to talking to him and hearing about his work and experiences. I think these interviews will really contribute to my analysis of how prison libraries function today and if they are successful as libraries in the educational and recreational materials and programs they provide. My first thesis draft is pretty rough, but I am excited to continue to work on improving and further developing it. Maren, my second reader, has also provided really interesting sources on exhibiting the writings and experiences of incarcerated people and the potential issues that may arise from this, such as the exploitation of incarcerated people's trauma in promoting certain personal agendas/ideals.

So Many Books and So Little Time!

So after panicking in class last Tuesday that I did not have enough work done or things read, and I am not truly sure where my thesis is heading anymore, six of my inter library loan books came in by the end of the week! Now the books are pretty big and all written in Spanish, so it is going to take me some time to actually get any useful information from them, but at least I have somewhere to go with my research now. The only problem is the biggest book that came in, from the Yale library, is due back by the end of the month, which is definitely not enough time for me to read it all (thanks Yale). The book literally covers art made throughout all wars in Spain, so yeah I am going to have to start sifting through that now to be able to get it back in time.

Other than the update on new reading materials, I did get a response back from the Reina Sofia last week in regards to requesting documents/information on their collection. All they sent me was a research request form to fill out (which I am not sure why that wasn't on their website in the first place), and since sending that back last week I have not heard anything. It isn't the best feeling in the world that they haven't responded in over a week, but I am still holding out a little hope. If this doesn't pan out, I am thinking of a plan B research question that still uses everything I have done so far this semester. 

Continuing to Research and the Challenges of not Living in Spain

As I mentioned in our last class before break, I reached out to my art history professor from Spain, asking him if he knew of any resources I can look over in relation to my working thesis topic (which is how art made during the Spanish Civil War influenced the Reina Sofia's collection and how the museum used the collection to tell the story of the civil war). He was generous enough, not only to respond super quickly but with a large amount of resources, which was great initially, but I soon found it a challenge to find any of the articles/journals he references online. I followed up with him over break, asking if any of the sources were available online, and unfortunately he said that none of them were digitized, and I would have to contact the institutions and ask if they could do it for me and send over copies. So that threw a wrench in my plans, here I was thinking I had so many great resources but most of them I need to be in Spain to access. 😓 

I can't let that stop me however, so I am trying to see if the topics have been written about in English, in databases that I can access, and also going through the sources and seeing which ones I am most interested in so I can send some emails to the Spanish institutions in hopes that they will help me out. In the mean time, my intern library loan came in last week so I am excited to start reading that and see if it will lead me to any new sources. I also read the article my professor in Spain wrote when he worked at the Reina Sofia, and to my surprise it was a very critical article on how modern and contemporary art museums do a disservice to visitors by not providing proper historical contexts with their works. His main focus was the second floor permanent exhibit surrounding Guernica in the Reina Sofia, and how the museum does not properly explain the history of the The Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris 1937) which Guernica was made for and first displayed at. It really has me rethinking my experience in that museum and how it would have meant so little if I did not already have a general understanding of the history and the artist.