Here, There, Now, Then is my creative thesis, which I finished in 2021. It explores the relationships among queerness, ruralness, settler colonialism, and visuality by juxtaposing images I made of queer rural households at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic with archival images of lesbian separatist communities and of early settlements of the American West.
I completed this project in tandem with a second thesis of analytical writing, titled The Temporal Lens: Photographs and Settler Colonialism in Western Oregon Self-Determination Movements, 1972-1982, which historicizes and critically examines the parallel and overlapping arcs of lesbian separatist settlement and of the movement to regain legal sovereignty by the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians through the photographs produced by each.
For these theses, I was awarded high honors by the Harvard Committee on Degrees in History and Literature and recieved an honorable mention for the Cummings Thesis Prize in LGBT Studies as well as a nomination for the Hoopes Prize, Harvard’s highest honor for undergraduate thesis work.