I returned to Carleton for my senior year of college, a year that is synonymous on campus with the Comps process. Comps is Carleton’s version of a senior thesis, that is, a major project in your field that builds off of original research or work. The idea is to gain experience with the graduate-level research process before completing your undergraduate education, preparing you for continuing education. As a History major, I had to write a 30-40 page research centering original primary source research and analysis. For my Comps, I wrote a comparative study of film censorship in the early to mid-1930s in Nazi Germany and the Irish Free State.
In particular, I studied the censorship of three films starring Marlene Dietrich: The Blue Angel (1930), Blonde Venus (1932), and The Song of Songs (1933). Through an analysis of the censorship documents gathered while researching abroad in Ireland and Germany, I argue that both states employed a defensive nationalism that targeted non-normative gender roles as part of protectionist censorship campaigns designed to allow a pure national culture to flourish after an era of gendered instability. You can read this paper below!