Honors Program | Notable Projects

The Little Prince: Page to Stage | Clare Nowak, '16

In conjunction with her peers in the Theatre program, Clare Nowak developed and directed a fully-realized stage adaptation of Antoine de St. Exupery’s book, The Little Prince. She established the most essential locations and major actions, then created a scenic concept and ground plan that would translate well between scenes and benefit all necessary action. As part of the vision to bring this story to life, some of the characters were chosen to be portrayed with puppets. Designed to be transported to different locations, the sets are inspired from St. Exupery’s watercolor paintings which accompany the book and intended to be visual representations of the storybook come to life.

The Legal Issues of Abortion | Tia Westhoff, '16

“If you have a miscarriage, you could be prosecuted for murder,” warned a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post from 1981. When we consider the effects of the overturn of Roe v. Wade, some fear that women’s liberties will be compromised if abortion is criminalized. If the unborn are legally defined as persons, then it seems a woman could be prosecuted for procuring an abortion, for conspiring to procure an abortion, or even more tragically if she miscarries. Tia Westhoff provides a synthesis of the legal issues surrounding abortion and focuses on scrutinizing these issues within the State of Iowa. It aims to investigate the law prior to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, how the law changed as a result, the current efforts being made to scale back the scope of the ruling, and what a society with Roe overruled might look like.

Explorations in the Art of Storytelling | Michaela Kinyon, '16, & Laurence Rossi, '16

Michaela Kinyon and Laurence Rossi sought to discover how people represent a fallen world, God, and how they reconcile those forces, both through fiction and photography. One aspect of this project involved researching writing and various genres of storytelling, as well as reading stories of conversion, discovery, and redemption, such as C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Mary Eberstadt’s The Loser Letters, and G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Physical research and principle photography were done on-location across Europe during Kinyon and Rossi's semester abroad in Florence. From this, a travelogue-style novella was written in order to understand storytelling as well as issues and questions which plague the spiritual lives of young people, and was visually supplemented by photography. Photographs were selected based on quality, locations that coincided with the novella, and portrayal of the character’s state of mind and spirituality. These two mediums were combined to create a cohesive, complete representation of one fictional young woman’s physical and spiritual journey.