For her senior thesis, Gisella Castagna examines how the history of Korean “comfort women,” women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II, is remembered through art. Her research asks how survivors’ experiences and demands for justice are represented in modern and contemporary art, and how art shapes public understanding of this history. She intends to better understand how history is constructed not only through state accounts, institutional narratives, and textbook history, but also through what people create, display, and engage with informally. She is particularly interested in how art is a tool for the subaltern to represent themselves, and reclaim dignity, agency, and historical visibility.
Through fieldwork across Seoul and other regions of South Korea, Gisella plans to observe how the history of comfort women and other forms of colonial and gendered violence are presented in protests, museums, memorials, and public spaces. Her research considers how representations across grassroots and institutional settings differ, and how they may reveal tensions, gaps, or simplifications in dominant historical narratives.
She investigates how symbols, materials, language, and different mediums are used to communicate survivors’ experiences and demands for justice. By observing how these works are displayed and how the public engages with them, she hopes to better understand how protest and public art is interpreted, whose experiences are centered, and how these art forms shape contemporary discussions of gendered violence, colonial history, and accountability. Her research also connects this history to broader questions of military violence and feminist resistance in Korea.
An AMEC major, Gisella is writing her thesis under the supervision of Barnard College’s AMEC department.