Carly A. Quinn
Academic Projects
For her final Digital Humanities project, Carly worked with a game designer to create Cold War Confidential: Briefing a U.S. President, public history project featuring an interactive, text adventure gaming experience designed to be used in conjunction with high school and college level history curricula. Acting as the US President, students analyze top secret documents and attempt to resolve a Cold War crisis in real time using the gaming platform, Quest. View the project here.
In her undergraduate honors thesis, "Anxiety, Atomic Bombs, and Armageddon: How the Cold War Affected 1960s Film and Culture," Carly analyzed five fictional Cold War films released in the 1960s (A Gathering of Eagles, Fail-Safe, Dr. Strangelove, The Bedford Incident, Topaz) and explored how they operate as valuable historical sources. She argued that the culture of the Cold War influenced the films of the 1960s, which in turn influenced and were influenced by the public's reactions to the Cold War. Read her thesis here.
For a course taught by Cold War expert Dr. Gretchen Heefner, Carly researched the Pueblo Hostage Crisis and the Naval Inquiry that the hostages faced upon returning from 11 months of North Korean captivity. Carly argues that in the late 1960s, a shift was taking place in how the American people viewed POWs, their government, and their military, and the sympathetic response to the Pueblo Court of Inquiry was a result of this shift in public awareness and sentiment. Read the paper here.
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As a part of her Digital Humanities studies, Carly created UndercovHER: Female Spies in Film & Television, a digital project that looks at 8 different American films and television series that feature a female spy in the lead role as a field agent. The project explores how these characters are products of feminism and the explosion of female action heroines in the media that began in the 1990s, and argues that they reflect and subvert contemporary notions of gender norms, femininity and sexuality in the traditionally masculine field of espionage. View the project here.
An in-depth study of how Oliver Stone's 1991 film, JFK operates as a historical film was in order for Carly's senior capstone project. Carly discussed the production process and filming techniques used, the merits of the visual docudrama as a form of history, the ways in which the film interacts with the historical narrative (successfully, and unsuccessfully), the explosive impact of the film's release, and the cultural debate that followed. Read the paper here.
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Carly analyzed Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Manchurian Candidate, and Dr. Strangelove for an Art History course entitled, Picturing War. She argued that although each movie deals with a slightly different anti-communist fear, be it conformity, brainwashing, or nuclear warfare; together, the films reveal that American citizens were most afraid of losing their freedom, free will, and identity during the Cold War. Read the paper here.