Elissa Harwood likes to pretend she’s from New York City, but she really lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia with her parents, her brother Yaz, and her sister Godzilla. Although Elissa’s siblings have four legs, tails, and meow on a regular basis, her parents haven’t noticed yet. Elissa went to boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where she edited the school newspaper, learned about snow (see photo), and didn’t get a lot of sleep. At Princeton, she lives in the conveniently located Forbes College. She plans to study international relations with a focus on the Middle East and attend as many Yankee games as possible.
Because Elissa still draws at the third grade level, art intimidates her. She can at least draw a timeline, so she’s not afraid of history, and she decided to explore an artist’s work from a historical perspective. While searching through the Marquand stacks for an earlier assignment, she came across a catalogue from an exhibition about the artwork of the Dreyfus Affair. The exhibition focused on graphic art found in newspapers and on posters during the Affair, so Elissa investigated the impressionist art influenced by the same events. Although she enjoyed researching Degas and the Dreyfus Affair, Elissa has loved Degas since she was a six-year-old aspiring ballerina, and she became more and more disillusioned every time she read one of his ridiculous anti-Semitic comments. Next time, Elissa will research the artist’s ideology before she spends her allowance on his coloring book.
E-mail Elissa at eharwood@princeton.edu.