Introduction

My name is Gordon Hargraves and I am currently a senior at Bates College on track to graduate this Spring with a double major in Political Economy and Art and Visual Culture with general concentrations in Modern Middle East and Premodern History studies.

If you are reading this blog you have probably been sent its link by me personally or have been referred by a friend. It is not my intention for my posts on this blog to receive as many views as possible, but rather to serve as a new medium to practice brief and concise journalist opinion pieces. As I ready myself for my post college career, I hope that this blog will help transition my writing from an academic to a more professional style.

As a scholar of international politics and art history, the majority of my work will focus on these two fronts. Under the political sphere, my interests lie in the challenges and development of the more hostile regions of the Middle East. As an American, my perspective follows the current US involvement in these regions and their relationship with private enterprise. On the art side I tend to focus on those works which I believe have made the largest impact on the markets of their time. My undergraduate study follows works which invoked stylistic change in the High Renaissance and Baroque eras. I wish to take this past understanding and apply it to trends in sales of the contemporary art world.

During my senior year I will complete two semester long undergraduate thesis: one in each of my major departments. Currently, I am coming to the end of my research on the most significant changes to privately commissioned Biblical depictions in the Counter-Reformation artistic revival. I analyse works before and after the Protestant Reformation on the Supper at Emmaus on a linear format. In doing so, I highlight the work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio in its ability to correctly intermix narrative legitimacy and the devotional quality usually associated with icon images.

This Spring I will shift my focus to the Bates Politics department where I hope to engage in a study of the Kurdish regions of North and Northeastern Syria. I wish to use this region as a case for how private security contractors will shift their operations in Syria in response to the continued conflicts between Syria, Turkey, the Kurdish Regional Government and the United States. Though this brief overview will inevitably change as I get closer to my second semester, it will undoubtably be an investigation into the relationship between government and private security firms in the Middle East and potentially North African regions. After completing an internship this past summer for the security divisions of International SOS and Control Risks in their Dubai offices, I will use my experience with these firms in my research.

Lastly, I would like to thank anyone reading for taking interest in either my writing or my interests. Everything that I write on this site is of my own perspective and I hope to produce pieces with original and unique analysis.