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Swiss American Historical Society Review

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The Origins Of Democracy In Switzerland, Thomas Quinn Marabello

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Switzerland is one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies. Since the Middle Ages, Swiss cantons engaged in democracy at the local level, which led to the Federal Charter of 1291. This important document laid the foundations for the Swiss Confederacy, an alliance of cantons that eventually became a unified democratic nation in the heart of Europe. For over seven centuries, Swiss democracy has impacted people and institutions in Switzerland and elsewhere. America’s founders were well versed in Swiss political institutions and borrowed from them when creating the Constitution of the United States. As democracies come under attack and see their …

New President’S Report, Fred Gillespie

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Dear Members of the Swiss American Historical Society,

This is my second stint as president of the SAHS. During my first term, I was asked how I became president. I facetiously replied they couldn’t find anybody who wanted the job. I believe my performance while hardly perfect was acceptable since I am back. I hope not to repeat my mistakes.

Swiss Presidents Report For Usa, Barbara Müller

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Dear Members of the SAHS,

Membership is a key concern to us and unfortunately this year we have lost three members here in Switzerland. One due to death, Dr. Lucie Zehnder; one member, Anselm Zurfluh, has asked to be taken off the list, and The Institut des Suisse Dans le Monde is closed. Christine von Graffenried has cancelled membership as of 2023 so that will be reflected in 2023.

Sahs Website Report, Richard Hacken

Swiss American Historical Society Review

The Website of the Swiss American Historical Society is one of the Society’s show windows to the world. The site consists of seven main pages.

About Us, the landing site and first web page, gives our mission statement and goals along with other general information and long-term announcements, such as the dates and locations of annual meetings for the next three years. There is also a listing of the officers of the Society with contact emails and a stand-alone “Contact” button for easy and rapid access to the Society from curious visitors.

2022 Tell Award For Scientific Achievement And Cooperation, C. Naseer Ahmad

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Each year, the Swiss Embassy in the United States of America awards the Tell Award. This prestigious award is named after the legendary Swiss hero William Tell who symbolizes the struggle for political and individual freedom because he overcame the tyrannical rule of Albrecht Gessler who terrorized Swiss people.

Gender Inclusivity In Italian: Can Gender Neutrality Be Reached In A Gendered Language? Difficulties, Proposals And Public Perception Of The Phenomenon, Gaia Prunotto

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Italian is a gendered language in which reference to grammatical gender has been constant and inevitable. As language reflects and shapes society, grammatical gender reinforces binary views of social gender and the invizibilization of non-binary identities. Movements for social justice have inspired gender-fair linguistic innovations, such as the feminization of job titles and gender-neutral markers, to promote gender equity and challenge hierarchies of power and dominance in society. This research aimed to explore gender-neutral forms in the Italian grammatical system and public perceptions of these innovations through two studies with two groups of participants.

The first group of participants (n=27) …

Una Comprensione Computazionale Della Psiche Emotiva E Ordine Nelle Ballate Del Decameron: Stilometria E Elaborazione Del Linguaggio Naturale, Nothando Khumalo

Honors Projects

The present thesis, written in Italian, explores the emotional psyche and narrative order embedded within the ballads of the Decameron, a renowned literary masterpiece by Giovanni Boccaccio. Leveraging the advancements in stylometry and natural language processing techniques, this research aims to convince medieval Italian literature scholars to produce more on scholarship of the ballads and uncover the intricate patterns of human emotions and narrative organization in the ballads. The study begins by establishing a comprehensive corpus of ballads from the Decameron, utilizing digital libraries and text repositories. Subsequently, using stylometric analysis, the research examines the linguistic and stylistic features that …

A Nation On The Periphery Of History: A Discussion Of Poland-Lithuania During The Reformation, Dillon Piorkowski

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project hopes to establish several key points. One of which is that Poland is unfairly represented in Western historiography. Specifically, this means that in the English-speaking academic world, Poland is discussed disproportionately. Countries like Germany, France, and Britain have thousands of pages written about them discussing their roles during the Reformation. But Poland does not. This is evidenced by the many Western textbooks that misrepresent the nation. In turn, the project will use these various textbooks as evidence. The second point this project aims to cover is why Poland’s underappreciation is unfair. Simply demonstrating how Poland is underrepresented is …

Communicating With The Past Via Javier Cercas’ Las Leyes De La Frontera, Bobby D. Nixon

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

Cercas’ protagonist, Gafitas, narrates his memories of being a member of "el Zarco's" youth gang in the barrio chino of Girona during the summer of 1978, from the vantage point of the early 2000s. The novel is simultaneously viewed through the intertextual lens of José Antonio de la Loma’s cycle of quinqui films based on the life of the famous Catalan delinquent, El Vaquilla, Juan José Moreno Cuenca. There is renewed interest in these films from the Transition period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the success of this novel and director Daniel Monzón's film based on Cercas’ …

Multilingual Experimental Literature And Transnational Feminist Solidarities: Erín Moure And Kathy Acker, Melissa Tanti

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The impulse toward multilingual writing has arisen as a prominent trend in contemporary women’s writing. Criticism and notions of the literary have to respond to, among other things, the fact that "we live in a world where a significant portion of the population is at least partially bi or multilingual" (Camboni 34). To be responsive to the "increasing multilingualism of writers necessitates new strategies for reading the polyvocality of texts" (Eagleton and Friedman 3). This paper considers the ways multilingual writing creates, “small scale modes of listening” (Maguire xix) that tune the reader to languages, identities, and cultures under erasure. …

Plagues, Oblivion, And The Anonymous Dead Echoes From Seneca’S Oedipus And Lucan’S Civil War To Covid-19, Christina Franzen

Critical Humanities

The dead who are piled up in the literary worlds of Seneca’s Oedipus and Lucan’s Civil War are not very different than those of modernity. In their anonymity and silence, they speak so much about the atrocities and traumatic events of the societies in which they live. In Oedipus, nameless citizens claustrophobically are joined to one another in death, and, in Civil War, heaps of dead rot as Caesar looks on. One cannot help being reminded of the mass graves on Hart Island, the refrigerated morgue trucks, and the mass funeral pyres in India. This essay explores how the …

A Commentary On The Dynamics Of The Local And The Global, And The Representations Of Minorities In Mediascapes, Delphine Godefroit-Winkel

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

This commentary intends to extend knowledge about local identities with regard to their representations in the mediascape. It uses two focal MGDR papers and uncovers the opportunities for local identities to develop in global-local dynamics. This commentary reminds the interdependence between the global and the local and how local identities are formed. We discuss the accessibility of local identities and cultures.

Jud Ms 25 Nathan F. Cogan Collection Finding Aid, Katelynn Paul

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Biographical Note

Nathan Franklin Cogan was born in Bath, Maine in 1937 and was the youngest of seven children. Nathan’s father, Morris Cohen, had originally arrived in Maine in 1914, following the outbreak of World War I. Nathan spent his childhood in Bath, where his father and family members assisted immigrants to Maine as a part of the Hebrew Benevolent Society. Nathan ultimately moved to Portland, Oregon in 1956 to attend Reed College. Nathan served two years in the U.S. Army, and upon ending service he pursued a doctorate in English at UC-Berkeley. Nathan became a professor emeritus of English …

Jud Ms 24 Frederic C. Weinberg Collection, Katelynn Paul

Search the Manuscript Collection (Finding Aids)

Biographical Note:

Frederic Weinberg was born in Metuchen, New Jersey. He graduated from Metuchen High School and pursued a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Connecticut in 1969. After receiving his initial degree in English, he enrolled in the University of New Hampshire’s program in Library Science. In 1972 he was accepted into a special program in Educational Media at Boston University where he received a master’s degree in Education. In 1977 Frederic and his family joined the Beth Israel Congregation. He later assisted the congregation as a researcher and archivist. Currently Frederic is a regional coordinator for …

Front Matter

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

Integrated Or Excluded: The Effects Of French Integration Policies On Immigrant Communities From 2000 To 2020, Johanna N. Soleil

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

Few issues are as important to European politics as integration, though research into the actual effect of integration policies on immigrant communities is sparse in Europe and especially in France. This paper examines through the data available to researchers how immigrant communities compare to native populations in terms of cultural, health, and economic characteristics. To this end the paper is organized as follows: the first section introduces the French political context and the cultural attitude towards immigrants. Next, the various methods of analysis are presented, and each of the previously mentioned attributes is analyzed in the French context as well …

Introverse Arrangements: Rediscovering The Typewritings Of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Savannah M. Champion

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to understand Wolf-Rehfeldt’s place in the unofficial art world of the GDR by examining her work in light of her status as a clerical worker with social rather than professional ties to the art world. She stands out within the East German Mail Art context, not just for her inventive use of a typewriter to create abstract figurations, but for the way she used it to interject considerations of gender and power into a network of artists overwhelmingly dominated by men with her open-ended Typewritings.”

Through historical research and close readings of her work, this study uncovers …

Embodiment And Gendered Subjectivity In Ukrainian Women’S Film, Poetry, And Prose During Perestroika (1985-1991), Sandra J. Russell

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became …

L’Italia, L’Altrove Luoghi, Spazi E Attraversamenti Nel Cinema E Nella Letteratura Sulla Migrazione, Simone Brioni Dr.

Department of English Faculty Publications

This monograph is a meditation on how transnational migrations have influenced how the sense of place and the politics of space are represented in literature and film about migration to, from and within Italy. It examines work produced in Italian and English, and it emphasizes how culture and national identity can be reconsidered in a more inclusive way within a world marked by increased mobility. The text is divided into three main sections – “Places”, “Spaces” and “Crossings” – each of which contains two chapters. Chapter 1 argues that bridges, as they are represented in literature, movies and paintings about …