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New Perspectives On Johannes De Muris And His Notitia Artis Musicae, Jeffrey Allan Arnsdorf

Dissertations and Theses

At the end of the 1310s, Norman mathematician and astronomer Johannes de Muris (c. 1295-after 1344) reconceived the existing musical notation system on a mathematical foundation. His Notitia artis musicae dramatically increased the fidelity with which the system could represent complex rhythmic patterns. In recent years, musicologists, particularly Karen Desmond, have begun to incorporate the scholarship of historians of astronomy in their work on Muris and the Notitia. These studies take as their focus conceptual shifts in music theory and practice. This thesis repositions the perspective to Muris himself, seeking to shed light on his intention in writing the …

Examining The U.S. Wars On Vietnam, Laos, And Cambodia As The Production Of Neo-Colonialism, Aiden Gregg

University Honors Theses

I interrogate the colonial and neo-colonial histories of the U.S. wars on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos within the context of racialized and gendered labor accumulation, the production of difference through violence as a legitimation of colonial extraction, and ongoing neoliberal economic coercion. I examine genocide and ecocide as interdependent processes in the production of dependency and underdevelopment. I reject a common narrative of temporal and spatial disconnection which separates the wars from current economics and examine the violences which both produce and result from an economy based on growth.

History And Memory In The Intersectionality Of Heritage Sites And Cultural Centers In The Pacific Northwest And Hawai'i, Leah Marie Rosenkranz

Dissertations and Theses

While working to maintain contemporary and future relationships with stakeholders, heritage sites and cultural centers across the United States attempt to tell the history and experiences of the land and people who were once there, are there in the present, and will be there in the future. Fort Vancouver National Historic Site is one of these heritage places. This study is a response to current management needs identified for the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. Through an internship with the ongoing Fort Vancouver National Historic Site Traditional Use Study, my research examines how heritage sites and cultural centers fulfill the …

Moonlit Nights And Seasons Of Romance: Yosano Akiko's Use Of The Moon In Tangled Hair, Teppei Fukuda

Dissertations and Theses

Ever since they opened their country to the world in the late nineteenth century, the Japanese experienced drastic changes in many aspects. They rapidly absorbed Western culture with their desperate hope to modernize their country in politics, the sciences, and art. Literature was not an exception. Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), who is well known as a pivotal poet of Japanese Romanticism, absorbed this new modern sense of self and individuality and advocated the poetic expression of one's private and personal emotions.

In premodern Japan, poets had traditionally expressed their feelings through a set, limited range of classical landscapes and natural objects, …

Disney's Reign Over Independent Cinema: How Mega-Corporations Are Commercializing Creativity, Hannah Z. Dawson

University Honors Theses

The Walt Disney Company is undoubtedly a monopoly in the media industry space. Their impressive acquisitions have expanded their portfolio to corner the market in nearly every genre. Most recently, the company has hired independent directors in hopes of re-invigorating and creating variety between multiple brands and franchises. But the directors' authoritative voices are lost under the Disney brand, which I argue overshadows independent autonomy and potentially envelopes the rest of the media market. Brandishing this massive media force, Disney (and its other subsidiary branches) promotes palatable, conservative leaning "family friendly" content that leads to a wider chance of profit. …

"I'M Absolutely Ordinary": Bella And Her Perception Of Gender Within Twilight, Jaid M. Eichmiller

University Honors Theses

This thesis explores Bella's perceptions of femininity, virtue, and gender roles within Twilight, with a focus on the feminist stance that Bella takes as the narrator. Through a close reading, I explore traditional gender roles, the internalized maternal roles of wife and mother, and the externalized judgements that Bella expresses. Her relationships with those around her, and most importantly Edward, are judged by her internalized concepts of gender politics. Through the examination of previous literature and the close reading of the core text, I argue that Bella both embodies and rejects traditional femininity.

The Almohad: The Rise And Fall Of The Strangers, David Michael Olsen

Dissertations and Theses

The Almohad (1120-1269) displaced the Almoravid dynasty (1040-1147) as the rulers of the Maghreb and Andalusia in 1147 and created the largest Berber kingdom in history. They conquered the first indigenous rulers of the Maghreb by aggregating the Masmuda tribes from the High Atlas Mountains and enlisting the Zenata and Arab tribes from the Northern Maghreb. The Almohad rule built upon the existing Almoravid infrastructure; however, their cultural, administrative, and military approach entailed a more integrated tribal organization, centralized authority, and an original Islamic ideology. In creating this empire they envisioned the Maghreb as a consolidated political center and not …

Catholic Social Teaching And Sustainable Development: What The Church Provides For Specialists, Anthony Philip Stine

Dissertations and Theses

The principles of Catholic Social Teaching as represented by the writings of 150 years of popes as well as the theorists inspired by those writings are examined, as well as the two principal schools of thought in the sustainability literature as represented by what is classically called the anthropocentric or managerial approach to sustainability as well as the biocentric school of thought.

This study extends previous research by analyzing what the Catholic Church has said over the course of centuries on issues related to society, economics, and the environment, as embodied in the core concepts of subsidiarity, solidarity, stewardship, the …

Late-Night Political Comedy's Impact On Audience Political Attentiveness, Public Opinion, And Civic Engagement, Molly J. Olmstead

University Honors Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between late-night comedy news shows and their audiences, in terms of how they impact public opinion, political attentiveness and civic engagement. It looks at how the genre of late night political comedy is not a monolith, and neither is its audiences, and addresses the different ways these two interact with one another. Through an in-depth literature review, this thesis finds that late night political comedy has the most impact on politically inattentive audiences who end up learning about politics inadvertently, and that the jokes featured on these shows actively primes these viewers to hold certain …

A Land Of Poets And Warriors: The Connection Between Warrior Culture And Bardic Culture In Medieval Wales C. 1066-1283, Sarah Lynn Alderson

Dissertations and Theses

Wales in the Middle Ages was a region both divided by war and united by culture. Frequent raids from the Hiberno-Irish, Scandinavians, and Flemish threatened Wales from the outside, while the kings within the borders of Wales fought for supremacy. During the late eleventh century, William the Conqueror made his way to the Welsh border in an attempt to secure his fledging kingdom. Under the premise of protecting his borders, William established the first March of Wales on the eastern border of Wales in 1087. This started the slow process of Anglo-Norman expansion and colonization into Wales.

The Welsh maintained …

The Performativity And Dynamics Of H.P. Grice's "Logic And Conversation": An Interdisciplinary Re-Conceptualization, Linnea Alexander

University Honors Theses

The following paper covers an interdisciplinary examination and re-conceptualization of philosopher H.P. Grice's Logic and Conversation. By way of interdisciplinary analysis and theory building, this paper breaks down Grice's philosophical understandings of conversational pragmatics as well as significant components of speech act theory, as put forth by philosopher J. L. Austin and revisited by J. R. Searle, and interactive frame theory as understood in sociocultural linguistic anthropology by Deborah Tannen and Cynthia Wallat. It interrogates shortcomings of Grice’s understanding of conversation and draws from speech act and frame theory to fill these shortcomings and expand on Grice's original …

Literatura Viva: Formas De Conocer La Literatura Y Agricultura Desde Chiapas, Jesse Nichols

Dissertations and Theses

Literatura Viva reflects the links between agriculture and literature in Chiapas, Mexico, demonstrating how the ways of knowing the environment which are culturally expressed through literature and the practices of sustainable agriculture are deeply linked. It argues that the experience of the agricultural working class is central not just to a physical movement towards tangible agricultural change but to a society's ability to understand its socio-cultural and natural environment. The thesis first explores indigenous literature, then agricultural practices and finally educational movements which seek to express pluriversal understandings and ways of interacting with the planet. It argues that these understandings …

Great Sand Sea, Nada Sewidan

Dissertations and Theses

This is a collection of essays regarding land and identity tied with the personal experiences of my family's immigration from Egypt to America.

Automatic Keyphrase Extraction From Russian-Language Scholarly Papers In Computational Linguistics, Yves Wienecke

University Honors Theses

The automatic extraction of keyphrases from scholarly papers is a necessary step for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including text retrieval, machine translation, and text summarization. However, due to the different grammatical and semantic intricacies of languages, this is a highly language-dependent task. Many free and open source implementations of state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction techniques exist, but they are not adapted for processing Russian text. Furthermore, the multi-linguistic character of scholarly papers in the field of Russian computational linguistics and NLP introduces additional complexity to keyphrase extraction. This paper describes a free and open source program as a proof of …

Christine De Pizan's Passive Heroines: Recoding Feminine Identities In Le Livre De La Cité Des Dames And Le Ditié De Jehanne D'Arc, Evelyn Ives Mills

Dissertations and Theses

Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Christine de Pizan has resurfaced in the academic and literary spheres as a paragon of proto-feminist thought. This modern fascination with the fifteenth-century writer is largely grounded in her surprisingly progressive views on a woman's right to receive an education, to govern and achieve financial freedom. More recently, scholars have lauded Christine's later works for their reinterpretation of what it meant to be a woman in fifteenth-century Europe. The present study examines this latter goal of Christine de Pizan's writing specifically in the context of the heroic feminine identity she constructs …

Social Saints In The City: Race, Space, And Religion In Chicago Women's Settlement Work, 1890-1935, Johanna Katherine Murphy

Dissertations and Theses

Many scholars on the settlement movement have mentioned Hull-House's interactions with the Catholic Church and/or the surrounding immigrant communities, but have failed to fully examine the dynamic between Hull-House women, Catholic laywomen who took up settlement work, and the various Catholic immigrant groups of Chicago. This research seeks to place these relationships within the context of space -- meaning physical space in the neighborhood, access to spaces, and space as influence. This lens acts as a thread connecting the tangled and fluctuating dynamics of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender surrounding the settlement house movement.

Hull-House residents and Catholic laywomen contended …

Settler Colonial Curriculum In Carlisle Boarding School: A Historical And Personal Qualitative Research Study, Patrick Gerard Eagle Staff

Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation research study brings together a historical account and one scholar's personal and family stories of how Indigenous children were stolen and sent to the first Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding schools and tribal schools. In the case of the researcher's family, the educational experiences at Carlisle Indian Industrial School immediately started a traumatic assimilation process on Indigenous children that instilled generational trauma for them and their descendants. At these schools, Indigenous children were forced to conform to a foreign European school designed to abolish their Indigenous identity that demanded they give up their language and culture to …

The Relation Between Spinoza's Monism And Kabbalistic Monotheism, Naomi H. Fredgant

University Honors Theses

Benedict de Spinoza's (1632-1677) excommunication from the strict Jewish-Portuguese community of Amsterdam didn’t erase all of the years of studying Judaic and Kabbalistic thought. His theory of G-d (monism) is deeply connected to Kabbalistic monotheism (the Judiac mystic theory of G-d). This thesis explores the similarities and differences between Spinoza's monism and Kabbalistic monotheism in order to shine new light on Spinoza's proof of the existence of G-d, and the nature of how we exist in relation to Him. By moving through descriptions of the two theories, it becomes evident that both have similar structures. There is one infinite G-d, …

The Pursuit Of Democracy: The Racial Subject And Sympathy’S Limits In Leaves Of Grass, Aidan Kennelley

University Honors Theses

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass has long been celebrated as a great work of American democracy, a work of democratic poetics. Throughout the text, Whitman goes to great lengths to sympathize with as many different sects of American society as possible. But where do his sympathies deserve scrutiny? By analyzing Whitman's relationship to the black, enslaved subject throughout the text, it becomes clear that there are limits to sympathy, and sympathetic intentions can inadvertently inflict violence upon subjugated groups. In turn, it becomes evident that Whitman’s democratic project is much more flawed and complicated than the way it is often …

Music Education As A Potential Mediator For Social Decline, Gabriel V. Trees

University Honors Theses

Many cultures around the world are experiencing a decline in social wellness. This may be attributed to the decrease in quality and quantity of social connections people have been experiencing in recent times. Among the activities that seem to help humans feel connected and accountable to each other are the community singing, dancing, and drumming that has been part of our human heritage since before the beginning of written history. Active participation in group music making has been shown to promote prosocial attitudes and behaviors. Music education for preschoolers and primary school students may be an effective method of providing …

Tourism And Tradition In Chiang Mai, Jared Makana Kirkey

University Honors Theses

This paper is an attempt to delve deeper into the relationship between tourism and culture in Chiang Mai. The push and pull of these forces is of particular interest. On one side, tourism is beneficial for Chiang Mai's economy, and encourages the preservation of its unique culture. Tourist dollars support local businesses, and any further profits can be reinvested into the local economy. And because many of Chiang Mai's major tourist draws are its cultural attractions, their preservation seems commonsense. But this is not always the case. Oftentimes, tourist dollars are funnelled out of Chiang Mai as packaged tours, luxury …

The Potential Of Solidarity In Existential Feminist Discursive Methods, Bella Brown

University Honors Theses

The following paper will be dissecting the ways in which Simone de Beauvoir’s examination of the intertwined nature of selfhood and freedom regarding the body offer a facet of liberation around the construction of womanhood. I will consider the extent to which Beauvoir’s concept of the politicized essentialless body in contemporary feminist scholarship (existentialist, phenomenologist, and post-structuralist) is incomplete in that there are many contemporary scholars who expand her idea of essentialless properties and their effects on identity. The importance of the individual and their freedom in discourse is to work towards solidarity through difference with others in order to …

Fidelity And Rhetorical Strategies: An Introduction To And Translation Of Arunika Senarath’S Diese Eine Nacht (2017) With An Interview With The Author, Malcolm A. Goldman

University Honors Theses

Arunika Senarath’s 2017 novel Diese eine Nacht [That One Night] addresses political themes ranging from right-wing extremism to racism to sexual assault, which are combined with the day-to-day life of the main character, a young woman attending university in Dresden. This combination is aimed to increase political engagement in young people by making difficult or complicated topics accessible, while also exposing them to a more diverse range of perspectives. The novel is situated in contemporary Dresden, examining the prominence of right-wing populist movements such as PEGIDA in former East Germany (GDR) and their impact on people of color. …

Oregonian Holocaust Memory: Creating A Portal To The Past For Oregonians, Max Blust

University Honors Theses

Since the end of the Second World War, Holocaust Memorials have spread beyond Europe and become established in the United States. The genocide of European Jews and other ethnic minorities was an international event, spreading from Western Europe all the way into the Soviet Union. The international coalition which invaded Germany and ended the Second World War, resulted in Holocaust survivors resettling all across the globe. In the United States, where thousands of survivors joined existing Jewish communities, there arose interest for memorializing the victims of genocide and the trauma endured. The Oregon Holocaust Memorial (OHM) is a product of …

Fallen Objects: Collaborating With Artificial Intelligence In The Field Of Graphic Design, Harrison S. Gerard

University Honors Theses

In this paper, I discuss the creation, execution and reception of my digital art series Fallen Objects, in which I collaborate with a neural net to create pseudo-found objects. I explore how artists might collaborate with Artificial Intelligence obliquely, not by having the AI generate the images themselves, but instead generate input for the artists to make the images. While many artists are focused on training neural nets to replicate their own art inputs, I instead focus on working with an AI trained on external, easily-accessible data and creating images from the prompts it delivers. In this way, the AI …

Palisadia: A Novel Byte, Gretchen Amanda Adams

University Honors Theses

A creative writing thesis which uses the lens of fiction to explore femininity, sexual violence, and the nature of artificial consciousness.

Pregnancy And The Apocalypse: The Enlistment Of Reproductive Futurism In Aid Of Nationalism, Emily E. Horger

University Honors Theses

While America has long held a fascination for the end of the world, the apocalypse has enjoyed a surge in popularity over the past twenty years, rising the ranks from cult classic to mainstream media - many examples of which include representations of pregnancy. Reproductive futurism is exemplified in such varied recent sources as A Quiet Place, Bird Box, Train to Busan, The Walking Dead, and more through their representations of pregnant women in apocalyptic settings. The prevalence of this trope, in addition to specific messages found within the contexts of each example, coincide with recent …

De-Stigmatizing Mental Health Through First Person Narration In Young Adult Literature, Tatum E. Francis

University Honors Theses

This thesis project includes a written short story titled "Quiet Dissonance" that explicitly depicts anxiety and depression within the genre of Young Adult literature. The purpose of this story is to consciously de-stigmatize the mental health issues by depicting these mental disorders as authentically as possible with both research and my own real-life experience of being diagnosed with both anxiety and depression, rather than relying upon stereotypes and the influence of the media. This story is consciously written through the point of view of first person narration, allowing for further exploration into the interiority of the thoughts of the protagonist …

Two Black Utopias Of The United States: Self Determination And Survival, Makaveli Gresham

University Honors Theses

In line with Charles Davis III's assertion in regards to the formation of black space and it’s spectral qualities representing the "material conditions of black survival", two black utopian projects: Soul City, North Carolina and the unrealized work of Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) in New York City are analyzed to explicate to what extent that the United States built environment is compatible with "black survival". These two case studies are used to inform an understanding of the anti-black nature of Modernism and the cultural relationship between the construction of "whiteness" and "blackness" in the United States. This relationship …

Weaving Urban Webs: Representations Of Urban Space In The First Four Issues Of Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, Cordelia Albertson

University Honors Theses

As the anthology Comics and the City explores, cities have been central to comics since the beginning of the modern medium. Yet, scholars have remarked little on the relationship between superhero identities and urban space. Peter M. Coogan's article, "The Hero Defines the Genre, The Genre Defines the Hero," in the anthology What is a Superhero?, cites an urban setting as a secondary identifier of the superhero genre and the superhero identity, but he makes no other remark on this facet in the article or his other work. Much of the works existing on the subject of urbanism and …