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A Defense Of Hume's Dictum, Cameron Gibbs Oct 2019

A Defense Of Hume's Dictum, Cameron Gibbs

Doctoral Dissertations

Is the world internally connected by a web of necessary connections or is everything loose and independent? Followers of David Hume accept the latter by upholding Hume’s Dictum, according to which there are no necessary connections between distinct existences. Roughly put, anything can coexist with anything else, and anything can fail to coexist with anything else. Hume put it like this: “There is no object which implies the existence of any other if we consider these objects in themselves.” Since Hume’s day, Hume’s Dictum has played a major role in philosophy, especially in contemporary metaphysics. In ruling out necessary connections, …


“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair Oct 2019

“The Worlding Game”: Queer Ecological Perspectives In Modern Fiction, Sarah D'Stair

Doctoral Dissertations

Cultural and literary theorists have been increasingly advocating for a posthuman ethic that challenges oppressive binaries of all kinds. In turn, the field of queer ecology, which investigates discourses of sex and nature for implicit heterosexism and androcentrism, has come to the fore. This dissertation, rooted firmly in this newer branch of ecocriticism, focuses on various inter-species environments imagined by early twentieth-century queer women writers. Each of their works, in different ways, challenges the naturalization of social hierarchies based on gender, sexuality, race, class, and species being reinforced in the burgeoning fields of sexology, psychology, and evolutionary biology. Their novels …


Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs Oct 2019

Narratives Of Queerness: Queer Worldmaking (In) The Classroom With Undergraduate Students, Rachel Briggs

Doctoral Dissertations

This research brings together education research, queer theory, and performance theory to consider the worldmaking potential of the queer classroom. Using students’ stories about queerness in the classroom and my own stories about the classroom, I ask what we can learn from students’ voices about how queerness is/can be performed in the classroom and through relations. This study uses critical ethnography, personal narrative, and performative writing to examine the production of subject positions in the classroom, to connect this to a queer theoretical framework, and to explore the worldmaking potential of the classroom. I interviewed seven undergraduate students at a …


The Body (Re)Public: Women On/As The Landscape Of Modernity, From Zola’S Au Bonheur Des Dames To Varda’S Cléo De 5 À 7, Christine Gutman Oct 2019

The Body (Re)Public: Women On/As The Landscape Of Modernity, From Zola’S Au Bonheur Des Dames To Varda’S Cléo De 5 À 7, Christine Gutman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways in which questions of gender, space and mobility intersect in a selection of fin-de-siècle French novels and 1960s French New Wave films in an effort to discern how the representational interplay of these three elements gives allegorical form to the sociopolitical anxieties of the times in which the works were produced. Using the Paris Commune of 1871 and the protests of May ’68 as anchoring points for the two periodizations underlying my inquiry, I examine how women in the novels of Emile Zola (Au Bonheur des Dames, Nana) and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam ( …


Reconsidering Diasporic Literature: "Homeland" And "Otherness" In The Lost Daughter Of Happiness, Qijun Zhou Oct 2019

Reconsidering Diasporic Literature: "Homeland" And "Otherness" In The Lost Daughter Of Happiness, Qijun Zhou

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the transformation of “homeland” and “otherness” as well as the relationship between each other in The Lost Daughter of Happiness (扶桑 Fusang). I begin by exploring how the migration of Chinese to the United States is depicted as an endless trajectory in the story through a historical engagement and a dialogue between two generations. From there, I plan to point out that the story complicates the meaning of diaspora as it can not only represent a spatial dislocation, but also a temporal dislocation. Thus, I argue that it destabilizes the conventional ideology which refers “homeland” to a …


“Nothing Material Occurred”: The Maritime Captures That Caused Then Outlasted The United States’ Quasi War With France, Emma Zeig Oct 2019

“Nothing Material Occurred”: The Maritime Captures That Caused Then Outlasted The United States’ Quasi War With France, Emma Zeig

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the French maritime seizures during the eighteenth-century US Quasi War with France (also called the half war, or the United States’ undeclared war with France), encompassing events on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in France, the United States, and the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. The analysis focuses on the captured ships, telling the stories of seamen who feared for their lives and merchants who lost their ships. This point of view allows the thesis to explore an area of the Quasi War that are less documented in other histories: how civilian participants experienced violence and the indifference …


'Choose A Language Like A Wedding Ring': Polysystems, Norms And Pseudotranslation In Lea Goldberg’S Poetry & Prose, Benjamin Rangell Oct 2019

'Choose A Language Like A Wedding Ring': Polysystems, Norms And Pseudotranslation In Lea Goldberg’S Poetry & Prose, Benjamin Rangell

Masters Theses

Lea Goldberg [1911-1970] is one of modern Hebrew literature’s most significant poet/translators. This thesis approaches her early poetry and prose from the perspective of three theories of translation. ‘Polysystems’, ‘norms’, and ‘pseudotranslation’ grew from the scholarly and translation-lineage in Hebrew literary studies that Goldberg herself contributed to. Utilizing these three methods of reading, this thesis argues that translation’s thematization in Goldberg’s creative work is evidence for the poet’s ideal for a cosmopolitan, multilingual, national literature in the new Jewish State. This receptive stance to previous and concurrent literary traditions was met with much skepticism and criticism from Goldberg’s colleagues, and …


The Morality Of Chinese Legalism: Han Fei’S Advanced Philosophy, Yuan Ke Oct 2019

The Morality Of Chinese Legalism: Han Fei’S Advanced Philosophy, Yuan Ke

Masters Theses

Legalism, as one of the most useful philosophies of government, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. The work of Han Fei—one of the most influential proponents of Legalism—has been scrutinized and critiqued for centuries as immoral. I intend to show Legalism, especially the Han Feizi, is moral through focusing on four aspects of Han Fei’s work. First, his understanding of human nature. Han Fei states people are born with a hatred of harm and a love of profit. This understanding of human nature can never lead to a cognitive distortions in governing. So it is a moral basic …


Translation Issues In Modern Chinese Literature: Viewpoint, Fate And Metaphor In Xia Shang's "The Finger-Guessing Game", Jonathan Heinrichs Oct 2019

Translation Issues In Modern Chinese Literature: Viewpoint, Fate And Metaphor In Xia Shang's "The Finger-Guessing Game", Jonathan Heinrichs

Masters Theses

The Finger-Guessing Game is a novel with many layers of themes, characterization, and metaphor, and conveying all of these varied aspects requires a detailed, careful approach to translation. With this thesis I aim to show that strictly adhering to a singular translation method, such as “word-for-word” or “sense-for-sense,” will produce unsatisfactory results at certain points within the novel. This is accomplished by an overview of several different unique aspects of the writing style of this novel, viewpoint, the theme of fate, and the use of idioms and metaphors. Following this will be an analysis of these aspects’ functions within the …


Meatspace, Nicholas M. Criscuolo Oct 2019

Meatspace, Nicholas M. Criscuolo

Masters Theses

“MeatSpace” is a group of related bodies of work including podcasts, prints and videos produced by working with simulation technologies such as “weak A.I.”, virtual reality, and 3d scans. Collectively the works explore how people relate to these technologies and how they relate to us. They share thematic or process-oriented sensibilities involving a series of rule-based steps that alternate between the procedural and the intentional. “Uncanny” is defined as strangely familiar. Something which falls in the Uncanny Valley feels wrong, but the reasons may be difficult to articulate. “MeatSpace” is an ongoing experiment to see where our own digital reflections …


Existence Stories, Althea Keaton Aug 2019

Existence Stories, Althea Keaton

Masters Theses

Existence Stories is an interactive activist art project that gathers personal narratives from people about the ways in which their lives have been impacted by the current political climate in the United States, particularly surrounding the 2016 Presidential election and its aftermath. The project harnesses first-person narrative and audience participation as tools for humanizing the “Other” and building connections between people through the act of sharing stories. As the project has progressed over time, it has evolved in multiple directions and come to incorporate a variety of media, primarily comics, animation, printmaking, and zines. The roles that reproduction, distribution, and …


I Speak As One In Doubt, Margaret Hazel Wilson Aug 2019

I Speak As One In Doubt, Margaret Hazel Wilson

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition I Speak as One in Doubt. Blending epistolary format and visionary narrative, the artist addresses her complex relationship to her Catholic upbringing.


Fielding, Emily Tareila Aug 2019

Fielding, Emily Tareila

Masters Theses

Fielding is an ongoing exploration of place-making, spaces of learning and relationship building in formal and informal learning environments. The project is comprised of a series of events and workshops that are embodied, multimodal, olfactory and engagement-focused and a mobile cart that helps to facilitate these happenings both in and out of the formal gallery space. I regard my art practice as pedagogical, a blurring of art and life into intentional ways of being in the world; an experience of sharing practices with others and a form of what is regarded in institutionalized art as social practice. I find art …


“Æthelthryth”: Shaping A Religious Woman In Tenth-Century Winchester, Victoria Kent Worth Aug 2019

“Æthelthryth”: Shaping A Religious Woman In Tenth-Century Winchester, Victoria Kent Worth

Doctoral Dissertations

It is well established that Anglo-Saxon writers were concerned with a specific set of principles (chastity, wisdom and piety) articulated in monastic life. However, the representation of women’s religious lives and the exemplification of their values influencing male saint’s Lives and their authors have to date been largely overlooked. To rectify this omission, I focus on Wulfstan’s tenth-century Vita St. Æthelwoldi, in which Æthelthryth’s character plays a far more significant role than we have heretofore noticed. Apart from the traditional figurae the author uses to depict her virtuous devotion, Wulfstan’s account of Æthelthryth is a testimony of a particular …


The Epistemic Dimensions Of Moral Responsibility And Respect, John Robison Jul 2019

The Epistemic Dimensions Of Moral Responsibility And Respect, John Robison

Doctoral Dissertations

What epistemic conditions must one satisfy to be morally responsible for an action or attitude? A common worry is that robust epistemic requirements would have disastrous implications for our responsibility attributing practices: we would be unable to make epistemically justified responsibility attributions, or we would be licensed to disrespectfully excuse agents for their sincerely held beliefs. Those more optimistic about robust epistemic requirements inadvertently make them too demanding to explain the moral successes of ordinary agents. The present project shows how both the pessimists and optimists rely on instructively mistaken assumptions in epistemology, ethics, and action theory, and it culminates …


Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20th Century Literary Representations Of The Black Male Race Traitor, Gregory Coleman Jul 2019

Black Men Who Betray Their Race: 20th Century Literary Representations Of The Black Male Race Traitor, Gregory Coleman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, Black Men Who Betray Their Race, gathers a literary archive in order to identify and introduce the “race traitor” as a heretofore unrecognized yet important trope within 20th century African-American Literature. In addition to coping with the burden of racism, African Americans have had to put considerable energy toward negotiating the possibility of being perceived as race traitors by others within the African American community. This study tracks the possibilities and perils of black group identity in literary representations of black men, neither privileging opposition to the white world, nor celebrating black unity beyond it. Focusing …


The Political Work Of Memory In Collaborative Caribbean Archaeology, Elena Sesma Jul 2019

The Political Work Of Memory In Collaborative Caribbean Archaeology, Elena Sesma

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is the product of a community-based research project that sought to understand how descendants of the 19th century Millars Plantation on the southern end of Eleuthera, Bahamas continue to use and reinterpret the landscape that they have called home for over a century and a half. In 1871, the last owner of the Millars Plantation left the estate in her will to the descendants of her former slaves and servants. That descendant community still upholds their right to this land today, although in recent years, a Bahamian developer has attempted to gain title to the acreage through the …


Pakistani Pro-Democracy Movement: From The 1960s To The 2000s, Sofia Checa Jul 2019

Pakistani Pro-Democracy Movement: From The 1960s To The 2000s, Sofia Checa

Doctoral Dissertations

In Pakistan from the 1960s to the 2000s, with a focus on the latter. The dissertation is composed of three different papers. The first paper is an analysis of the changing civil society in Pakistan. I argue that in order to understand why the two movements were so different, we need to look at not just a snap shot of the civil society, but its evolution over the years. Rather than thinking of civil society as a static collection of different groups and organizations, this research analyzes it as a combination of groups (or structures) as well as processes that …


Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory In The Age Of Social Media, Erica Fagen Jul 2019

Hashtag Holocaust: Negotiating Memory In The Age Of Social Media, Erica Fagen

Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the representation of Holocaust memory through photographs on the social media platforms of Flickr and Instagram. It looks at how visitors – armed with digital cameras and smartphones – depicted their experiences at the former concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Neuengamme. The study’s arguments are twofold: firstly, social media posts about visits to former concentration camps are a form of Holocaust memory, and secondly, social media allows people from all backgrounds the opportunity to share their memories online. Holocaust memory on social media introduces a new, digital kind of memory called “filtered memory.” This study …


‘Black Intifada’: Black Arts Movement, Palestinian Poetry Of Resistance And The Roots Of Black And Palestinian Solidarity, Nadia Alahmed Jul 2019

‘Black Intifada’: Black Arts Movement, Palestinian Poetry Of Resistance And The Roots Of Black And Palestinian Solidarity, Nadia Alahmed

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary contrapuntal study of Black Arts, Black Power Movements, Palestinian Poetry of Resistance and Palestinian Nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It starts with the examination of shared historical, political cultural and aesthetic forces that propelled the emergence of these movements and how their shared ideological matrix determined the resonance of their political and artistic strategies and goals. It moves on to analyze Black discourse on the Palestine/Israeli conflict from 1948, until the 1967 War, using W.E.B. Du Bois and James Baldwin as models, showing how its key characteristics premeditated the transformation of this discourse …


“Greetings, I Am An Immortal God!”: Reading, Imagination, And Personal Divinity In Late Antiquity, 2nd – 5th Centuries Ce, Mark Roblee Jul 2019

“Greetings, I Am An Immortal God!”: Reading, Imagination, And Personal Divinity In Late Antiquity, 2nd – 5th Centuries Ce, Mark Roblee

Doctoral Dissertations

In City of God, Augustine entertains “personal divinity”—the idea that a person could become an immortal god. Recent scholarship has focused on the social function of such beliefs. The divine status of public figures such as emperors and martyrs has become a trope widely understood in its social and institutional dimensions. I add to this sociological understanding by inquiring into individual experience. How did a late antique person become divine? How did she understand divinity and the limits of the self? In City of God, Augustine assembles an archive that includes references to works by Platonists Apuleius, Plotinus, …


Self-Knowledge, Choice Blindness, And Confabulation, Hayley F. Webster Jul 2019

Self-Knowledge, Choice Blindness, And Confabulation, Hayley F. Webster

Doctoral Dissertations

There are two kinds of epistemic theories about self-knowledge: the traditional account, and the inferentialist account. According to the traditional view of self-knowledge, we have privileged access to our propositional attitudes. “Privileged access” means that one can gain knowledge of one’s own propositional attitudes directly via an exclusive, first-personal method called introspection. On the other hand, the inferentialist view of self-knowledge postulates that we don’t have privileged access to our propositional attitudes and must infer or self-attribute them instead. In this thesis I argue that the traditional view of self-knowledge, which postulates that we have privileged access to our propositional …


Interpreting Access: A History Of Accessibility And Disability Representations In The National Park Service, Perri Meldon Jul 2019

Interpreting Access: A History Of Accessibility And Disability Representations In The National Park Service, Perri Meldon

Masters Theses

This thesis illustrates the accomplishments and challenges of enhancing accessibility across the national parks, at the same time that great need to diversify the parks and their interpretation of American disability history remains. Chapters describe the administrative history of the NPS Accessibility Program (1979-present), exploring the decisions from both within and outside the federal agency, to break physical and programmatic barriers to make parks more inclusive for people with sensory, physical, and cognitive disabilities; and provide a case study of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site (HOFR) in New York. The case study describes the creation of …


The Man Who Had It All But Her: The Construction And Destruction Of The Macho Image In Four Mexican Novels, Adriana Marmolejo Soto Jul 2019

The Man Who Had It All But Her: The Construction And Destruction Of The Macho Image In Four Mexican Novels, Adriana Marmolejo Soto

Masters Theses

The ideas of Mexican Machismo have been crystallized in the image of the Macho, a virile man who represents the ideals of masculinity in a determined time and space. This work aims to examine how four Mexican Novels (Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Elena Garro’s Los Recuerdos del Porvenir, Yuri Herrera’s Trabajos del Reino, and Fernanda Melchor’s Temporada de huracanes) present their unique macho ideals, and how the male characters fail to fulfill them. Through a textual examination of the four novels, this work asks: how is a macho image formed in each pair of novels? And most importantly how …


Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly Jul 2019

Everything Feels Like The Future But Us: The Posthuman Master-Slave Dynamic In Japanese Science Fiction Anime, Ryan Daly

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of the relationships between humans and mechanized beings in Japanese science fiction anime. In it I will be discussing the following texts: Ergo Proxy (2006), Chobits (2002), Gunslinger Girl (2003/2004), and Mahoromatic (2001/2002). I argue that these relationships in these anime series take the form of master/slave relationships, with the humans as the masters and the mechanized beings as the slaves. In virtually every case, the mechanized beings are young females and the masters are older human males. I will argue that this dynamic serves to reinforce traditional power structures and gender dynamics in a …


Imagining A Home For Us: Representations Of Queer Families In Contemporary Japanese Literature, Patrick Carland Jul 2019

Imagining A Home For Us: Representations Of Queer Families In Contemporary Japanese Literature, Patrick Carland

Masters Theses

This thesis addresses popular works of fiction written or produced near or after 1989 in Japan and examines the roles that sexual orientation, gender and 20th century social and discursive history have had on the conceptualization of familial relations in postwar Japan. This thesis will analyze the means by which writers and artists during the 1980s and 1990s have engaged discourses of family in their works and will argue that these writers explicitly use queer (hereby defined as non-heterosexual and/or non-gender conforming) individuals and narratives to question, reshape and propose alternatives to culturally received images of heterosexual marriage and …


Heritage Sites, Leah Burke Jul 2019

Heritage Sites, Leah Burke

Masters Theses

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Heritage Sites, in which vignettes of the artist’s personal and familial narratives become a backdrop for examining themes such as global tourism, the notion of universal heritage, and questioning Puerto Rico as a postcolonial place. A two channel short video layers archival imagery with original material to examine the ways Puerto Rico has been represented and misrepresented personally and globally.


Globalizing Nature On The Shakespearean Stage, William Steffen Mar 2019

Globalizing Nature On The Shakespearean Stage, William Steffen

Doctoral Dissertations

As the far-reaching consequences of human-generated climate change continue to threaten the earth, an evaluation of the historical narrative of the Anthropocene has never been more important. Globalizing Nature revises the anthropocentric narrative of early globalization from the perspective of the non-human world on the early modern stage, which showcases Nature’s agency in determining ecological, economic, and colonial outcomes. Overturning the popular narrative that European technology and military might determined the outcome of settler colonialism in ancient Britain and colonial Virginia, John Fletcher’s Bonduca suggests that the floral and microbial grafts attending colonial exchange could make or break an invader’s …


Engaged, Multicultural Individualism In The Millennial Works Of Maryse Condé And Zadie Smith, Nicole Calandra Mar 2019

Engaged, Multicultural Individualism In The Millennial Works Of Maryse Condé And Zadie Smith, Nicole Calandra

Doctoral Dissertations

In “Engaged, Multicultural Individualism in the Millennial Works of Maryse Condé and Zadie Smith,” I explore the way these authors of the Caribbean diaspora represent the particular challenges characters face when they try to construct individual identities while also managing past traumas and future anxieties in multicultural contexts. I argue that the only path to success is through the development of a humor perspective similar to that of Condé’s and Smith’s third-person narrators, whose humorous, mocking tone, particularly at moments of crisis, creates the critical distance necessary for constructing an autonomous individual identity. The first chapter argues that philosophical insights …


Implicit Learning As A Means Of Tonal Jazz Pitch-Listening Skills Acquisition, David Mosher Mar 2019

Implicit Learning As A Means Of Tonal Jazz Pitch-Listening Skills Acquisition, David Mosher

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present a method for developing tonal jazz pitch-listening skills (PLS) which is rooted in scientific experimental findings from the fields of music cognition and perception. Converging experimental evidence supports the notion that humans develop listening skills through implicit learning via immersive, statistically rich exposure to real music from a particular musical idiom, such as tonal jazz. Therefore, I recommend that to acquire tonal jazz pitch-listening skills, learners should (1) immerse themselves in the real music of that idiom, (2) remediate their listening skills, where necessary, by listening to slowed-down versions with exaggerated features, and (3) organize …