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The Tortured Pre-History Of Urban Blight: African American St. Louis And The Politics Of Public Health, 1877-1940, Taylor Desloge

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a long history of the contested legal and environmental category of blight, especially in its racialized dimensions, in tandem with the African American experience of living in blighted urban spaces and forging a black politics of public health and welfare. Rethinking the conventional view that identifies blight as simply a preoccupation of post-World War II planners, this dissertation relocates its roots in a politics of public health that emerged a hundred years earlier, in the Post-Reconstruction Era, when black migration to the city and the rise of industrial capitalism raised new questions over both the social needs …

Crip Time In Fin-De-Siècle Spain: Disability, Degeneration, And Eugenics, Erika Rodriguez

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A period of intense nation-building, the late nineteenth century was marked by the search for medical and legal solutions to the increasing number of bodies that did not align with culturally constructed expectations of productivity and reproduction in Spanish modernity. Authors of this time used representations of disability to engage in urgent political questions about population control and the rights of individuals in the face of increasing medical intervention. In carrying out this analysis, I raise the question of how representations of disability created a space to reconfigure the social values that determined what lives matter. Focusing on canonical realist …

In Praise Of The Peaks: Science, Art, And Nature In Kojima Usui’S Mountain Literature, Aaron Paul Jasny

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the Meiji period (1868–1912), a newly constituted Japanese nation sought equal standing among the global powers it encountered with increasing frequency, by updating and modernizing in various fields of knowledge and cultural production. Science and technology were adopted and adapted from the nations of the West in order to bolster the economy, improve infrastructure, and ensure the health and well-being of the Japanese people. Meanwhile, literature and the arts were refashioned to make them more suitable for dealing with modernization, urbanization, empirical and rational thinking, and a regard for individual autonomy and subjectivity. Meiji Japan witnessed numerous innovations, which …

Painting Ephemera In The Age Of Mass Production: American Trompe L’Oeil Painting And Visual Culture In The Late Nineteenth Century, Katherine Brunk Harnish

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study offers a fresh approach to investigating the modernization of visual media, exploring themes of media translation, appropriation, and the fine art and popular art divide. This dissertation focuses on paintings that represent prints and photographs in order to understand the relationships between all three media—relationships that changed drastically in late nineteenth-century America. William Harnett, John Haberle, and John Peto made many trompe l’oeil paintings that depict photographs, newspaper clippings, trade cards, and other ephemera. This project posits that these artists represented new media strategically to attract viewers well versed in these forms and to assert the continued relevance …

Affective Materiality: Latin American Science Fiction At The Turn Of The Twenty-First Century, Kyeongeun Park

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores diverse shapes of the future as represented in literary production at the turn of the century—from the late 1980s to the present day—through examining the science fiction (sf) of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. I focus primarily on materiality as an actor and on the agency of things in dialogue with human society through an investigation of the material and cultural productions of sf texts by further scrutinizing the impact of new networking technology. While analyzing the absence and presence of material culture and technological ecology in the selected texts, I work to identify the unique shades and …

Milagros Y Portentos: Evento, Corporalidad Y Etnicidad En La Nueva España, Silvia Juliana Rocha Dallos

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Miracles and Portents: Event, Corporeality and Ethnicity in New Spain (Mexico) studies the concepts of miracle and portent as modes and codes of differentiation and representation of diverse social sectors. Through the examination of treatises on idolatry, inquisition cases related to subjects of African ancestry, and studies on astronomy, I argue that the interpretation of extraordinary events made by the imperial institutions of power impacted not only the imaginaries, but also the behaviors deployed by indigenous peoples, afrodescendants, and creoles. From 1600 to the celebration of the IV Provincial Council of 1771 and the Promulgation of the first Royal Pragmatic …

The Evolution Of Modern Music: Tradition And Innovation In Bartók, Schoenberg, And Stravinsky, Dan Viggers

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite their reputations as musical revolutionaries, Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky continually asserted that their styles were not revolutionary, but evolutionary. For each composer, stylistic evolution implied a continuation of the musical traditions and techniques they inherited from their predecessors. While much has been written about the innovative—or revolutionary—aspects of these three composers, less has been written about how their styles connected to the classical tradition. This dissertation attempts to capture the evolutionary aspects of the styles of Bartók, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. In each chapter, I analyze the interaction of innovative and traditional musical structures. Chapter one discusses …

Sociocultural And Collaborative Antagonism In The Harold Prince-Stephen Sondheim Musicals (1970-1979), Ashley Marian Pribyl

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“I can get an idea for a musical…from getting politically roiled up about one or another thing.” - Director/producer Harold Prince “I couldn’t have been less interested in politics.” - Composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim Despite the above seemingly incompatible quotes, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim somehow ended up forming one of Broadway’s most enduring collaborative legacies. Prince, who strived to challenge his audience’s political complacency, often clashed with Sondheim, whose primary consideration was individual characterization and narrative arc. Prince also chose other collaborators who were more interested in creating politically challenging works, contrary to Sondheim’s focus. When collaborating, Prince and Sondheim …

The Afterlife Of Corpses: A Social History Of Unburied Dead Bodies In Qing China (1644-1911), Joohee Suh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation began with the reading of numerous Qing-dynasty records pertaining to dead bodies that remained on the ground without proper burial. These bodies were not necessarily the victims of extraordinary events such as wars or natural disasters, but the remains of ordinary people whose families failed to arrange a burial site. A wide range of historical materials recorded the presence of these bodies, such as commentaries and critiques on popular burial customs written by the imperial government and literati elites, and Qing popular tales where these bodies were described as man-hunting zombies (jiangshi 僵屍). These sources demonstrate unburied dead …

Infancias Imaginadas: Creciendo En España En El Siglo Xx Con Elena Fortún Y Miguel Delibes, Maria Del Carmen Toro Gonzalez-Green

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

From the 1920s to the 1990s, a large number of works featuring children as main characters were produced and published in Spain. Children live in constant confrontation between what they are and what is expected of them: because of this, in a new literary paradigm, childhood became a symbol for the confrontations, tensions, and contradictions that characterize 20th century Spain. Also, the preponderant temporal dimension for these children characters is the present, which is a significant choice in a historical period in constant tension between letting go of the past and clinging to it. This project explores how different imagined …

Living In This World: A Social History Of Buddhist Monks And Nuns In Nineteenth-Century Western China, Gilbert Zhe Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation relies on about 600 legal cases from the Ba County Archive that survive from the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century to investigate the social life of ordinary Buddhist monks and nuns. Although they played a crucial in maintaining the survival and proper functioning of Buddhism at the local level, they have remained significantly understudied. This dissertation adopts a bottom-up approach to investigate ordinary monastics’ involvement in various socioeconomic activities. By shifting the analytical focus from elite monks to their more mundane counterparts, this study illuminates how deeply ordinary monastics were embedded in their communities. The shift also …

Sociocultural And Collaborative Antagonism In The Harold Prince-Stephen Sondheim Musicals (1970-1979), Ashley Marian Pribyl

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“I can get an idea for a musical…from getting politically roiled up about one or another thing.”

- Director/producer Harold Prince

“I couldn’t have been less interested in politics.”

- Composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim

Despite the above seemingly incompatible quotes, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim somehow ended up forming one of Broadway’s most enduring collaborative legacies. Prince, who strived to challenge his audience’s political complacency, often clashed with Sondheim, whose primary consideration was individual characterization and narrative arc. Prince also chose other collaborators who were more interested in creating politically challenging works, contrary to Sondheim’s focus. When collaborating, Prince and Sondheim …

When A Woman Betrays The Nation: An Analysis Of Moto Hagio’S The Heart Of Thomas, Kaoru Tamura

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses The Heart of Thomas (1974), the representative shōjo manga (girl’s comic) of Moto Hagio, who is often called “The Magnificent Mother of shōjo manga” or “The Goddess of shōjo manga” and was the first shōjo manga creator to win a Meadal of Honor for artistic achievement from the Japanese government. Although The Heart is highly regarded, even worshiped, by fans of manga, scholars have been slow to give it due consideration as an important document of social history, especially of women’s social history. The following study takes a personal approach, attempting to analyze The Heart in the …

The Making Of Cleveland’S Artist: The Aesthetic And Cultural Politics Of Boundary Crossing In The Industrial Landscape Paintings Of Carl Gaertner, 1923 - 1952, April N. Johnston

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The Making of Cleveland’s Artist: The Aesthetic and Cultural Politics of Boundary Crossing in the Industrial Landscape Paintings of Carl Gaertner, 1923 – 1952

by

April Johnston

Master of Arts in American Culture Studies

Washington University in St. Louis, 2019

Dr. Iver Bernstein, adviser

In 1923 Carl Gaertner captivated jurors at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s annual competitive May Show with a painting of a local bolt factory titled Up the River at Upson’s. What made the painting so arresting was its rendering of the elements of factory, nature, and the human spaces that mediated between them, as …

Methods Of Teaching Latin: Theory, Practice, Application, Morgan A. Nicoulin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I present a way to effectively blend modern theories of language acquisition and the contemporary practice of teaching Latin. I intend to demonstrate that a curriculum is able to balance both traditional and innovative philosophies by adapting Second Language Acquisition Theory’s idealized way to learn a language to fit the realistic limitations of the classroom. I begin with a discussion of the history of language pedagogy, focusing on Latin’s influence on the study of language learning from antiquity to present. Next, I present the key topics in SLA and the practical implications of this research for today’s …

The Rise And Fall Of The Fighters: Colonial Korean Exiles In China, Minseung Kim

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis mainly aims to examine colonial masculinity, especially focusing on the national fighters for Korean independence during the Japanese colonial period. As China was a place that Korean exiles moved to, through an examination of Korean short stories by Chu Yosŏp, Sim Hun, and Kim Kwangju, this thesis traces back to the rise and fall of Korean exiles in China who participated in political movements during the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1920s, male intellectual characters in stories by Chu Yosŏp, and Sim Hun expressed their pride as national fighters while participating in Korean exile groups in Shanghai. The …

“By The People Most Affected”: Model Cities, Citizen Control, And The Broken Promises Of Urban Renewal, Sarah Rachel Siegel

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation stands at the intersection of civil rights social history, political history, and urban planning. Among the first academic work to recognize the significance of the Model Cities War on Poverty program, this dissertation explores how residents tried to make American cities safe places for poor people to live as full citizens. It argues that neighborhood activists in St. Louis and around the country used the War on Poverty and Model Cities specifically to make a bid for a permanent role in city planning for their neighborhoods. This was no less than an attempt to alter the relationship between …

Forging A People: Visual Culture In The Illustrated Press Of Post-Revolutionary Mexico, Pablo Martin Zavala

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I trace the methods by which different sectors of society – from writers, journalists, photographers, political militants, graphic artists, activists, and intellectuals, to the State – imagined collective subjectivities in the illustrated printed press while negotiating with

current phenomena like modernization processes and political ideologies. With the stroke of the pen, pencil, or carving tool, these image makers had the power to craft what it meant to be a worker or a peasant. At times tinged with satire, and at others with realism, the images were part of various efforts to forge a people. I argue that …

Impossible Communities In Prague’S German Gothic: Nationalism, Degeneration, And The Monstrous Feminine In Gustav Meyrink’S Der Golem (1915), Amy Michelle Braun

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigates the contribution of Gustav Meyrink’s best-selling novel The Golem/Der Golem (1915) to the second revival of the international Gothic. While previous scholarship suggests that this genre disappeared from the German literary landscape in the 1830s, I interpret The Golem as a Gothic contribution to the “Prague Novel,” a trend in Prague-based, turn-of-the-twentieth-century German-language literature that found inspiration in the heated sociocultural and political tensions that characterized the milieu.

Structured around the demolition of Prague’s former Jewish ghetto under the auspices of the Finis Ghetto plan, a historic Czech-led urban renewal project that leveled the district of Josefov/Josephstadt …

Network Poetics: Studies In Early Modern Literary Collaboration, John Ladd

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Literature scholars often consider the seventeenth century to be the period in which the role of the individual author as we know it today was consolidated, strengthened, or even invented. Scholars of collaboration, most notably Jeffrey Masten in his book Textual Intercourse, tend to treat the phenomenon of joint literary work as limited to coauthorship and either to specific genres (usually drama) or specific periods in time (usually 1590 to 1620). In this model, collaborative environments give way to authorial ones, particularly in Restoration England as the position of the professional author was strengthened by changes in publishing practices. However …

Epistemic Justice And Epistemic Participation, Kate C.S. Schmidt

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I advance a new theory of epistemic injustice, with important implications for pursuing epistemic justice. This project develops a positive account of epistemic justice, broadens the scope of the phenomenon, and motivates new interventions. This dissertations works towards a better understanding of what it means to be an epistemic subject and to be treated as such.

I argue that epistemic injustice can be understood through a lens of participation in inquiry, rather than using the received view that focuses on testimony. On my account, victims are marginalized when disrespected and devalued as potential participants in inquiry due to prejudice. This …

Heretical Communes: The Struggle For Authority In The Fourteenth-Century Papal Territories, Luca Roberto Foti

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation tackles a series of interconnected questions concerning the transformation of papal authority in fourteenth-century Italy. Challenging previous assumptions of a clearly planned process of “state-building” undertaken by the popes in the provinces of central Italy, I argue that papal secular rule was instead the result of a highly localized process of negotiations and compromises with local elites. More specifically, I look at inquisition trials for heresy as a space in which local elites could contest papal authority and advance claims to govern their own cities. This dissertation is based on research conducted in the Vatican Secret Archives and …

Moral Pathology, Katie Rapier

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between morality and mental illness. Mental illness is often thought to impair moral functioning but careful examination reveals that mental illness offers its own insight into moral functioning. While we learn a great deal about moral responsibility and exempting conditions (psychopathy and addiction), we also discover that there a multiple ways to be moral and that many individuals act morally despite ongoing conditions (high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and recovered borderline personality disorder). I conclude that these insights ought to shape our ethical theories.

Seeking Asylum: Communities Of Madwomen In Post-1945 American Novels, Rose Miyatsu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After the end of World War II, the number of mental hospitals in America rose dramatically, as did national attention to mental illness and its treatment. Caught up in these institutions were not just men returning from war with shell shock and other psychological disorders, but also a growing number of women who were finding it difficult to navigate their changing roles in a persistently patriarchal society. This dissertation examines novels that have been written about women in mental asylums in the last half of the twentieth century to argue that this subgenre of American literature, which I will call …

Sinning Men, Sinful Places: Spatial Politics Of Moral Transgressions In The Franco-German Borderland, Oguz Alyanak

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Where do Muslim Turkish men who live in Strasbourg go after work? What are the kinds of places they socialize? Is it home? Is it the mosque? Or is it elsewhere, like coffeehouses, or wherever the car takes them in Strasbourg, and beyond, such as nightclubs, drinking alleys, bistro-casinos and brothels in Kehl and other neighboring German cities? And if it is the latter, and it rarely should be, as the imams would warn the pupils attending religious conversation circles, and the Friday sermons, how do these men justify their presence in these spaces? How do they reflect on their …

Upon This Rock: American Evangelical Spirituality And Jesus Music, 1969-1976, Kathryn Kinney

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation studies the music of the Jesus movement and its role in shaping American evangelical spirituality. I begin by analyzing the emergence of Jesus music in the contexts of the economic systems of evangelicalism and mass media. Next, I examine how anti-rock critics and Jesus music artists differed in their beliefs about the theological functions of music. The second half of the dissertation analyzes how through Jesus music and pop worship Jesus movement participants developed and distributed a new evangelical spirituality based on ‘feeling’ or experience. This aesthetic embrace of experiential, musical spirituality allows for people with varying levels …

Female Acrobatics In Context: 5th-4th C. Bc, Marleigh Anderson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The ‘meaning’ of a performance is largely determined by its context. This idea became clear to me after years as a dancer performing in drastically different venues—including nursing home lobbies, circus tents, makeshift outdoor festival stages, football fields, and ornate theatres. To me, every performance opportunity felt distinct, especially depending on the audience and the nature of the performance. This is the personal background that I bring to my study of female acrobatic performances in ancient Greek society, and it is part of the reason that I find it critical to consider these performances within their contexts. Even if the …