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Korean Newspapers And The “Irish Problem”: Japanese Censorship In Colonial Korea, 1920-1930, Jaehyun Kim

Student Work

Jaehyun Kim’s thesis, “Korean Newspapers and the ‘Irish Problem’: Japanese Censorship in Colonial Korea, 1920-1930,” touches upon a subject that scholars of colonial Korea have given insufficient attention to. Kim asks why there featured so many colonial Korean run newspaper articles on the Irish Independent movement in the 1920s and 1930s when the Japanese colonial government actively censored Korean newspapers. Indeed, in the wake of the March First Independent Movement, the colonial authorities shifted its harsh military rule to a more conciliatory cultural policy, allowing Koreans to vent their nationalistic sentiments within the confines of state control. However, the level …

Housing Displacement In Corlears Hook: From Naghtongh To One Manhattan Square, Don Macleod

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The displacement of residents from their homes in New York City began with the European settlement of New Amsterdam and continues to this day. This paper focuses on displacement in Corlears Hook, part of Manhattan’s Lower East Side from the violent extirpation of a Lenape settlement in 1643 New Amsterdam to the gentrification of a traditional working-class neighborhood along the East River propelled by the influx of luxury housing development. Throughout Corlears Hook’s long history, displacement has been caused by violence, well-meaning efforts to improve slum conditions, ham-fisted “urban renewal” projects that favored the wealthy and civic improvements that used …

Endless Form, Kaela Kennedy

Masters Theses

Endless Form is a gentle argument for a practice rooted in embodied seeing and communicating. It invites the reader through multiple actions of visual and linguistic perception – observation, seeing, and attention – and examines how these methods operate to widen our fields of understanding to more empathetically engage with the world as an ecological whole. It claims that graphic design, as a practice built on the relationship between visual form and language, has a unique ability to translate the unending feedback loop between the eye, the seen, and the language we use to define it. It argues for ways …

Analyzing The Enduring White Reception Of Raisin In The Sun: Defining And Reexamining The “Universal” Label, Kayla J. Baur

Student Theses

Hansberry’s intent to centralize the Black American family while simultaneously addressing divisive topics of race and gender positioned Raisin as a prescient, continuously relevant work that is open for interpretation for years to come. With this intent in mind, critics acclaimed Raisin and hailed it as a universal play for every theatergoer to enjoy. However, this enduring sentiment of Raisin as “universal” is a construct created by the predominantly-white theater industry. This perceived universality is dependent on the audience’s ability to find entertainment value in the story, even if the idea of only deriving amusement from the story undermines Hansberry’s …

“Unnatural, Filthy, Unclean And Positively Dangerous To Health And Life.”: Smallpox Vaccine Refusal And Sectional Violence In Montréal 1885, Mary M. Horman

Major Papers

Montreal was stricken by an epidemic of smallpox in the year 1885 which resulted in over 3,000 deaths and which lasted 15 months. The disease was brought into the city by a pullman conductor arriving on a train from Chicago. The city of Montréal Health Department was confident that they would be able to manage the initial outbreak easily because by 1885 smallpox was considered to be a vaccine preventable disease. Unfortunately, many errors were made by the Health Department in the initial outbreak that allowed the disease to escape into the city of Montreal, where it was greatly aided …

"Most Catholic Spain": British Evangelical Protestant Views Of The Spanish Civil War And Its Legacy, Chloe Kinderman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

"Most Catholic Spain": British Evangelical Protestant Views of the Spanish Civil War and its Legacy presents a case study of The Churchman’s Magazine and Wickliffe Preachers’ Messenger (CMWPM), a publication of the Protestant Truth Society, between 1930 and 1945. The Protestant Truth Society was a British Evangelical organization that was dedicated to opposing the influence of Catholicism within Britain. This thesis explores how the CMWPM discussed Spain during the interwar and World War II period, especially its coverage of the Second Spanish Republic, the Spanish Civil War, and the early Franco Regime. Ultimately, the CMWPM latched on to Spain as …

Defining Elegant Taste In Emma And The British Housewife, Genevieve Brewer

Masters Theses

Master's Thesis completed at Trinity College, Hartford CT

Georgia Ghosts: History, Folklore, And The Roots Of The Southern Gothic, Katherine M. Mcdowell

Master's Projects

There is something quintessentially human about ghost stories, yet particular regions tend to be more powerfully associated with haunted folktales than others. One of the regions is the southeastern United States. In fact, these oral traditions appear to have influenced the area's best-known literary subgenre: the Southern Gothic.

Why is the South considered haunted? Are there particular qualities in historical events that make them more likely to engender ghost stories? What makes the South's folkloric spirits so powerful that they appear even in modern literature? Most of all, what connects the region's history and folklore with the Southern Gothic? By …

Rewrite The Past And Remember The Future: How Expatriates Built An Independent Ireland, Morgan Grabowski

English Honors Papers

This paper seeks to answer the question “How did Ireland create a unique identity after gaining independence from England?” In order to answer that question, I analyzed five different Irish authors who wrote in a timeframe spanning the first half of the twentieth century. These authors are W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Elizabeth Bowen, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. These authors, at one point or another, wrote texts which are considered Irish, while living abroad. Because of this, this paper focuses on their status as expatriates, and how that influenced their contributions to the Irish Literary Revival, which is the literary …

Coming Out Of The Coffin: The History And Present Of Queerness In The Vampire Genre., Bailey Drummond

Honors Projects

This essay delves into the captivating and lasting influence of vampires on popular culture since their creation. The fascination with vampires can be traced back to literary works such as John Polidori's "The Vampyre" and Bram Stoker's classic "Dracula," which have served as foundations for vampire mythology across different media platforms. Despite the evolution of media and cultural contexts, certain themes surrounding vampires have persisted throughout history. Notably, vampires have been portrayed as symbols of sexuality and queerness, reflecting societal fears and desires from past eras to the present day. These themes have been critically analyzed and dissected in various …

Milton Holland: An Enslaved Texan Who Earned The Nation's Highest Military Honor, Patrick Coan

Honors Program Theses and Research Projects

Texans have long contended that slavery in Texas was marginal. Early scholars depicted Texas as a western state rather than a southern state dedicated to slavery. However, slavery was central to Texas from the 1830s-1860s. The story of Milton Holland offers a window into the importance of slavery in Texas and the importance of enslaved Texans in U.S. history. Holland was the first Texan to win the Medal of Honor (not just the first black Texan to win the Medal of Honor). Despite this achievement and Texas’ affinity for military prowess, Holland remains missing in Texas history textbooks, the Bob …

Hozier, Tiktok, And Sapphic Rhetoric, Sophia Marie Kovalcik

English Theses & Dissertations

Through the process of social circulation and critical imagination, Sappho’s poetry, which maintains rhetoric that women, nature, and love are related to ritual and feminine divinity, intersects with queer digital rhetoric. Via discussion of feminist spirituality rhetoric, Marie Cartier’s lesbian theology, and rhetorical and literary analysis of Sappho’s lyrical fragments, I explore her Ancient Greek mythological, cultural aesthetics. I then connect sapphic rhetoric to two contemporary artifacts that represent or influence contemporary feminist, digital, and queer identities: the lyrics of the Irish musician Andrew Hozier-Byrne, known as Hozier and TikTok comment sections surrounding Hozier’s music and concert clips.

Does Pleasurable Music Indirectly Better Learning?: A Multimodal Approach, Elizabeth Anna Roeglin

Undergraduate Honors Papers

Recent research has shown that musical pleasure is due to the combination of uncertainty and surprise a musical piece elicits. Additionally, research has demonstrated that music influences arousal and mood, both of which affect learning. However, current research has not adequately tested whether pleasurable music indirectly improves learning by influencing mood/arousal. This study attempts to do so. Twenty-seven participants completed a survey that included the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire. Eighteen participants, whose scores demonstrated that they feel emotion-evoking and/or mood-regulatory pleasure from listening to music, came in for further testing. These participants experienced a music condition, in which they listened …

Hame, Russell Clarke

Dance (MFA) Theses

Researcher Russell Clarke contemplates the need for human belonging, looking into ways that human belonging shows up in the contemporary world. Clarke explores the interconnection between his identity and memories from his childhood along with exploring his life’s journey of searching for belonging. He focuses his research on main themes throughout his life that have influenced his need to belong: family, migration, dance, and his connection to the outdoors. Growing up in Scotland and later migrating to America, Clarke found his relationship with his family and dance as constant threads entangling and influencing his life—the call of his homeland is …

An Examination Of The Visual And Textual Influences On The Anthology Of American Folk Music, Ben Collier

History Theses

The Anthology of American Folk Music is a collection of eight-four selections of southern vernacular recordings made for commercial record labels in the 1920s and 1930s and assembled into a unified collage by Harry Smith. Smith was an experimental filmmaker, painter, and self-taught anthropologist with a deep interest in renaissance hermeticism and mysticism who worked with Moe Asch in 1952 to release the six-record set and accompanying handbook on Folkways Records. The release was heralded by musicians and critics as an essential piece of influence on the folk music revival. Despite this, the Anthology sold poorly and quickly faced legal …

The Body Negotiating Unprecedented Movement, Mei Bock

Honors Projects

A collection of poems exploring threads including the Lower East Side, immigration, stray animals, art, and Chinese-American identity.

Holistic And Holy: An Inward Journey Toward Healing And Wholeness, Chad Mcswain

Doctor of Leadership

There are two ubiquitous challenges to the modern church in North America: declining church attendance and the mental health crisis. This is an opportunity for the modern church to take up the missional imperative by providing access to mental health resources to meet the mental and spiritual needs of those they serve, while creating a positive connection to those who do not currently attend church.

This doctoral project seeks to address both challenges by providing a podcast called, Holistic and Holy, Listener Guide, and website that creates conversations at the intersection of mental health and spirituality. This approach uses traditional …

The People Are A-Changin’: The Political Groupings That Built American Folk And Country Music, Nicholas Taubenheim

CMC Senior Theses

Since the Civil War, American folk and country music have become deeply political cultural mediums. This thesis posits that the history of the folk-country family can be broken down into three distinct “eras.” During the first era, the post-Civil War South gave rise to a new form of “Dixie,” or “hillbilly” folk music derived from traditional European folk ballads. In the second era, the Dust Bowl migrants of Southern California pioneered the “Okie” sound, which built upon Dixie/hillbilly music. And in the third era, the political and cultural dissidents of the 1960s produced a new type of folk music in …

Decolonization Of The Writing Classroom: Creating Space For Decolonial Theory, Tools, Anti-Racist Pedagogy, And Methods To Improve The Emerging Bilingual Student Experience, Desiree L. Brown

Masters Theses

In this thesis, the author addresses the colonial roots of the secondary writing classroom and the origin of standard academic English which enables strict standardized testing and writing assessment requirements that in-turn incite linguistic violence towards emerging bilingual students. The author frames her study within the framework of April Baker-Bell and Asao B. Inoue through a reflective/reflexive study of her teaching in a ninth grade writing classroom in a primarily Hispanic school district in South Texas, which is assessed by the state of Texas through STAAR. This study seeks to identify instances of linguistic violence being perpetuated in the writing …

The Third Horseman: Preventability Versus Apocalypse In The Great Famine Of 1315 And The Irish Potato Famine, Luke Ziegler

Honors Theses

Famine is a huge problem for societies, even in the modern world. Throughout history, famine has reared its ugly head and brought about demographic and societal collapse. The Great Famine of 1315 Famine and the Irish Potato Famine, despite their differences, had similar underlying factors of land management and overpopulation paired with an environmental catalyst, and also show that governmental response has the potential to both cause and prevent a famine, but only if the scale of the problem is limited. They both examine the question of national identity and create a multitude of debates in later historiography. Although these …

Memories And Trauma Of An Absent Past- Women Filmmakers In Argentina, Nicholas P. Pezzote

Doctoral Dissertations

This work analyzes the relationship between personal and historical memory in five Argentine films made after the end of the country's last dictatorship. All are directed by, and feature, women. Besides approaching the topic of memory, this work examines how patriarchy influences narratives of both personal histories and, more broadly, of history in: Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984), Un muro de silencio (Lita Stantic, 1993), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003) and La mujer sin cabeza (Lucrecia Martel, 2008). Trauma and the handing down of memory—issues that appear in all of the chosen films—are approached from a critical feminist perspective. At …

Likeness In Utopia: Situation And Metaphor From Thomas More To Edward Bellamy, Sage Rachmiel Bard Gilbert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a literary genre, utopia is notably didactic. It seeks to teach desire and to educate hope. As such, utopia provides a unique site to examine the way metaphor and imagination enable one to be convinced, and the way those same elements facilitate misunderstanding. Following the theorization of Ernst Bloch, the goal of critiquing these literary utopias is not to reject hope but, rather, to educate our own daydreams, to learn and move forward. These chapters examine didacticism and the development of colonial metonymy in Thomas More’s Utopia, the way metaphor operates through time in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: …

Proud Of Your Boy: Toxic Masculinity, Boyhood, And The American Musical, Aaron J. Wood

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project traces the cultural historiography of the phrase "boys will be boys" and examines the pattern of white male excusal it embodies through a case-study based survey of onstage depictions of boyhood in musical theatre. I argue that the generational idea of manhood as aggressive, competitive, and violent is continually reasserted through our passive acceptance of white boy violence. This dissertation looks to the musicals Newsies, West Side Story, Heathers, and Dear Evan Hansen as case studies for exploring the cultural lineage of the phrase “boys will be boys.” Like the works of Aaron Thomas, Raymond …

Feeling Uneasy On Easy Street: Decoloniality, Mental Health, And Social Culture Within A University Department Of Music, Ucee-Uchenna L. Nwachukwu

Masters Theses

As a graduate student in a university music department, I have devoted a lot of time to working in associated yet also disparate realms: as a performer, a Teacher's Assistant, and a student. During this time, I have also begun conducting research examining the music department’s social culture. I have observed my colleagues– meaning my fellow graduate students–sacrificing their mental health, physical health, and emotional wellbeing in order to meet ambiguous expectations that I will argue are often rooted in the coloniality of Western Art Music. I have observed and experienced conversations that neglect to acknowledge the ways in which …

The Haunting Aesthetics Of Empire: Filipinx America, Us Empire, And Cultural Production, Alana J. Bock

American Studies ETDs

Throughout this dissertation, I argue that US imperial knowledge production affirms US exceptionalism by disavowing the imperial violence wrought on the Philippines and its people. This disavowal not only renders the Philippines and Filipinx bodies illegible, but also haunts the Filipinx American diaspora. I argue that the haunted logics of empire are a set of relations, rather than specters of specific times and places, in which knowledge and power work together to continually produce and reproduce a specific and limiting reality and sensorium through which to view the world. In my interrogation of empire’s haunted logics, I not only look …

The Context And The Commissioner: The Effect Of Milwaukee’S Health Commissioners’ Social, Cultural, And Historical Understanding Of Milwaukee’S People During The Last Five Pandemics, Madeline O'Dea Fruehe

Theses and Dissertations

Resistance to pandemic response policies was observed globally throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This resistance has been linked by researchers to the prolonged duration and higher mortality rate of COVID-19 compared to previous pandemics, despite advancements in modern medicine, extensive surveillance networks and record vaccine production. However, the strategies implemented by public health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic closely mirrored those successful in mitigating past pandemics. To elucidate this disparity, a historical analysis encompassing the 1918, 1957, 1968, 2009, and Covid-19 pandemics was conducted within the city of Milwaukee. By examining archival documents and over 800 newspaper articles, this research found …

Urbanization On The Landscape Of The Old City: An Archaeological Investigation Of Site 40kn223 In Knoxville, Tennessee, Garrett B. Wamack

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I examine the effects of urbanization on the landscape and the people who lived upon it at archaeological site 40KN223 within the Old City in Knoxville, Tennessee. This landscape analysis focuses particularly on the decades from 1850 to 1920 during the birth and growth of the Old City. Amid the rising tides of commercialization, industrialization, and the flood-prone waters of First Creek, residents established a working-class neighborhood on the fringe of a substantial African American community. I examine this neighborhood and the transformation of its immediate landscape to understand how urbanization impacted its transformation, to learn who …

“Each Heart Alone Knoweth Its Own Bitterness”: The Jackson Family In Clarke County, Virginia, From Enslavement To Jim Crow, Melanie E. Garvey

Graduate Masters Theses

This thesis examines the experiences of three generations of the Jackson family in Clarke County, Virginia, from approximately 1860 to 1915, covering the shift from enslavement to the Jim Crow period. Chapter One introduces the challenges with pre-existing publications on Clarke County and Virginia history. Chapter two focuses on the antebellum period and discusses what enslavement may have looked like in Clarke County. Chapter Three narrows the focus to Charles Jackson, Sr., the family patriarch, who was enslaved at New Market Plantation. Chapter Four looks at Charles Sr.’s son, Charles Jr., and the life he created for himself after enslavement. …

The 1900s Southwestern Ontario Sand Sucker Panic, Mary E. Baxter

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

During the early twentieth century, waterbed aggregate mining in the Great Lakes supplied sand and gravel for infrastructure development in the lakes’ shoreline communities. This thesis explores commercial dredging and its impacts at Lake Erie's Pelee Island and Point Pelee, and along the St. Clair River. The mostly transnational activity produced shoreline erosion that threatened agricultural operations, and sand suckers, the dredges that performed the mining, came to symbolize American capitalist exploitation in southwestern Ontario. Disputes arose over the extent of the erosion and affected relations between governments at all levels. Using government and business records, I argue that the …

Ecology And Retribution: Blake, Tokarczuk, And Animal Rights, Kristina Isaak Powell

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's 2008 novel, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, engages with William Blake's life and his writings on animal welfare and speaks to current conversations about multispecies justice in the environmental humanities. It argues, first, that in recognizing how this novel's protagonist, Janina, selectively reads Blake to rationalize retributive justice, readers should resist a tendency to mistake this character for Tokarczuk's ideal advocate for environmental ethics. Secondly, it asserts that legal scholars' division between retributive and restorative justice offers valuable framework for approaching both this novel and ongoing debates about …