Digital Commons Network^™

Vatican Ii, Liberation Theology, And Vernacular Masses For The Family Of God In Central America, Bernard J. Gordillo

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The Second Vatican Council (1962–65) instituted reforms in the Catholic Church that included changes in language and music employed in the liturgy, inspiring a proliferation of sung vernacular masses throughout Latin America. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research undertaken in Nicaragua and the United States, this article examines three Central American vernacular masses—Misa típica panameña de San Miguelito (1967), Misa popular nicaragüense (1969), and Misa campesina nicaragüense (1975). Each mass emanated from communities founded as part of the transnational Familia de Dios (Family of God) movement, which established programs of religious education, leadership training, and community building among impoverished …

Early Modern Scottish Metrical Psalmody: Origins And Practice, Timothy Duguid

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Non-literate societies are often dependent on music for transmitting news and ideas because of music’s ability to enhance memory. Sixteenth-century reformers were aware of this, but they had to compete with secular and Roman Catholic music that often contradicted Reformed doctrine. Highly influenced by the Strasbourg-based Martin Bucer and the writings of Saint Augustine, John Calvin insisted that Biblical Psalms, set in vernacular poetry, were most appropriate for both corporate worship and private devotion. The result was a series of metrical psalters that were intended to be performable by everyone. Some editions had explicitly liturgical designs, but most were intended …

Environmental Racism In Historical Context: The Robbins Incinerator Debate, 1980s-1990s, Brian Reyes

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

Conventional narratives of environmental racism paint a “perpetrator-victim” scenario, in which an environmental hazard is forced upon a powerless nonwhite community. This is not always the case. In 1988, a deal was struck to locate an incinerator in an all-Black suburb of Chicago called Robbins. The debate over the Robbins incinerator, which lasted nearly a decade, emerged as a particularly notable incident of environmental racism because of the willingness of Robbins’ Black leadership and residents to accept the plan. Their support was the result of a longstanding history of racialized underdevelopment and political neglect which had left the town destitute …

Operationalizing Culture: Refugees, Migration, And Mental Health In The Wake Of The Vietnam War, Helena Bui

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

!e end of the Vietnam War led to the migration of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to the United States a"er political and economic upheaval. As another result, the refugees’ years of warfare, trauma, death, and injury began to manifest as unprecedented mental health issues that American physicians and researchers sought to understand. In this paper, I argue that American medical professionals— in good faith—operationalized [Vietnamese] culture to help themselves and their colleagues understand the mental health issues of Vietnamese refugees. Yet this operationalization acted as a double-edged sword. Viewing Western mental health discourse through the lens of Vietnamese …

Argo: Cia Influence And American Jingoism, Andrea De Oliveira

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

“Argo: CIA Influence and American Jingoism” focuses on the ways in which CIA involvement in the production and publicity of Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012) yielded a biased representation of the Iranian public. Throughout the film, Affleck pictures Iranians as aggressive and deindividualized, spreading the trope of the Middle Eastern fanatic to viewers worldwide. While villainizing the Iranian public, Argo undermines a fraught history of United States intervention in Iran. Although Affleck takes several liberties in cinematizing the Iranian Hostage Crisis, Argo masquerades as a historical authority, peppered with markers of authenticity such as newsreel footage. I argue that the film …

“An International Law With Teeth In It”: The Baruch Plan And American Public Opinion, Amir Rezvani

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

In 1946, Bernard Baruch, the American representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, introduced the United States’ proposal for international control of atomic energy, known as the Baruch Plan. It suggested a regime under which the United Nations would enforce an international ban on atomic weapons. The proposal, which stated that the United States would destroy its atomic arsenal only once the plan were fully implemented, was blocked in the United Nations by the Soviet Union. This paper argues that domestic public opinion played a significant role in the development, negotiation, and failure of the plan, but that the …

Lgbtq In Russia: Obstacles In The Late Post-Socialist Period, Mary Tate

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

In the lead up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics, President Putin passed a law that placed a ban on all homosexual "propaganda" in the country. The "gay propaganda" law was met with an international outcry, as advocacy groups around the world condemned Russian state-sponsored homophobia. Despite their heightened involvement before the Sochi Olympics, international activists had little impact on LGBTQ oppression in Russia as they failed to address two key obstacles facing the Russian LGBTQ movement: enforcement of conservative "traditional values,” and Putin's nationalist project to return Russia to a misremembered imperial past. This essay argues that we must understand …

From “Pseudowomen” To The “Third Sex:” Situating Antisemitism And Homophobia In Nazi Germany, Gabriel Klapholz

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

In this article, I examine how Nazi antisemitism and homophobia built upon one another, employing parallel narratives about femininity, foreignness, and threats to the nation state. I explore how early historiography of the Nazi period links the two phenomena as part of a single project, variations on the same theme of Nazi hatred. Ultimately, however, I work to challenge the earlier historiographical narrative and illuminate the ways in which Nazism treated Jews and gays very differently. In order to do so, I examine the two main strands of German sexology at the time, that of Magnus Hirschfeld and that of …

Immunity As An Integral Aspect Of Tribal Sovereignty: An Analysis Of The Supreme Court Case Michigan V. Bay Mills Indian Community, Meghanlata Gupta

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

While Native nations in the United States have tribal sovereignty—that is, the inherent freedom and authority to govern themselves without outside control—non-Native actors have often challenged this institution within legal and political spaces. The United States court system, starting with the Marshall Court, has often attempted to define aspects of Indigenous sovereignty and federal-tribal relationships. The 2014 US Supreme Court case Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community is no exception, raising questions of sovereign immunity in the context of Indian gaming, tribal-state relationships, and land trusts. This paper first provides a general context for the case, identifying relevant historical events …

Jewish Ancestral Languages And Communicating The Sephardic Experience: The Judeospanish Of Tela De Sevoya, Julia Kahn

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

Judeo-Spanish, the ancestral language of Sephardic Jews, enjoys fewer speakers, literature, and less scholarly attention compared to Yiddish, its counterpart spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. Nonetheless, Judeo-Spanish captures the rich experiences of its speakers through exile, persecution, and perseverance, embodying unique Jewish-Spanish culture and religious practice. It has received fresh recognition in the last two centuries from scholars and Sephardim themselves, and the quincentennial of the 1492 Jewish expulsion from Spain inspired a new Sephardic autobiographical genre, where Sephardic authors grapple with their heritages and language, dimming from assimilation and the Shoa. Myriam Moscona is one such author whose unique descent …

Interwoven Histories: A Chinese Family, A Yale Graduate And The Nanking Massacre, Isabella Yang

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

Following the fall of Nanjing, the Republic of China’s capital, in December 1937 during World War II, Japanese soldiers conducted a series of atrocities against civilians in the region that lasted for months, infamously known as the Nanking Massacre. This paper takes a microhistorical approach to examining how these atrocities permanently affected civilians’ lives. Relying on oral histories and primary sources at the Yale Divinity Library, it explores two interwoven histories of wartime survivors: one of the Cao family residing just outside Nanjing when the atrocities happened, and another of a Yale graduate named Miner Searle Bates who took advantage …

“But The City Made Us New, And We Made It Ours”: Reflections On Urban Space And Indigeneity In Tommy Orange’S There There, Meghanlata Gupta, Nolan Arkansas

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

Native American writers in the United States have often used literature to celebrate their communities, defy stereotypes, and share their histories on their own terms. In the past few years, this movement has seen another wave, with artists and scholars engaging in literary storytelling to shed light on Indigenous resistance efforts in the United States. Tommy Orange is no exception, writing about urban Indigenous life in his 2018 novel There There. While There There positions the city as a product of settler colonialism, the book also illustrates the ways in which urban Indigenous peoples subvert colonial mechanisms by celebrating tribal …

Greening The Archive: The Social Climate Of Cotton Manufacturing In The "Samuel Oldknow Papers, 1782-1924", Bernadette Myers, Melina Moe

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article re-examines the records and correspondence of Samuel Oldknow, a late eighteenth century textile manufacturer, within the context of the environmental humanities. Oldknow’s papers, a portion of which are held at Columbia University, are most often used by economic historians to date the beginnings of the factory wage labor system. We highlight, instead, the environmental implications of Oldknow’s cotton enterprise by juxtaposing documents related to the global reach of Oldknow’s empire with evidence of his transformation of the local landscape of northern England. This process of re-scaling captures a sense of what we call the “social climate” of the …

Singing And Sensing The Unknown: An Embodied History Of Hindu Practice In Ghana, Shobana Shankar

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Hinduism fits well into the “sound-filled” West African religious soundscape, which is a scene of competition and conflict. This article explores the soundscape of devotional singing, mantras, and prayers as a central part of the embodiment and embedment of Hinduism among Africans in Ghana, where the Indian diaspora has been relatively small and the indigenous movement of Hinduism entirely through African initiative. Using ethnographic and written sources to examine the Hindu Monastery of Africa, founded by the Ghanaian monk Swami Ghanananda in 1975, I examine how the oral and aural popular devotions crafted by the swami have shifted attention away …

A Requiem For The Ussr: From Atheism To Secularity, Oksana Nesterenko

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This article examines performance and reception of music of sacred tradition in the Soviet Union in the 1970s-80s, with the focus on two works composed in the genre of Catholic Requiem Mass, Alfred Schnittke’s Requiem (1975) and Vyacheslav Artyomov’s Requiem (1988). The article recounts the history of Soviet atheism that, as a result of state’s failure to eradicate religion, evolved into a form of secular modernity, and outlines the music culture in which Schnittke and Artyomov lived. The official reception of the two requiems, which changed dramatically within twelve years, illustrates the state’s changing attitude to religion from atheist, where …

Assimilating To Art-Religion: Jewish Secularity And Edgar Zilsel’S Geniereligion (1918), Abigail Fine

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In 1918, Edgar Zilsel—a Marxist-Jewish philosopher who was soon to be exiled from Vienna—published a sociological study that later readers have found prescient of fascism. In Die Geniereligion (“The Religion of Genius”), Zilsel cautioned against the hidden dangers of elevating secular figures to the status of deities. As early as 1912, Zilsel was disturbed by how art-religion shaped music culture: his earliest published essay ruminated on timelessness and canonicity, on striving for heavenly tones while cast down to the earthly squalor of the concert hall. Indeed, in Zilsel’s Vienna, art-religion had come to dominate the music world—biographers made Beethoven a …

A Comfort Women Redress Movement Without Comfort Women, Jenna Shin

Student Work

A 2020-2021 Williams Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Jenna Shin (Morse '21) for her essay submitted to the East Asian Studies Program, "A Comfort Women Redress Movement without Comfort Women” (Yukiko Koga, Associate Professor of Anthropology, advisor).

While the comfort women issue is often framed within contested relations between the victims and the perpetrators, such as South Korean survivors and/or South Korea’s relationship with Japan, Jenna Shin’s essay, “A Comfort Women Redress Movement without Comfort Women,” shifts her reader’s attention to the relationship between the surviving comfort women and their main advocacy group, the …

Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration To Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911, Gregory Jany

Student Work

A 2020-2021 Williams Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Gregory Jany (Jonathan Edwards, '21) for his essay submitted to the Department of History, “Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration to Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911" (Denise Ho, Assistant Professor of History, advisor).

Gregory Jany’s thesis, “Imperial Crossings: Chinese Indentured Migration to Sumatra's East Coast, 1865-1911,” is elegantly written, deeply researched in multiple archives—British materials, Dutch archives, and Qing documents—and uses several languages beyond English: Bahasa Indonesia, Dutch, Chinese, and Classical Chinese. Grounded in the literatures of the late imperial China, the Chinese diaspora, and colonial Southeast Asia, …

Continuous Extremes: Architecture Of Uncertainty In Poland, 1945—, Cayce Davis

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

In this thesis, architecture situates between extremes. The dichotomies of destruction and construction, mobility and fixity, performance and reality, inside and outside, and form and time frame architecture and the processes through which it is made. The context is Poland in the fallout of the year 1945, when Warsaw’s unique, nearly total destruction and the ascendance of a new communist regime raised the political stakes of architecture. The thesis focuses on a cast of characters in architecture and related artistic disciplines—individuals haunted by the traumas of their own pasts, negotiating a Polish state that created oppressive limitations through artistic mandates …

Battling Over Bargain-Hunting: Defining The American Consumer Through Mass-Consumption Shopping Practices, 1909- 1915, Angela Xiao

Harvey M. Applebaum ’59 Award

This essay examines the debate and backlash against bargain-hunting in the first two decades of the 20th century across the United States. Using newspaper coverage and advertisements, congressional testimony, and the writings and speeches of businessman Ed Filene, it provides an account of the social and political discussion surrounding the practice of bargain-hunting, which include tensions at various levels. It concludes that the debate surrounding bargain-hunting and bargain-hunters, the women who most often engaged in such practices, reflected the challenges of imagining the concept of the American consumer and grappling with the role and relationship of the consumer as a …

The Suffrage Postcard Project: Feminist Digital Archiving And Transatlantic Suffrage History, Ana Stevenson, Kristin Allukian

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article introduces The Suffrage Postcard Project (SPP), a feminist digital humanities project that utilizes digital tools to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist digital humanities practices engender new historical narratives of the suffrage movement, especially in the United States and Britain. This article uses our Omeka-based digital archive of suffrage postcards to discuss the history of the postcard, the significance of a postcard archive to digital archival studies, and the significance of the digital postcard archive to digital history.

Our project uses feminist DH methodology in coding, tagging, and data visualization to better understand how gender, and intersecting …

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …

Blood At The Root, Jarrett Martin Drake

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

What is the sound of silence and what is the sight of absence? The following essay situates itself along those two questions by devoting close ethnographic attention to the lives and afterlives of seven people—Delia, Renty, Jem, Alfred, Fassena, Drana, and Jack—whose reflections resonate and resound throughout the world of archives. I argue that a theory of archival power must consider the role of process and place in the shaping of modern memory practices. The article begins by narrating the story of how these seven people came to occupy the center of the archival universe. Next, it traces a tale …