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Methods For Estimating Long-Distance Dispersal, Ran Nathan, Gad Perry, James T. Cronin, Allan E. Strand, Michael L. Cain

Faculty Publications

Long-distance dispersal (LDD) includes events in which propagules arrive, but do not necessarily establish, at a site far removed from their origin. Although important in a variety of ecological contexts, the system-specific nature of LDD makes "far removed" difficult to quantify, partly, but not exclusively, because of inherent uncertainty typically involved with the highly stochastic LDD processes. We critically review the main methods employed in studies of dispersal, in order to facilitate the evaluation of their pertinence to specific aspects of LDD research. Using a novel classification framework, we identify six main methodological groups: biogeographical; Eulerian and Lagrangian movement/redistributional; short-term …

From Shiloh To Savannah: The Seventh Illinois Infantry In The Civil War, B. Franklin Cooling

Civil War Book Review

Military Memoir

A newly annotated edition of Ambrose's account

Effeminate Pacifists And War-Mongering Women Thoughts On War And Peace In The Long Eighteenth Century, Kathryn R. King

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Eve's "Sweet Converse" Conversational Patterns In Paradice Lost, Alice Mathews

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Poems By Eminent Ladies The Encyclopedic Anthology Of 1755, Chantel Lavoie

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

"The Alphabet Of Nature" Writing As Trope In Early Modern Scientific And Philosophical Discourse, Nicholas Hudson

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

Jonathan Swift Bounces A Head, Regina Janes

1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era

No abstract provided.

"Above The Noise And The Glory": Tiers Of Propaganda In Great War Literature, Margaret L. Clark

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

"Above the Noise and the Glory:" Tiers of Propaganda in Great War Literature illuminates the literary responses of Rupert Brooke, Mary Borden, Alice-Dunbar Nelson and Willa Cather to the manner in which the threat to one's cultural community, as well as personal and physical landscape, transforms a nation's, and even a world's, people from a state of complacency or purposelessness to one of jingoistic fervor. Prompted and inspired by personal, political and cultural forces, these writers mobilized early twentieth-century private citizens' spirits of nationalistic pride and solidarity. Individual chapters place within historical and literary contexts how war propaganda, particularly British …

Narrative Immediacy And First-Person Voice In Contemporary American Novels, Amy Faulds Sandefur

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study of first-person fictive narration analyzes a selection of contemporary American novels so as to understand and describe more fully a literary effect I call immediacy. I employ the term immediacy to define narrative situations in which little durational gap exists between experience and narration and in which little ideological and emotional distance is communicated between the narrating persona and the subject self. The following chapters provide a close examination of narrative techniques employed by writers in the creation of immediacy and argues that both the tone of the novels and their themes of maturation and self-identity are attributable …

The Institutional Determinants Of Property Regime Change In New Democracies: The Russian Federation, Hungary, And Czechoslovakia, R. Vanessa Krasner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Is there a relationship between the design of democratic institutions and optimal collective decisions? Optimum decisions are defined as achieving goals important to the transition such as deep and equitable property reforms. Democratic institutions refer to first-order institutions of governance and the electoral rules for choosing leaders. Overseeing both are the written or "parchment" constitutions. Constitutions are designed to distribute power among actors, generate efficiency, and govern the interactions among actors. My findings showed that constitutional designs intentionally and sometimes with unanticipated consequences can result in highly cooperative, competitive, or conflictual struggles by political actors over high-stakes distributive issues such …

Cultural Competence Of Faculty Of Baccalaureate Nursing Programs, Lorinda J. Sealey

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the level of cultural competence among faculty teaching in baccalaureate nursing programs in Louisiana and to identify associated factors. A survey was mailed to all 313 faculty members identified as actively involved in teaching in any baccalaureate nursing program in Louisiana and 163 valid responses were obtained. The Cultural Diversity Questionnaire for Nurse Educators, a researcher designed instrument intended to measure cultural competence, was the instrument used. It included Likert-type items organized into five subscales representing the components of cultural competence according to Campinha- Bacote’s model of cultural competence (i.e., cultural awareness, …

The Novelty Of Improvisation: Towards A Genre Of Embodied Spontaneity, David Alfred Charles

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Improvisation has often been viewed and valued in terms of its service and resemblance to scripted traditions of theatre. Such a stance seriously undermines the significance and impact of this global performance modality, and has resulted in improvisatory modes being largely ignored or downplayed in modern historical accounts of theatre. This dissertation examines improvisation on its own terms, seeking to understand its unique features, functions and potentials, while freeing it from the heavy shadow of its scripted counterpart. To this end, the theories of literary critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, provide important methodological guideposts and allow the silhouette of the improvisational impetus …

The History Of Russian Vaudeville From 1800 To 1850, Alexander V. Tselebrovski

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

 There is no significant scholarly work on the history of the Russian vaudeville. The author of the dissertation makes an attempt to explore the history of vaudeville in Russia from 1812, when the first original vaudeville was written by A. Shakhovskoi, to the 1850s, when vaudeville as a genre was finalized as a form and brought to its classic completion. Two phases of the history of vaudeville in Russia, aristocratic and democratic-raznochinnyi, are considered in close connection with the political, social, and cultural events of Russian society of the time. The first phase embraces the period from 1812, when …

Power And Empowerment In Writing Center Conferences, Kerri Stanley Jordan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores power and empowerment in writing center peer conferences. Arguing against the notion of “hierarchical” and “collaborative” conference categories, it suggests that because both participants enact power in conference interaction, conferencing power dynamics exist on a continuum. Issues of ownership are also placed on a continuum (and associated with enactments of power); this study argues against idealized notions of tutees “owning” their texts and conferencing goals. It distinguishes between empowerment in a practical sense (associated with improving writing skills) and in a political sense (associated with increasing critical awareness). The research involved ethnographic methods: it followed two peer …

The Body Politic: Burial And Post-War Reconciliation In Baton Rouge, Leah Wood Jewett

LSU Master's Theses

Historians typically agree that reconciliation between the white North and South took place between the period of 1898 (Spanish-American War) and 1913 (before World War I). To test this hypothesis and identify when reconciliation took place in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I will use the burial of R. L. Pruyn in the Baton Rouge National Cemetery. Pruyn served as a U.S. soldier during the Mexican War and a Confederate soldier during the Civil War. Anthropologists have studied rituals, beliefs, and practices associated with death since early in the discipline. Archaeologists, in particular, have focused on this aspect of culture, in large …

Radical Dialectics In The Experimental Poetry Of Berssenbrugge, Hejinian, Harryman, Weiner, And Scalapino, Camille Martin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I focus on the work of five contemporary experimental poets - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Hannah Weiner, and Leslie Scalapino - in order to demonstrate various aspects of a philosophical dynamic at work in their poetry. The critical debates surrounding experimental poetry often tend to be structured as a dualistic opposition with, for example, the forces of coherence, narrative linearity, and transparent referentiality on one side, and the forces of semantic disruption, narrative discontinuity, and linguistic materiality on the other. On each side, critics attempt to bolster the essential value of one term or set …

Jazz And The Cultural Transformation Of America In The 1920s, Courtney Patterson Carney

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In the early twentieth century jazz was a regionally based, racially defined dance music that featured solo and collective improvisation. Originating in New Orleans, jazz soon spread throughout the country as musicians left the South for better opportunities-both economic and social-elsewhere in the country. Jazz greatly increased in popularity during the 1920s. No longer a regional music dominated by African Americans, jazz in the 1920s helped define a generation torn between the Victorian society of nineteenth century America and the culture of modernity that was quickly defining the early twentieth century. Jazz and its eventual popularity represented the cultural tensions …

Reticent Romans: Silence And Writing In La Vie De Saint Alexis, Le Conte Du Graal, And Le Roman De Silence, Evan J. Bibbee

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Apart from discourse and yet somehow part of it, silence is a powerfully ambiguous linguistic phenomenon that blurs the lines between presence and absence. Eluding the material aspects of oral and written language, it is only perceptible as the gaps or spaces between words. Nonetheless, it plays a role in all linguistic productions: although silence itself cannot be directly communicated, it can influence communication. In a literary text, silence may takes on many different guises, including rhythmic hesitations, rhetorical omissions, and poetic oppositions that mimic the audible gaps of spoken language. The visual, aural, and fictional interaction of all these …

The Evaluation Of A Family Literacy Program, Katrina Denise Hopkins

LSU Master's Theses

Based on the literacy need in the state of Louisiana, this project was interested in whether the Ready to Learn: Between the Lions literacy workshop could equip parents to enhance and develop their child’s literacy skills and to enhance family literacy interactions. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of a Ready to Learn literacy workshop in two Baton Rouge Head Start preschool centers, Banks and Southern University. Participants attended workshops once a month from January to April, lasting approximately 30 minutes each. The workshop was evaluated using a pretest/posttest instrument consisting of seven likert-type …

Disarming The Externalist Threat To Self-Knowledge, Gabriel Guy Cate

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to examine various attempts to disarm the externalist threat to self-knowledge. That threat is engendered by a certain causal theory of meaning and reference, which suggests that empirical investigations may be required to know the contents of our own thoughts. It is claimed, then, that direct, non-inferential self-knowledge of our own mental states, is not possible if externalism is true. The leading compatibilist strategies that attempt to reconcile these apparently conflicting theses are explored and criticized. I conclude by offering what I take to be the essential features of a more successful compatibilist strategy.

The Impact Of A Life-Application Learning Instructional Program On Struggling Readers At The Middle School Level, Angelle Rae Stringer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This eight-week descriptive study examined the impact of the incorporation of a Life-Application Learning Methods Program on struggling middle school readers. Two questions were explored: 1) How did incorporating life–application learning into the middle school curriculum impact reading motivation?, and 2) How did incorporating life-application learning in the middle school curriculum impact the reading levels? Participants in the study were eight eighth-grade students considered to be struggling readers Qualitative methods were used for this study utilizing responses from a survey, two inventories, student journals, and researcher observations. Data gathered suggested that students are more likely to become motivated and engaged …

Feathers And Tuxedos: An Analysis Of Political Cartoons About Indian Gaming, Michael Stephan Nasirov

LSU Master's Theses

Feathers and Tuxedos: An Analysis of Political Cartoons About Indian Gaming is an exploration into the changing stereotypes of Indians in illustrated media. Beginning with general issues such as poverty and media coverage, this thesis continues to cover chronologically the origins of modern Indian gaming and the resulting expenditure of profits into social welfare of the tribes and the continuous three-way battle between state, federal, and Indian sovereign rights. Normative U.S. societal reactions to Indian gaming are contrasted with their Indian counterpoints. Cartoons allow for a visual representation of contested relationships, including recent imagery of well-to-do entrepreneurs profiting at the …

An Africanist-Orientalist Discourse: The Other In Shakespeare And Hellenistic Tragedy, Haegap Jeoung

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The main aim of this dissertation is to show how the discourse of the psychoanalytical other--femininity, death, madness, disorder, and impiety--overlaps with colonial discourse in some plays from Shakespearean and Greek-Roman tragedy, and what difference or similarity there is between the two ages. The hypothesis is that foreigners are allegories of the psychoanalytical other. For this purpose, the research tries to grasp the concept of the other, from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, and to analyze the core of colonial discourse on the basis of the concept of the psychoanalytical other. The starting point of the dissertation is that the other …

Drawing Of The Mind, Buddy Harper

LSU Master's Theses

The rules of drawing I have described are an outline to my method of working. It is to be used like the rules of a game. The thesis paper provides the viewer the basic parameters for looking at my work. The body of work is produced like two people playing a game of chess. I establish the rules and then I develop the work in an investigative manner.

Dialogic Dogs And Phatic Felines: Speaking To And Through Our Pets, Nicole M. Dufour

LSU Master's Theses

While many pet owners acknowledge that they speak to their pet, Pet Communication has remained mostly overlooked by researchers. Through discourse analysis, this thesis is an attempt to analyze Pet Communication, which deals with human speech to a pet, about a pet, or through a pet. I analyze data which I transcribed in the waiting room of the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine Small Animal Clinic. Data were collected from conversations that took place between pet owners, between pet owners and the Clinic's staff, pet owners and their pets, and between staff and pets. These data were then …

Perspectives On Comparative Literature, Alexandru Boldor

LSU Master's Theses

The main objective of this dissertation was to provide researchers interested in the history and evolution of "comparative literature" with a collection of references delineating the evolution of the concept and the development of academic departments dedicated to its study. The paper includes a first section describing the main issues contributing to the "identity crisis" with which studies and departments defining themselves as "comparative" were consistently confronted ever since the term was coined. The "preliminary concepts" section offers an overview of the elements that usually confer a "comparative" quality to a literary study, such as interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, together with …

Perceptions Of Stereotypes In Hispanic Children's Literature, Nancy Gomez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study attempted to determine the accurateness of the representation of the Hispanic culture in children’s books. I interviewed ten people: five non-Hispanic and five Hispanic, and I found that the Hispanic people do not seem to pay as much attention to physical features as non-Hispanic people do. However, they were concerned about the portrayal of the Hispanic culture in traditional ways: the traditional roles of women, the traditional dress, the architecture of the houses and the portrayal of the Hispanic people living in rural areas and being extremely poor. It appears that from the timeline covered by the books, …

Will The Real Jesus Please Stand Up?: Bridging The Divide Between The Jesus Seminar And Its Opponents Through A Burkeian Approach, Carol Melissa Hopson-Sparks

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study employs a Burkeian cluster-agon analysis approach to analyze the rhetoric of four members of the Jesus Seminar; namely, Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and John Shelby Spong as well as that of two of the Jesus Seminar’s critics; Luke Timothy Johnson and N. Thomas Wright. Specifically, this study sought to discern the orientations or perspectives held by each of the examined rhetors in an effort to locate common ground or similar foundations within two seemingly disparate points of view. In doing so, this study creates a third perspective, or corrective, based on the orthopraxis approach of …

Caller Id, Plamen Ivanov Arnaudov

LSU Master's Theses

As one might expect from a young poet writing at the turn of a millennium, recurrent in "Caller ID" is the theme of struggle with literary tradition and of seeing it as both necessary and constricting to the project of forging one's own creative identity. The collision between history and the self is visible in the often conflicted references to great philosophers and poets of the past as well as in the call for renewal of the body poetic after an envisioned 'end of history' marked by creative sterility and exhaustion. The proposed renewal does not entail destruction of tradition …

Delta Memories And Delta Days: Facets Of Ladies' Lives As Revealed To A Southern Daughter, Susan E. Probasco

LSU Master's Theses

The Arkansas Delta is a land considered by many to be devoid of beauty and richness of life. However, to a daughter who was the youngest child of the youngest child of a youngest child that was born in the Delta, the region is beautiful, enhanced by the observations of the lives of the women she observed there. An ethnography of the everyday lives of white, middle-class southern women in a small Arkansas Delta town seeks to communicate some of the richness and beauty of their lives, as well as other aspects of culture illustrative of southern culture in general, …