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Rethinking The "Unusual Type": Black Queer Women And The Spatial Politics Of Belonging In Twentieth Century America, Olivia N. Kerr

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

Historical examinations of queer people in American history have often overlooked and disregarded Black queer women. However, archival evidence gestures towards the existence of such women who led complex lives within a white supremacist heteronormative dominant society predicated on the Othering of Black queer bodies—rendering them abject. My research explores the contours of Black women’s queerness through a historical lens. I analyze primary source materials through an archival analysis surrounding the lives of Black queer women in the twentieth century United States, prior to the Stonewall riots. Heteronormative and connotatively “queer” spaces were often hostile towards Black queer women as …

The Hidden Power Of Images: An Allegory Of Chaos And Performance In The Digital Age, Livia Xandersmith

MFA in Visual Art

Within this text, I explore the hidden power of images in American visual culture through painting-based installations. I investigate images of the past and present juxtaposed in a surrealist landscape. Through the use of images in the news, entertainment, advertising, and images within the home, I depict how the problems of the past bleed into our perceptions of the present. I find that this cycle of problem inheritance connects us as humans regardless of time, generation, and place. In my work, I explore the complexity of image culture and its shifting presence within the digital age. Using surrealist collage, I …

Re-Imagining “Spaces” For Relating Within And Between France And Germany In The Long Nineteenth Century, Debra Gusnard

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The “modern world” as we now know it is quite different from that which was emerging in Western Europe and began to accelerate in its development under the impetus of revolution and wars at the turn of the nineteenth century. Not only were material conditions in the process of shifting from those grounded in more traditional, rural and agrarian ways of life to those developing into more urban and industrialized ones, but the “social ontology” and cultural forms of “mapping” and communicating about reality were also changing.

This study employs a “macro-historical” framework which incorporates complexity and complex system principles …

Rewriting History: The Press As A Tool For Destruction And Preservation, Emily L. Mogavero

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This statement describes my two bodies of work, Aufheben and Artist-Hero/Squish, in which I use printmaking processes to rewrite history. In Artist-Hero/Squish I mimic canonical paintings of women by modernist male painters and run my quotations of these paintings through the press while the paint is still wet on the canvas. Through this process, I examine, confront, and change the male-dominated history of art. Aufheben currently includes one hundred drypoint prints that catalogue the personal history of my mark. This series represents a process of constant change, with individual prints suggesting stages of my process including moments of growth …

Fashioning Women Under Totalitarian Regimes: "New Women" Of Nazi Germany And Soviet Russia, Victoria Vygodskaia Rust

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

My dissertation seeks to expand our knowledge of Russian and German women's history under totalitarian systems by comparing women's fashioning by the state and their self-fashioning in Germany and Russia during the Third Reich and Bolshevik and Stalinist rule respectively. I argue that processes of women's fashioning and self-fashioning were largely influenced by the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on the so-called Woman Question and the New Woman and were culturally specific. I map the evolution of the Woman Question and the New Woman in the decades directly preceding and following the Nazi and Bolshevik seizure of power, defining changing …

A State Without Nationals: The Nationality Issue In Japan's Making Of Manchukuo, Xiaoyan Liu

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

Lustmord And Loving The Other: A History Of Sexual Murder In Modern Germany And Austria (1873-1932), Amber Aragon-Yoshida

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Lustmord and Loving the Other: A History of Sexual Murder in Modern Germany and Austria: 1873–1932) examines the historical significance of German–speaking Europeans’ responses to crises of modernity vis–Ã –vis their fin de siècle cultural fascination with crimes and representations of Lustmord. I address the emergence and development of the concept of Lustmord, particularly the changing ways in which medical, legal, and criminal experts, survivors, perpetrators, neighbors, the press, and artists understood and attempted to explain this modern phenomenon. I demonstrate the ways in which a society came to name, understand, and, to some degree, even accept a troubling new …

Wayward Sons: Civil Litigation And The Family In Nineteenth-Century China, John Bandy

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

Han'gul For The Nation, The Nation For Han'gul: The Korean Language Movement, 1894-1945, Daniel Pieper

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

This Inglorious War: The Second Seminole War, The Ad Hoc Origins Of American Imperialism, And The Silence Of Slavery, Daniel Scallet

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Daniel Scallet, "The Second Seminole War, the Ad Hoc Origins of American Imperialism, and the Silence of Slavery," Ph.D. Washington University in St. Louis, December 2011 My dissertation examines the national context of the Second Seminole War and argues that it was begun at the behest of Deep South slaveholders and represented a vital national shift toward violent expansionism. However, due to tacit agreements among public officials to refrain from debating the influence of slavery on federal policy, the fundamental arguments of the war - why it was undertaken, how it was to be fought, why it had to be …

Humores Nacionales: Sátira, Costumbrismo Y Disparate En La Literatura Comica De Mexico (1960-2010), Jose Galindo

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This work looks into humor in Mexican Literature from 1960 through 2010. The first chapter analyzes how humorists have responded to symbols and narratives of Mexican nationalism. The second chapter focuses on how humor has dealt with customs--religious practices, gender relations and family dynamics. The third chapter studies humor vis a vis the world of books and authors, that is, writers making fun of their own guild--the ambitions, betrayals, expectations and posturing common in the literary life. The fourth and final chapter focuses on gallows humor and scatological humor. Narrative, theater, chronic and essays are the genres studied throughout the …

Culture And Exchange: The Jews Of Königsberg, 1700-1820, Jill Storm

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation traces the history of the Jewish community in Königsberg, East Prussia, from its founding in 1700 to the aftermath of the Prussian Emancipation Edict of 1812, as well as the early stages of Jewish embourgeoisement and political integration. My project combines aspects of a traditional communal history with newer trends in Jewish history, including an integrated discussion of economic and cultural life. I argue that the commercial successes of the Jewish mercantile elite in Königsberg, in particular of the Friedländer family, set the stage for the publication of ha-Measef and the local flowering of the haskalah. Moreover, I …

Unbound By Law: Association And Autonomy In The Early American Republic, Kevin Butterfield

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation examines how the concept of voluntary membership evolved between the 1780s and the 1830s, a period in which men and women created thousands of groups seeking everything from fraternity to profit to social reform. Before observers foreign and domestic would begin to identify the voluntary association as a defining characteristic of post-Revolutionary American culture, Americans who organized and joined such groups had struggled for decades to determine what membership ought to look like, what rights and duties the act of joining should entail. By the time Alexis de Tocqueville famously noted in 1831 that Americans were "forever forming …

Historical Function Of The Fictional Work Of H. J. C Von Grimmelshausen And Essad Bey, Sarah Griesbach

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In an historical analysis of Grimmelshausen and BeyΓÇÖs work the disinhibition created by the authorsΓÇÖ hidden identities and writing styles becomes an historical asset. The medium of fiction gave Grimmelshausen and Bey the freedom to shape their narratives as best fit their purposes. The historical usefulness of their texts is buried in their choices for deliveryΓÇöliterary device, character perspective, atmosphere, toneΓÇöand in the messages the authors deliver, intentionally or not.

Natural Disorder: The Animal Image In French And British Art Before Darwin, C. 1790-1859, Noelle Paulson

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This study of the animal form in French and British art reveals humanity's shifting self-image as new theories of species transmutation replaced hierarchical models of nature in the half-century before the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. To assert various qualities of difference, distance, similitude, and proximity between species, visual artists represented animals either in humanized guises or in contexts of encounter with humans. Animal imagery was especially malleable during this period when science and pseudo-science both confronted the possibility that species were susceptible to gradual change over time rather than fixed in form since …

150 Years Of History And Preservation At Cahokia Mounds, Christa Wroblewski

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

Origin And Early History Of The United Hebrew Congregation Of St. Louis, 1841-1859, The First Jewish Congregation In St. Louis, Donald Irving Makovsky

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.