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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

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“Intimacy In The End Means Trouble”: Interracial Relationships In Britain From Interwar To Windrush, Stephanie Makowski Sep 2024

“Intimacy In The End Means Trouble”: Interracial Relationships In Britain From Interwar To Windrush, Stephanie Makowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interwar period, World War II, and the Windrush era present three major turning points in the evolution of what has become known as the making of a “multiracial” Britain. During these years, British public discourse became increasingly preoccupied with relationships between Black men and white women. This discourse became global in scope and Black activists across the Anglophone world took part in shaping the narratives and meanings projected onto these relationships. By charting the shifting boundaries of racial acceptance and gendered mores, this project demonstrates the predominantly performative and extremely conditional nature of Britain’s “acceptance” of men of color. …


Housing Displacement In Corlears Hook: From Naghtongh To One Manhattan Square, Don Macleod Jun 2024

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 …


Resilience, Resistance, And Nation-Building Among Internally Displaced Persons: Kites As A Means Of Transcending Displacement, Michelle Black Jun 2024

Resilience, Resistance, And Nation-Building Among Internally Displaced Persons: Kites As A Means Of Transcending Displacement, Michelle Black

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Once a simple plaything, the kite has evolved into a symbol of hope and defiance. This study explores kite flying in Gaza, specifically among internally displaced people (IDPs), as an act of resilience and resistance. It investigates how kites, amidst conflict and displacement, rise as symbols of solidarity and identity, and contribute to nation-building efforts. The research process begins with an extensive investigation into IDPs, followed by an exploration of key concepts such as resilience, resistance, and nation-building. The study then delves into how these concepts manifest within the IDP population. Additionally, research was conducted on the history and uses …


Staying Power: The Struggle For Space And Place In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Erin E. Lilli Feb 2024

Staying Power: The Struggle For Space And Place In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Erin E. Lilli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at how gentrification touches down, at the neighborhood and individual scale, in Crown Heights and reproduces experiences of racial inequality in home and place. Taking an historical materialist approach and drawing on residential oral histories, this study frames these reproductions of racial inequality as always-in-tension with ongoing acts of resistance from Black homeowners, renters, and long-term residents. Specifically, the research explores the conditions under which Black residents of a predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood acquire and maintain—and in some cases lose—their housing and sense of place and belonging. These residents resist the varied tactics of anti-Blackness such as landlord …


Regulating The Care Boom: Labor Standards Enforcement And Paid In-Home Care Work, Isaac Jabola-Carolus Sep 2023

Regulating The Care Boom: Labor Standards Enforcement And Paid In-Home Care Work, Isaac Jabola-Carolus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, population aging has driven explosive growth in care-sector occupations, especially among low-wage home care aides who provide long-term assistance to older adults. These aides, predominantly women and disproportionately people of color, now represent one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing occupational groups. In recent decades, economic inequality and meager social policies have also spurred demand for nannies, housecleaners, and other domestic workers—occupations heavily reliant on immigrant women, many undocumented. While scholarly and public discourse has addressed labor shortages and job quality in such occupations, a related problem is the widespread violation of labor standards, including minimum …


“For ‘Their Own Good’”: Education, The Performing Arts, And Social Justice At The Brooklyn Academy Of Music, 1915–2023, Anna S. Harb Jun 2023

“For ‘Their Own Good’”: Education, The Performing Arts, And Social Justice At The Brooklyn Academy Of Music, 1915–2023, Anna S. Harb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project examines the development of an education department at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the oldest performing arts institution in the United States (1861), and argues that education programs in cultural institutions attempt to fill gaps in cultural capital that have been reproduced across generations while also highlighting the need for comprehensive arts education in public schools. An investigation of education for young people at BAM—from weekend programming for the children of Academy subscribers, to a fully staffed branch serving students throughout the tri-state area (often during the school day)—offers a porthole into the larger municipal history, particularly …


International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera Jun 2023

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …


“Investment In Inertia”: Language Ideologies Of Instructors And Students Of Spanish As A Heritage Language, Michael E. Rolland Feb 2023

“Investment In Inertia”: Language Ideologies Of Instructors And Students Of Spanish As A Heritage Language, Michael E. Rolland

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When the Spanish-language skills of heritage Spanish learners are disparaged in an academic environment, these learners are at high risk of abandoning further study of Spanish and shifting entirely to English. This dissertation uses mixed qualitative and quantitative research methods, including thematic and discourse analysis, to investigate the language ideologies of instructors and students of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) and the effects of those ideologies on students’ experiences in SHL college courses. It builds on earlier research on language ideologies in the post-secondary heritage language context (e.g., Carreira, 2011; Loza, 2017; Valdés et al., 2003). I find that …


Legislating Against Liberties: Congress And The Constitution In The Aftermath Of War, Harry Blain Jun 2022

Legislating Against Liberties: Congress And The Constitution In The Aftermath Of War, Harry Blain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How far can a democracy go to protect itself without jeopardizing the liberties upon which democracy depends? This dissertation examines why wartime restrictions on civil liberties outlive their original justifications. Through a comparative historical analysis of five major American wars, it illustrates the decisive role of the U.S. Congress in preserving these restrictions during peacetime. This argument challenges the prevailing consensus in the literature, which identifies wartime executive power as the main threat to postwar freedoms. It also reveals broader narratives of American constitutional development, including the rise and fall of intrusive congressional investigations, the decline of sedition legislation since …


Staging Retro-Perspectives: Performing Age, Memory/Loss, And Queer Desire In The Later Works Of Split Britches (2009–2020), Benjamin Gillespie Jun 2022

Staging Retro-Perspectives: Performing Age, Memory/Loss, And Queer Desire In The Later Works Of Split Britches (2009–2020), Benjamin Gillespie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project investigates the later works of the celebrated New York–based lesbian-feminist performance troupe Split Britches made up of founding members Peggy Shaw (b. 1944) and Lois Weaver (b. 1949). Revealing how the duo consciously interlaces aspects of aging and age-based identity into the very fabric of their later performances in both form and content, this project analyzes how Shaw and Weaver integrate an explicitly anti-ageist and overtly queer representation of aging on the experimental stage. Their later performances serve to challenge narratives of decline and debilitation that come with (hetero)normative representations of old age and the life course in …


Inheritance: A Memoir, Jennifer Skoog Feb 2022

Inheritance: A Memoir, Jennifer Skoog

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I was born and raised on a small farm in central Minnesota, the youngest of nine. Our lives centered around a dogmatic faith that banned sex education and birth control in any form. The consequences of these teachings put my life on a tragic course, and I paid dearly for my ignorance. With the help of a therapist and a deep commitment to myself, I left the faith. After I earned a college degree in my early 40s, I began to critically examine my upbringing. Through my educational journey in Black studies, I saw deeply troubling ways in which my …


Sweetness And Femininity: Fashioning Gendered Appetite In The Victorian Age, Michael Krondl Feb 2022

Sweetness And Femininity: Fashioning Gendered Appetite In The Victorian Age, Michael Krondl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since at least the nineteenth century sweetness and a preference for sweet foods has been linked to femininity. Western, middle-class women learned and reproduced normative gendered dietary behavior due to both private and public pressure to control their appetites and those of their children. In performing their gendered roles, they came to embody them through everyday rituals such as teatime. Sugary foods and drinks served as necessary props in these performances. Theorists, most prominently Jean-Jacques Rousseau, began to propose a linkage of sweet foods with femininity in the seventeen hundreds. In the following century, the medical profession explained women’s tastes …


Situational Awareness, Maeve Higgins Jun 2021

Situational Awareness, Maeve Higgins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a long-form essay exploring the politics and power at play along the U.S.-Mexico border. My objective with this piece was to better understand how and why this increasingly militarized border has grown in the past decades, as well as who is profiting and who is suffering because of this growth. To do this I relied on academic theorists, journalism and on-the-ground research. I discovered that the year I visited The Border Security Expo was also the year that Customs and Border Patrol saw their biggest ever budget, and I gained insight into what they spent this budget on. …


Smashing Solidarity: Two New York Strikes At The Start Of The Postwar Wave, Joseph D. Parziale Feb 2021

Smashing Solidarity: Two New York Strikes At The Start Of The Postwar Wave, Joseph D. Parziale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Two strikes in New York at the beginning of the massive 1945-46 strike wave—one by elevator operators in commercial buildings and another by dock workers throughout the Port of New York—can help us better understand a moment when workers exhibited a profound sense of themselves as a class, while their rivals in the shop, the corporate boardroom, and the halls of power fought vigorously to dispel the notion that workers divided by geography, industry, race, nationality, and gender were right to see their fates as intertwined. Historians’ focus on the economic issues at stake in the major strikes of the …


Is The South (Still) America’S Sacrifice Zone? A Regional Analysis Of Toxic Emissions, 1987–2017, Tanesha A. Thomas Sep 2020

Is The South (Still) America’S Sacrifice Zone? A Regional Analysis Of Toxic Emissions, 1987–2017, Tanesha A. Thomas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The southern United States has been labeled a “sacrifice zone” for the rest of the nation's toxic waste. In the early days of the environmental justice movement, researchers found that the south contained a disproportionate number of toxic sites, including garbage dumps, landfills, and waste incinerators. These initial studies used different data sources and methodologies, but arrived at the same conclusion: America was dumping in Dixie, a predominantly poor African American region of the country. Since then, researchers have mainly confirmed or called into question the existence of environmental racism within the south. However, none have investigated the south’s environmental …


Developmental Predictors Of Adolescent Mental Health Stigma And A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial Of "Ending The Silence" In New York City, Joseph S. Deluca Sep 2020

Developmental Predictors Of Adolescent Mental Health Stigma And A Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial Of "Ending The Silence" In New York City, Joseph S. Deluca

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study explored predictors of mental health stigma among adolescents and the effectiveness of a school-based mental health stigma reduction and health promotion program, “Ending the Silence” (ETS), developed by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Youth mental health service use is impacted by many factors, but concern about stigma and low mental health knowledge have been consistently identified as leading barriers to help-seeking. Beyond education and contact program components, existing research on how to design a successful adolescent stigma reduction intervention has been inconclusive. A diverse sample of 206 high school students in New York City participated in the …


Black Skin, White Gaze: The Presence And Function Of The Linchpin Character In Biopics About Black American Protagonists, Nicole N. Williams Jun 2020

Black Skin, White Gaze: The Presence And Function Of The Linchpin Character In Biopics About Black American Protagonists, Nicole N. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout its existence the American film industry has--through the stories it has chosen to tell as well as discriminatory practices such as whitewashing and the erasure of non-White people--enshrined whiteness as the default American racial identity. In multiracial films, Hollywood productions have historically employed racialized character tropes to further emphasize hegemonic American whiteness. This practice continues to the present day with the introduction of the linchpin, a White character who appears in films with majority non-White casts. Although billed and presented as a supporting character, the linchpin’s centrality to a film’s narrative or emotional arc elevates them to main character …


Americans Collecting Natural History, Herbert A. Pollard Iv Feb 2020

Americans Collecting Natural History, Herbert A. Pollard Iv

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Americans established institutions of science that called upon the public to donate materials and further the study of natural history. This thesis examines how resident scholars recruited sailors, merchants, and amateur naturalists to collect objects and accounts of natural history in South America. In turn, we find that the kinds of education and professional training that young doctors received in antebellum Philadelphia gave naval surgeons like William S. W. Ruschenberger the skills and temperament to collect objects that were otherwise considered sacred or taboo. Finally, as medical education in urban Philadelphia divided …


Shock, Stimulus, And Upheaval: The Great Recession, The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act, And Mayoral Coalitions In Brooklyn, Ny 2009–2013, Charles Linsmeier Feb 2020

Shock, Stimulus, And Upheaval: The Great Recession, The American Recovery And Reinvestment Act, And Mayoral Coalitions In Brooklyn, Ny 2009–2013, Charles Linsmeier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Abstract: In 2009, the United States, and much of the world, experienced the largest economic decline since the Great Depression of the early 20th Century. New York City, the financial capital of the United States, was not immune. In early 2009, the federal government passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) shepherding a substantial infusion of federal funds to states and municipalities to stimulate local economies and stem the tide of potential job losses. At the same time, New York City was experiencing an historic mayoral election - the potential third term of Mayor Michael Bloomberg - …


Staging English Affairs In Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista Sep 2019

Staging English Affairs In Early Modern Italy: History, Politics, Drama, Fabio Battista

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the creation and dissemination of alternative versions of English history through the means of dramatic fiction, and contextualizes them in the panorama of the intellectual debates of seventeenth-century Italy. Staging English Affairs in Early Modern Italy studies the ways in which the reinvention of Tudor and Stuart affairs in dramatic literature mirrored the ambitions, fears, and fantasies of a century in disquieting transformation. This research documents how news and information from England entered the Italian states, how they were perceived, and what their repurposing can reveal about the potentialities of intercultural exchange. Anglo-inspired drama became a …


Waiting: History, Fear, And Healing In Ballynafeigh / The Upper Ormeau Road Of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Molly J. Hurley-Depret Sep 2019

Waiting: History, Fear, And Healing In Ballynafeigh / The Upper Ormeau Road Of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Molly J. Hurley-Depret

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in one neighborhood of Belfast called Ballynafeigh / the upper Ormeau Road in 2006–2007, I argue we need to pay closer attention to the “inconspicuous transformations” that may have been occurring in parallel to the official peace process. Walter Benjamin notes that “refined and spiritual things” do “make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning, and fortitude.” Benjamin states that “the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of …


In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin Sep 2019

In Her Own Hands: How Girls And Women Used The Piano To Chart Their Futures, Expand Women's Roles, And Shape Music In America, 1880–1920, Sarah F. Litvin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

American girls and women used the parlor piano to reshape their lives between 1880 and 1920, the years when the instrument reached the height of its commercial and cultural popularity. Newspapers, memoirs, biographies, women’s magazines, personal papers, and trade publications show that female pianists engaged in public-facing piano play and work in pursuit of artistic expression, economic gain, self-actualization, social mobility, and social change. These motivations drove many to use their piano skills to play beyond the parlor, by studying in conservatory, working as classical and popular music performers and composers, founding and teaching at schools, working as department store …


Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux May 2019

Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the practice of white musical variety clowns embodying stereotypes of African, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has been widely documented and theorized in scholarship on US American popular performance, it has been done largely in segregated studies that maintain the idea that racial impersonations in musical variety is a privilege of white performers. For instance, no study exists that focuses on more than one stereotype at a time, and the performer’s body is always either white or of the same “color” as the type being played. In addition, very little has been written about the tours and circuits run by …


"A Complicated Story, An Unsolved Mystery": An Experiment In Poetry And The Ethics Of Representation, Darren Wood May 2019

"A Complicated Story, An Unsolved Mystery": An Experiment In Poetry And The Ethics Of Representation, Darren Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York Juvenile Asylum, founded in 1851, was one of New York’s first institutional responses to the problems associated with the poor. It, and the theories of asylum that undergird the institution, still exist today in the form of Children’s Village. The location of Children’s Village, located just a few hundred yards from my home, prompted me to consider the distance between my family and the children who reside at Children’s Village; between my historical context and that of the children who resided at the New York Juvenile Asylum - and their parents who surrendered them there; and between …


The Family, Political Theory, And Ideology: A Comparative Study Of John Stuart Mill And Friedrich Engels, David M. Murray Jr. May 2019

The Family, Political Theory, And Ideology: A Comparative Study Of John Stuart Mill And Friedrich Engels, David M. Murray Jr.

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is concerned with the development of the Christian family in Europe and how its sociological and historical characteristics informed the writings of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Engels. The term “Christian family” refers to the dominant form of the family seen in Western Europe, namely the atomistic nuclear family. The sociological and ideological foundations of the family are explored to provide context for the writings of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Engels that utilize the concept of the family for their political projects. Both wrote critically about the state of the family in their lifetimes, particularly in regard …


Limits Of The Black Radical Tradition And The Value-Form, Shemon Salam Feb 2019

Limits Of The Black Radical Tradition And The Value-Form, Shemon Salam

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Black Radical Tradition was supposed to be victorious against racial capitalism. Instead the tradition was defeated by the early 1970s never to return again. Surprisingly the scholarship still treats the tradition as if this world historic defeat never happened. Furthermore, geographers have not reckoned with this defeat. Limits of the Black Radical Tradition and the Value-formbegins the process of starting a debate, hoping to ignite radical rethinking around the nature of the Black Radical Tradition, racial capitalism, and the value-form.


Morris High School: A Biography, Naomi Sharlin Feb 2019

Morris High School: A Biography, Naomi Sharlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Morris High School was conceived and built in the Bronx with a lofty mission: to provide a comprehensive, world-class secondary education to the children of immigrant and working-class families, and in so doing to elevate the American public education system and America itself. Such a weighty mission for an institution would result, one could expect, in painstaking record keeping, the lionization of great leaders, consistent investment in the building, and attention given to problems encountered or created over the years. And yet, the life of Morris High School remains elusive. Key figures in its story are lost to obscurity like …


Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt Sep 2018

Diagnosing The Will To Suffer: Lovesickness In The Medical And Literary Traditions, Jane Shmidt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout Western medical history, unconsummated, unreturned, or otherwise failed love was believed to generate a disorder of the mind and body that manifested in physiological and psychological symptoms. This study traces the medical and literary history of lovesickness from antiquity through the 19th century, emphasizing significant moments in the development of the medical discourse on love. The project is part of the recent academic focus on the intersection between the humanities and the medical sciences, and it situates literary texts in concurrent medical and philosophical debates on afflictions of the psyche. By contextualizing the fictional works within the scientific …


The Lines Between The Lines: Stage Directions As Fluid, Affective Collaborations Between Theatre Texts And Theatre Makers, Sarah Bess Rowen Feb 2018

The Lines Between The Lines: Stage Directions As Fluid, Affective Collaborations Between Theatre Texts And Theatre Makers, Sarah Bess Rowen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contends that certain kinds of stage directions can affectively engage the bodies of actors, and the imaginations of directors and designers, resulting in a collaboratively created performance of a given theatre text. As opposed to more literary treatments of stage directions, this project contends that theories of embodiment, especially affect theory, is a useful lens through which to explore the range of potential performances present in various stage directions. By analyzing the ways in which stage directions allow for more agency than has traditionally been considered in theatre scholarship, I seek to encourage theatre makers and scholars alike …


Culture And Mental Health: Considering The Role Of The Complex Cultural-History In Irish-American Population, Tiffinie Patricia Sesko Sep 2017

Culture And Mental Health: Considering The Role Of The Complex Cultural-History In Irish-American Population, Tiffinie Patricia Sesko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates the mental health of Irish immigrants and first generation Irish Americans. As the Irish-American population makes up such a large portion of the entire population of the United States, it is important we acknowledge its origin and take that into account where mental illness and treatment are concerned as the Irish culture has a pronounced effect on mental health. The intended audience of this review are expert and non-expert members of the clinical setting and community who may gain insight on helping a client or family member find a way to understand and express repressed feelings affectively. …