Digital Commons Network^™

No Such Thing As Nappy, Alan Roosevelt Atkins

Theses and Dissertations

This supportive statement examines how my upbringings influenced my cultural and societal perspectives and how I strive to challenge perceptions of race, history, and culture through my artwork. I include representations of people from various diasporas in drawings, prints, and animations to speak to the global reach of colorism and Eurocentrism. Influenced by the DIY nature of punk art and the urgency of protest art, I utilize materials such as Sharpies, fabric markers, collage, and cardboard. Use of cardboard suggests commercial exchange and the physical movement of goods from one place to another, as well as modern throw-away culture. Parallels …

Revolutionary Women, Fredgy Noël

Theses and Dissertations

Revolutionary Women is a five screen video installation that honors five women leaders of the Haitian Revolution that lasted from August 22, 1791- January 1, 1804. Women revolutionaries are almost non-existent in its historical documentation in spite of their important roles as fighters, military leaders, and spiritual guides. Revolutionary Women aims to fill this gap. It re-inserts these erased women into the history of the Revolution through telling the stories of Cécile Fatiman, Dédée Bazile, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, Victoria "Abdaraya Toya" Montou, and Sanite Bélair. The video installation takes an experimental mixed-media approach to tell their dynamic stories. The five screens …

Behind The Gate: Syrian Women In Soap Operas - Perception Vs. Reality, Tasnim J. Rahimah

Theses and Dissertations

Syria has witnessed what is known as al-fawra al-drameya, an eruption of drama since 2000. Every year, especially during Ramadan, dozens of Syrian soap operas are aired across the Arab world and beyond, depicting Syrians’ historical struggles as they fought for liberation from the French mandate at the beginning of the 20th century. Although women of those days were a vital part of that liberation movement and had prominent societal roles, these historical fiction soap operas chose to portray only the demure and dismissive female figures and not mention the women who were independent, courageous, and active members of the …

Trans-Atlantic Composition: The History Of British Academic Writing, Gareth George Rees-White

Theses and Dissertations

I author a revisionary comparative history of British Academic Writing and American Composition studies. My core argument is that the Composition story has always, ultimately, been a Trans-Atlantic one. This project serves two key goals: 1) it offers a comprehensive history of UK writing education; while 2) simultaneously offering a revisionist US history that fights the claim that uniquely American exigencies led to a uniquely American education system that therefore has little to learn from other global Compositions. This project tracks the history of university level writing education in the UK from the 1200s to the modern day, and follows …

Off The Press: Exploring Reproducible War Art, Emily Rose Hankins

Theses and Dissertations

Aspects of modernity, such as the news cycle and ever-changing technologies, have played large roles in the construction of the history of wars through the power of reproducible war art imagery as seen in various public spheres and contexts. These include engravings and photographs of the war in news publications, propaganda posters promoting patriotism, protest posters pleading for peace, and prints and books made by artists for display in galleries. The inundation of these images become ubiquitous with the conflict, and the artists who have a hand in creating these images also have the power to construct and reconstruct histories, …

Interrogating Rosa Montero’S Transition To Consensus: The Literary Interview As Lieu De Mémoire, Adrienne D. Banko

Theses and Dissertations

Looking from our 21st century viewpoint, the collection of interviews España para ti…para siempre (1976) and Cinco años de País (1982) can be seen as artifacts of the Spanish Transition to democracy and should be regarded as collections of “places of memory.” Many scholars chronicling the Transition and its impacts have positioned Rosa Montero as a prominent feminist writer of the period. However, her journalistic writing demonstrates her mediatic role as linchpin between the social and political transitions interwoven into the foundation of Spain’s democratic emergence from Francoism. These works were published at a particular moment of consensus in …

How Decision Makers’ Career Histories Impact The Gender Diversity Of The Ceo Successor Candidate Pool, Andre G. Havrylyshyn

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have explored when/why women are chosen as CEOs, and what factors explain the presence of women in the TMT, but little is known about when/why firms have women executives in their internal CEO successor candidate pool. This omission is consequential, since there are firm performance benefits to having a woman CEO who is an internal hire, and because being a CEO successor candidate helps ensure a woman executive has had skill-building opportunities that will help her thrive when she becomes CEO. To address this, my dissertation explores two research questions. First, when and why do women directors positively impact …

The Mirrored Road, Mary E. Hanlon

Theses and Dissertations

The Mirrored Road is a feature film that explores the relationship between trauma and memory, and questions the function of home movies as a vehicle for truth. The film weaves together family footage shot over the past 70 years, films from Hollywood’s silent era, and new footage shot between 2017–2020.

Connecting To History Through Service-Learning: A Qualitative Case Study Investigating Student Engagement In Core History Courses, Kimberly D. Stokes

Theses and Dissertations

Surveys have shown that students are not enthusiastic about taking history in college; some describe the discipline as boring and unnecessary. College is a setting where students are investing in themselves, exploring new knowledge to build a career, and gaining insight into the person they want to become in the future. Learning history through a traditional lecture method where memorization of names, dates, and events seems to be the norm is not appealing to students. Universities, promoting the thought that a well-rounded education is beneficial, commonly add history to the collection of general education core courses that are required for …

Historical Dissidence: The Temporalities And Radical Possibilities Of American Comics, Jeremy M. Carnes

Theses and Dissertations

Formal criticism of comics has often focused on the importance of sequence and the filling of gutters with causative logics. Practitioner-theorists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have focused on “sequentiality” and “closure” to conceive of how readers connect the disparate panels of a given comic. More contemporary scholars of the form have followed Eisner and McCloud, foregrounding the causative logics that create narrative progression in the comics form. Yet, these approaches implicitly rely on dominant, western logics of temporality in the construction of narrative in comics.

This project considers how comics form actually relies on various temporalities and thus …

Returning To Nature: Environmental History's Posthuman Direction, William H. Smith Iii

Theses and Dissertations

The purposes of this thesis were to (A) determine a new historiographical direction for environmental history through analyzing posthuman environmental change, (B) to present a new historical analysis of posthumanity, reinforced by scholarly accomplishes with the anthropocene, that allows the historian to discuss environmental history with humanity as a secondary character, and (C) to show how both the historiography of environmental history, as well as specific case studies of climate, infestations, and natural disasters, are able to present this new direction for environmental history. What has been the end result is that humanity will always improve their condition of sustainability, …

Complicating The Narrative: Using Jim's Story To Interpret Enslavement, Leasing, And Resistance At Duke Homestead, Jennifer Melton

Theses and Dissertations

In the antebellum South, an enslaved person was more likely to be leased out than to be sold during his or her lifetime. Despite its ubiquity, leasing of enslaved people is rarely interpreted at historic sites and is not widely understood by the general public. In this project, I examine leasing and resistance to slavery in North Carolina through the lens of Jim, an enslaved man leased by Washington Duke at the property that is now Duke Homestead State Historic Site. While Duke is famous in North Carolina as founder of the American Tobacco Company, he was a yeoman tobacco …

To The Peaches, Jazmine Hayes

Theses and Dissertations

My work focuses on erased histories and the ways these histories are preserved through cultural traditions. I explore histories across the African diaspora with specificity on African American culture and black female subjectivity.

Embodying Mrs. Wrights: The Dramaturgy Of Embodiment As Praxis, Jenni Reinke

Theses and Dissertations

Cartesian mind-body dualism undergirds much of modern Western culture, determining its ontological and epistemological values. Peeling away the hegemony of cognition, this thesis illustrates embodiment as a complementary way of knowing. It proposes the dramaturgy of embodiment as an emancipatory framework for interdisciplinary choreographic and ethnographic praxis. As method, embodied performance uses the body as the primary site for making and dissemination of information, asserting the validity of subjective epistemologies.

Detailing the practical and academic exploration of an embodied dramaturgical process, this thesis analyzes the author’s creation and performance of Mrs. Wrights, an evening-length solo dance theatre production. Inspired …

Creating Herstory: Female Rebellion In Arundhati Roy’S "The God Of Small Things" And "The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness", Priyanka Tewari

Theses and Dissertations

In The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness novels, the author Arundhati Roy is not only attempting to give feminist weight to the multiplicity of locations in which gender is articulated by recasting her female characters in their quest for selfhood, she is also focusing on women and women-identified characters as agents of history, thereby contributing to an ongoing project of feminist historiography.

Speaking Truth To Power: Writing (Against) History In "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" And "The Things They Carried", Karen Chau

Theses and Dissertations

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and The Things They Carried subvert dominating historical narratives by challenging the frameworks that construct them through introducing alternate narratives. By reframing the ethics of truth, they rupture central narrative space with marginal perspectives, rewriting History in service of their own truths.

The Trans-Historicity Of The Nineteenth-Century New England Novel: Social Injustice And The Puritan Ideological Legacy, Benjamin Michael Woods

Theses and Dissertations

This study offers a transhistorical reading of Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Sylvester Judd’s Margaret, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. I identify how each novel addresses the need for social reform in nineteenth-century New England by tracing the root of social injustice to the Puritan ideological legacy. These novels address social injustices by not merely using New England’s past as a catalyst, but in identifying their origin in New England’s Calvinist, Congregationalist past. These novels furthermore reflect the theological debate between Calvinists and their Unitarian and Transcendentalist opponents in the early nineteenth century. Each novel offers a challenge to …

The Leap In Place: Rethinking Key Concepts In The History Of Composition And The Return Of Lore., David Stubblefield

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation attempts to affirm a key set of practical terms in order to guide Composition Pedagogy. These terms include error, language, voice, teacher neutrality, and rationality. In recent years, many of these terms have been discredited theoretically; however, they remain dominant in textbooks and in our actual teaching practice. The result has been a significant divide between theory and practice, resulting in a cognitive dissonance between our classroom activities and our scholarly activity. However, by presenting each of these terms as dynamic and performative, this dissertation invites the field to find productive practical possibilities inside of them. Moreover, the …

Exorcising Power, John Jarzemsky

Theses and Dissertations

This paper theorizes that authors, in an act I have termed “literary exorcism,” project and expunge parts of their identities that are in conflict with the overriding political agenda of their texts, into the figure of the villain. Drawing upon theories of power put forth by Judith Butler, I argue that this sort of projection arises in reaction to dominant ideas and institutions, but that authors find ways to manipulate this process over time. By examining a broad cross-section of English-language literature over several centuries, this phenomenon and its evolution can be observed, as well as the means by which …

Recombinant, Ching-In Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The hybrid texts (poems and prose) in the following dissertation investigate female and genderqueer lineage in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. In this book-length project, I examine the challenges of communal memory by juxtaposing voices from Asian, African and indigenous communities in the Americas. Set in a speculative future, these voices simultaneously inhabit their own spaces and share pathways, a theme developed through manipulation of white space on the page. The narrative speculates about the origins of M. Lao, a snakehead matriarch who has created a business empire from a fictional edu-tainment park, CoolieWorld, which traffics in the …

Vcrs: The End Of Tv As Ephemera, Shawn Michael Glinis

Theses and Dissertations

Although the VCR is often written about in scholarly literature, it is usually discussed in relation to Hollywood videotapes and rental stores. This study fills a gap in the current literature by presenting a significant history of the VCR in relation to TV during the period regularly referred to as the VCR's first decade, 1975 to 1985. Specifically, this study is a look at the divergent discourses of the TV industry and the public opinion of TV viewership during this early era that offer insight into how we have come to contemporarily conceptualize TV. While the TV industry considered the …

The Integration History Of Kuwaiti Television From 1957-1990: An Audience-Generated Oral Narrative On The Arrival And Integration Of The Device In The City, Ahmad Hamada

Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to compose an account of television history in Kuwait, one that focuses on its integration into society and is told from the audience's perspective and experience. This study represents a cultural alternative to the overwhelmingly national, institutional, and biographical focus that accompanies television history works in Kuwait and the Arab world.

The narrative is gathered and generated through the individual oral stories of 25 Kuwaitis over the age of 50, who generally represent the six geographical districts of Kuwait. Through their oral stories, the narrators examine the different areas in which television has integrated itself into society …

Anabaptist Masculinity In Reformation Europe, Adam Michael Bonikowske

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the connections between the Anabaptist movement during the Protestant Reformation and the alternative masculinities that developed during sixteenth-century Europe. It argues that Anabaptist men challenged traditional gender norms of European society, and through their unique understanding of the Reformation's message of salvation, these men constructed new ideas about masculinity that were at odds with Protestant and Catholic culture. Anabaptist men placed piety and ethics at the center of reform, and argued for the moral improvement of Christians. In separation from Catholics and mainstream Protestants, Anabaptists created a new culture that exhibited behavior often viewed as dangerous. The …

The Influence Of One Scholar On Another: A Citation Analysis Of Highly Cited Authors In Instructional Design And Technology, Tyler Randall Small

Theses and Dissertations

While many historical articles and chapters on the foundations of Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) have painted an accurate picture of the field, it has been 21 years since anyone has given emphasis to the relationships of influence among IDT scholars. Many have written on various elements of the field, emphasizing events according to their own experience, which have increased our overall understanding of IDT. However, without insight on the connections between these pieces, the field appears to be only a broad array of isolated silos, each filled with its own research interest. This research sought to discover IDT's genealogy …

Unlawful Assembly And The Fredericksburg Mayor's Court Order Books, 1821-1834, Sarah K. Blunkosky

Theses and Dissertations

Unlawful assembly accounts extracted from the Fredericksburg Mayor’s Court Order Books from 1821-1834, reveal rare glimpses of unsupervised, alleged illegal interactions between free and enslaved individuals, many of whom do not appear in other records. Authorities enforced laws banning free blacks and persons of mixed race from interacting with enslaved persons and whites at unlawful assemblies to keep peace in the town, to prevent sexual relationships between white women and free and enslaved black men, and to prevent alliance building between individuals. The complex connections necessary to arrange unlawful assemblies threatened the town’s safety with insurrection if these individuals developed …

Telling History Through The Stories Of Women: Julia Alvarez's In The Time Of The Butterflies And In The Name Of Salomé, Nicole Marie Carlson

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis discusses the ways in which Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and In the Name of Salomé (2000) are revolutionary texts contesting traditional, male dominated history and redirecting historical and communal foci to the lives of Dominican women. I employ Walter Benjamin's theories found in his essays "The Storyteller" (1936) and "On the Concept of History" (1940) to assist my exploration of Alvarez's questions concerning the power and effect of storytelling, and the importance of reconstructing various historical voices and images, specifically, the importance of reconstructing female voices in male dominated cultures. I discuss the …

Sandra Cisneros As Chicana Storyteller: Fictional Family (Hi)Stories In Caramelo, Sally Marie Giles

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis discusses the ways in which Sandra Cisneros makes historical claims from a Chicana perspective by telling fictional family stories in Caramelo. Not only have Chicanas traditionally been marginalized ethnically by the Anglo mainstream, they have also suffered disenfranchisement as women in their own male-dominated cultural community. Both elements have contributed to the cultural silencing of Chicanas outside of domestic spaces, and particularly in historical discourse. Cisneros introduces storytelling as a means of empowering Chicanas through language that allows them to speak historically and still signify culturally. By telling stories from the site of the family, she ingeniously utilizes …

The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints In National Periodicals, 1982-1990, Matthew E. Morrison

Theses and Dissertations

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has continued to receive exposure in national periodicals. This thesis will explore that image from 1982 to 1990. During those years, the church continued to grow in membership and expand its existing programs.

National periodicals can assist in assessing the public image of the Church because they help "mould public attitudes by presenting facts and views on issues in exactly the same way at the same time throughout the entire country." In this manner, they help to form the public opinion about the Church. They also reflect existing opinions because magazine publishers …

"Give It All Up And Follow Your Lord": Mormon Female Religiosity, 1831-1843, Janiece L. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1750s American women have flocked to churches. Women have consistently been the majority in church populations. Religion was the central motivation of the female life experience. Likewise, women comprised a significant portion of the membership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in its first decade. There exists little historical analysis of the contribution and experience of these women as a whole. As a result of this lack of research some historians have made erroneous assumptions of patriarchal oppression and a lack of commitment on the part of early Mormon women. This project closely examines the …

Becoming Mormon Men: Male Rites Of Passage And The Rise Of Mormonism In Nineteenth-Century America, Bruce R. Lott

Theses and Dissertations

The evidence presented in this thesis supports a view of the first Mormon men as coming from the agrarian majority of early nineteenth-century American farmers and artisans who embraced a set of manly ideals that differed significantly, in many ways, from those embraced by their middle-class contemporaries. These men's life writings attest to boyhood experiences of working alongside their fathers as soon as they were physically able, and subsequently of acting as substitute farmers and breadwinners as well as being put out to work outside the direct supervision of their fathers. Such experiences enabled them to frequently follow in the …