Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The World Of Lérins: Ontology And The Late Antique Monastery, 400–542 Ce, Matthew Baker

Doctoral Dissertations

In the fourth- and fifth-century Christian world, there were many different ways of being a monk—many “monasticisms” or what this project describes as “monastic worlds.” This dissertation examines one of these monastic worlds centered on the islands of Lérins in southern Gaul, roughly two miles off the coast of modern Cannes, which sat for a few decades at the center of elite Christian discourse in the Latin West. I follow this community of monks from its founding around the year 410 CE under Honoratus of Arles, through the work of its leading “mythographer” Eucherius of Lyon, to the writings of …

The Creative Writing Pedagogy Of Black Mountain College, Bethany Gareis

Masters Theses

This essay relies on archival evidence and first-person accounts to study the development of creative writing pedagogy at black mountain college. Early accounts of creative writing at Black Mountain College reveal that it was initially an extracurricular activity driven by student interest, but over time, creative writing became a central part of the curriculum, aligning with the broader philosophies of art education at the college. I examine the pedagogical practices of key figures like Richards, Olson, and Wunsch alongside the progressive educational ideals that underpinned Black Mountain College's approach to learning, drawing on the philosophies of thinkers like Porter Sargent …

The Sons Of Melisende: Baldwin Iii, Amalric, And Kingship In The Kingdom Of Jerusalem, 1143-1174 Ce, Adam M. Aaron

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the development of kingship and royal ideology in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the reigns of Baldwin III (r. 1143-63) and Amalric (r. 1163-74). During their collective thirty years on the throne, they moved the ideas of kingship in Jerusalem away from the memory of the First Crusade and toward a Byzantine conception of rulership, including the empire’s policy of Christian ecumenism. By doing so, they incorporated Byzantine ideas and symbols into their own ideas of kingship and endeavored to make the Frankish presence in the east an indelible part of the landscape of the Levant.

Fernando Picó. One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand And The Peoples Of The Caribbean. Markus Wiener, 2011., Christian Lebron Lebron

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Fernando Picó, One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand and the Peoples of the Caribbean (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2011).

Word Count: 2,689

The book "One Frenchman, Four Revolutions: General Ferrand and the Peoples of the Caribbean" by Fernando Picó delves into the life of General Jean-Louis Ferrand and its connection to the four revolutions unfolding in the Caribbean between 1803 and 1808. Employing an intriguing literary technique, Picó initiates the narrative with the general's death, paving the way to explore the events surrounding the political landscape of the time. Drawing inspiration from Voltaire, the author employs a methodology that reflects …

41 For Freedom: Ballistic Missile Submariners And The Nuclear Deterrent Shield During The Cold War, Jeremy Daniel Long

Masters Theses

Ballistic missile “boomer” submarines were developed in the 1960s as a response to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite which proved the Soviet Union could launch a missile targeting anywhere on Earth. They made use of new nuclear power technology which allowed submarines to stay underwater indefinitely, limited only by the food they could carry to feed their crews. Ballistic missile submarines have served continuously since 1960, patrolling the ocean as the second-strike capability that makes nuclear deterrence possible. The men who served aboard the “41 for Freedom” ballistic missile submarines made innumerable sacrifices and contributed greatly to national …

Defining Humanity: A Postwar Reconstruction Of The Faust Myth, Mason F. Hockett

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Holy Asexualities: Discursive Constructions And Late Medieval Religious Women's Asexual Embodiment, Mackenzie Wynn King

Masters Theses

This thesis traces multiple strands of late medieval asexuality and compulsory sexuality that inflected the lives of holy women. Reading the sexuality of these holy women through the lens of asexuality adds another dimension to the study of medieval virginity, and challenges the presumption that virginity was always a struggle. It also has the radical potential to disrupt the naturalization of sex in both modern and medieval periods. This thesis begins by examining medical and natural philosophical discourses, which constructed a gendered iteration of compulsory sexuality by naturalizing lust as an inherent feature of women’s bodies. It next examines hagiography, …

Breaking Bondage: Manumission And The Absence Of Abolitionist Ideology In Rome, Thomas Andrew Witcher

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

A Character And A Fame To Model Their Own: Statesmanship, Masculinity, And Honor In Northern Political Culture, 1852-1874, Rachel Elise Wiedman

Masters Theses

The advent of the 1850s ushered in a period great change in the United States. Finding themselves in a moment of transition punctuated with a political changing of the guard, Americans were prompted to consider what kinds of political leadership they valued in the midst of sectional conflict and crisis. By the 1870s, the ideals northerners held looked very different than those touted only two decades before. Using the eulogies of Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas, and Charles Sumner, this thesis explores how changing ideals of masculinity drove the transformation of northern political culture and in particular its values regarding …

The Digital Face Of Airpower: Asymmetry, Artificial Intelligence And Intimate Combat In The Twenty-First Century United States Air Force, Jordan Bolster

Masters Theses

Remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) operators have been at war for over twenty-years using unmanned aerial vehicles to kill combat enemies half-a-world away. Their emotional experiences provide an opportunity to examine intimacy in warfare which can be compared and contrasted with conventional pilots and traditional rifle-bearing ground troops. By comparing and contrasting specific emotions felt across various combat environments and technologies, it is possible to answer the question of whether or not RPA operators are legitimate warriors or legitimated assassins. The implementation of RPA operators in combat zones and the proliferation of unmanned technology on the battlefield open up new questions …

Poor Whites Of The Antebellum South: How A Misunderstood Social Class Became A Point Of Controversy In Slavery Debates, Madison M. Adkins

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Law Of Inequivalent Exchange: The British East India Company In Japan, 1600-1625, Walter C. Price

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Rhythm Of The Land: Women’S Use Of Plants During The Pigeon Phase Of Magic Waters (31jk291) In Cherokee, North Carolina, Kelly Dean Santana

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the paleoethnobotanical remains of the Pigeon phase village component of the Magic Waters site, 31JK291. The Pigeon phase represented the early Middle Woodland period in the western North Carolina region and spans from approximately 200 BC to AD 200, situated in between the earlier Swannanoa phase (1000 BC to 200 BC) and the later Connestee phase (AD 200 to AD 800; Ward and Davis 1999). The site of Magic Waters is located adjacent to Harrah’s Cherokee Casino and Hotel in Cherokee, Jackson County, North Carolina, among the Blue Ridge ecoregion of the Appalachian Summit. The site …

Outlaws And Traitors: Justifying Rebellion In The Old French Epic Of Revolt, Klayton Tietjen

Doctoral Dissertations

The plot of many chansons de geste hinges on acts that would have been considered treasonable by medieval legal custom. Yet despite conspicuously treasonous behavior, rebel characters remain the heroes of the tales. Coming to an understanding of the esoteric way that medieval poets and their audiences would have perceived the difference between rebel characters and traitor characters is the pursuit of this study. Through an investigation of the narrative logic and poetic details of epic poems like Girart de Vienne and other chansons de geste, the divergence between treachery and rebellion can be shown to reside in narrative …

Resituando El Cuerpo Femenino A Través De La Memoria Histórica Y La Ficción: Carlota De Bélgica Y Eva Perón En Las Novelas Noticias Del Imperio De Fernando Del Paso Y Santa Evita De Tomás Eloy Martínez, Krysheida Ayub - Unzon

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the body and the memory of Charlotte of Belgium and Eva Perón in the historical novels Noticias del Imperio (1987) by the Mexican writer Fernando del Paso and Santa Evita (1996), by the Argentine Tomás Eloy Martínez. Through the conformation of these historical characters as literary protagonists, we observe how both are endowed with a new historical meaning from the articulation of fictional narratives that differ from traditional historiographical texts. From the analysis of the corporality and the memory of the female characters, we will attend to the resignification of the historical texts and their fictional ramifications …

Plants And People: Foraging To Farming Foodway Transition From Late Archaic To Early Woodland In Western North Carolina, U.S.A., Catherine Linn Herring

Masters Theses

During the Late Archaic to Early Woodland Transition, 3,200 years B.P. [Before Present], some gathering communities in the Eastern Woodlands began to increase their cultivation of plants. While archaeologists have located several sites in the Upper Tennessee River Valley and near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee that explicitly show an increase in plant cultivation, less research has focused on the North Carolina Appalachian Summit Region. This paper uses paleoethnobotanical data and spatial analysis of site locations to explore cultivation and settlement patterns in Jackson and Swain Counties, North Carolina. Data include site locations obtained from the North …

Exchange And Social Interaction In The Tennessee River Valley: A Geospatial Approach To The Analysis Of Late Archaic Archaeological Sites, Justin S. Bailey

Masters Theses

The cultural manifestation known as the Shell Mound Archaic persisted in the lower Midwest and Midsouth region of the Eastern United States for over four millennia beginning in the Middle Archaic ca. 8900 cal BP and terminating at the end of the Late Archaic ca 3200 cal BP. A geospatial approach is applied to the analysis of exotic material exchange of the Late Archaic (ca. 5800-3200 cal BP) to assess how foraging peoples in the Tennessee River Valley interacted and persisted during this time. Exotic material items manufactured from copper, marine shell, steatite, and other nonlocal materials demonstrate distinct spatial …

_Not That Bad_: Lessons Women Learn In A Rape Culture, Sydney J. Selman

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

In 2018, Roxane Gay assembled an anthology that addresses the severity of rape, rejecting the common belief that some sexually violent acts, compared to others, are not that bad. This collection, titled Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, compiles pieces from thirty different authors and sheds light on how the notion of not that bad contributes to a broader structural social problem involving sexual violence. This social problem, known as rape culture, is commonly defined as a culture that normalizes sexual violence and blames victims of sexual assault (“What is Rape Culture?”). In other words, rape culture …

Public Wife: The Life Of Jessie Benton Fremont, Lorraine D. Herbon

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the life of Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902) and the ways in which she performed the role of a “public wife” through her marriage to John C. Frémont. This re-examination of a woman immensely popular in the nineteenth century offers a new way of thinking about the wives of famous men and the steps they took to both participate in, and direct the narrative of, American history.

Jessie Benton was the daughter of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. At sixteen, Jessie met a young man from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers who came to meet with …

Troya Victa : Empire, Identity, And Apocalypse In The Frankish Chronicles Of The Fourth Crusade, Jordan Amspacher

Doctoral Dissertations

Histories of the Fourth Crusade have long revolved around the so-called “Diversion Question,” or the process by which a crusading army sworn to liberate the Levant from Muslim control ultimately found itself laying siege, not once but twice, to the largest city in Christian Europe. Competing answers to the Diversion Question have have tended to focus on the economic and diplomatic motivations of the crusade leadership. Scant attention, however, has been paid to the religious and intellectual motivations at play within the minds of these thirteenth-century Latin Christians. This dissertation examines intellectual trends in twelfth-century Latin Europe and the ways …

Seeing With The Eyes Of The Soul: Visionary Women, Meditative Lives Of Christ, And Their Readers In Late-Medieval England, Caitlin J. Branumthrash

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the interactions in the transmission and reception of visionary women’s texts, devotional retellings of Christ’s life, and female book cultures in late-medieval England (ca.1350-1550). Surveying English manuscripts and texts containing the texts of St. Birgitta of Sweden and Mechthild of Hackeborn indicates a link in the commensurate popularities of the Life of Christ genre and the visionary women. Devotional Lives of Christ written by men incorporate visionary texts, though they reflect implicit medieval misogyny even as they celebrate the holy women. In contrast, a Life of Christ written by a medieval English nun blends the lived experiences …

Supporting Characters: Prosthesis And Aesthetic Technologies Of Disability In The Victorian Novel, Rebecca L. Mccann

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the production of physical disability and the function of prosthesis in nineteenth-century British fiction. My intervention in disability studies readings of Victorian literature attends to the prosthetic object and prosthetic body not only as the dual products of medicine and art, but also as catalytic elements of fiction and culture. I read reciprocal developments in medical technology and disabled characterization in the Victorian novel to demonstrate how the artistic translation of the prosthetic object effected a set of criteria for defining people through both bodies and things and, in so doing, revealed the ways in which the …

A Performance Of Disease And Its Cures: Lovesickness In Medieval Iberia, Lillian B. Sanders

Masters Theses

In the context of late medieval Iberia, lovesickness as a real disease was both treatable and threatening to one’s lived experience. Different forms of lovesick cures, from both learned and vernacular healers, arose from the Galenic regime of the humoral body. Cures such as charms, mixtures, and verbal expressions helped heal lovesick patients, as is shown in the archive through sources like remedy books and literary texts depicting lovesick affliction. Much of the current scholarship on lovesickness focuses on medieval medicine through the archive. Through the lens of performance studies, I argue that medieval Iberians enacted cures on lovesick patients …

In Penn’S Woods: Intersections Between The Moravians, Indigenous Americans, And Nature, 1741-1760, Jane J. Chang

Masters Theses

The Moravian presence among Native American communities during the early colonial period (1741-1760) provides a valuable glimpse into the intermingling of European and indigenous cultures along with an environmental epistemology. Cross-cultural and knowledge exchanges were not uni-directional by any means. Moravians negotiated with indigenous Americans and their natural landscapes to construct syncretic space not only in their missionary efforts, but also the establishment of settlements. Integral in this shared space was the role of Moravian women, who played a crucial role in fostering intimate bonds with their indigenous Sisters. In this study, I examine Moravian hymns, architectural plans, and diaries …

De La Esclavitud A La Libertad: La Historia De Una Esclava Afromexicana, Margaree G. Jackson

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Resumen: “De la esclavitud a la libertad: La historia de una esclava afromexicana,” es una colección de poemas descolonizados contados desde la perspectiva de una mujer afromexicana ficticia del siglo XVII. La protagonista, Maricela Rivas, es una esclava que nació en la plantación azucarera Nuestra Señora de la Concepción, una plantación verdadera ubicada en Veracruz, México. Su historia se basa en las pocas historias que existen sobre la vida de la mujer afromexicana que formaba parte esencial de la sociedad y cultura mexicana pero que le falta representación y una voz. Estos poemas le dan una voz y perspectiva al …

East Germany's Angela Davis, Ross T. Parks

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

Angela Davis is arguably the most famous member of the Black Panther movement. She reached prominence within the United States as a political dissident, educator, activist, and prisoner in the early 1970s. However, the United States government was not the only one with an eye on Davis.

The Black Panther movement is well-known within the United States, with a complicated reputation among the public. Often framed as far-left radicals, the group and many of its members were heavily targeted by the FBI throughout its existence. The movement’s efforts are often categorized as the most extreme example of the Civil Rights …

Guerres, Individus, Systèmes : Problématiques De L’Écriture Martiale Dans Le Roman Américain Du Xxème Siècle, Julien Brugeron

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

This article aims at reassessing the long 20^th century American war novel and its inherent and hitherto seldom addressed problematics. Borrowing from both French, American and English critical standpoints, it aims at clarifying the definitional, ethical, political and aesthetic aspects of war writing by putting on an equal footing classic works of the genre (Dos Passos, Mailer, Heller, Herr) and left-aside writers (La Motte, Boyd, Hasford) as well as contemporary novelists (Powers). It is critical in American literary history, and to literary history in general, to seize what is at stake in war writing, as this particular kind of …

Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lucas R. Nossaman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the …

Asturleonés Medieval; Una Aproximación Sincrónica Y Diacrónica A Sus Rasgos Fonéticos Diferenciales Y Su Dominio Lingüístico, Alfonso Hernanz

Doctoral Dissertations

Unlike other romance varieties in the Iberian Peninsula Middle Ages, the Asturleonese dialect didn’t get to evolve into a fully differentiated language system due to several historical and sociocultural issues that thwarted its historical development. However, the distinctive features of the dialect survived until present time featuring a complex dialectal system along the geography of the ancient Kingdom of León. This research focuses on the building of the Asturleonese Linguistic Domain and the phonetic characterization of its distinctive phonetic features from a synchronic and diachronic perspective with the purpose of identifying in medieval documents, from IX to XIV centuries, the …

The Wilderness Experience: Imitatio Christi And The Demonic Encounters Of Italian Holy Women Of The Quattrocento, Amy Huesman

Doctoral Dissertations

During the fifteenth century, when Christian spirituality had become increasingly feminized, a number of women in the northern and central regions of the Italian peninsula chose to embrace fully the vita apostolica, and certain of them led lives of such austere piety in imitatio Christi that they were later deemed worthy of beatification or canonization. They were sante vive—living saints—revered for their miraculous powers and regarded as agents of the divine. These women took vows as nuns or associated themselves with a religious order as tertiaries, and they dedicated themselves to strict lives of prayer, extreme fasting, and …