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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu Feb 2024

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …


Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham Sep 2023

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …


Coloniality, Western Science, And Critical Ethnic Studies In Stem Education, Latoya M. Strong Feb 2023

Coloniality, Western Science, And Critical Ethnic Studies In Stem Education, Latoya M. Strong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I use a critical transdisciplinary approach to examine how the coloniality of Western Science impacts science education teaching, learning, and research. Weaving together Black geographies, settler colonialism, and decolonial theory, I illustrate how the historical, symbiotic relationship between colonization and Western Science created a culture that continues to shape modern science practices and science education. The coloniality of Western Science was codified into science education, resulting in three approaches to teaching, learning and research—the assimilationist model, the capitalist model, and the imperialist model. Moving from theory to research, I collaborated with STEM educators over six weeks to …


Pixel Predicament, Francisco J. Lahoz Dec 2022

Pixel Predicament, Francisco J. Lahoz

Capstones

If the art that affected you greatly in your youth was under the risk of fading away, wouldn't you do anything to preserve it? Gamers are tired of seeing the art of video games be neglected by their copyright holders and are making efforts to find, catalogue, and preserve their artform in multiple ways.

https://flahoz.com/2023/01/24/pixel-predicament/


The Storytelling Cure: Medicine And Narrative From Galen To Shahrazad And Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba Sep 2022

The Storytelling Cure: Medicine And Narrative From Galen To Shahrazad And Rousseau, Ryan A. Milov-Cordoba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Are stories healing? This dissertation introduces and explores an idea that I call “the storytelling cure.” With this term I capture a set of related notions about the healing power of stories that span literary studies, intellectual history, philosophy, and medical practice. Through a comparative study I make the case for “the storytelling cure” as a cross-cultural, multiconfessional, and multilingual phenomenon of great age, complexity, and power, worthy of the most sustained attention by the contemporary field of Comparative Literature. Concretely, this dissertation presents three extended case studies of “storytelling cures” from three different kinds of texts (case history, frame …


Review Of Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, And Urban Change In Pre-Interstate America, By Amy D. Finstein, Geoff Zylstra Jul 2022

Review Of Modern Mobility Aloft: Elevated Highways, Architecture, And Urban Change In Pre-Interstate America, By Amy D. Finstein, Geoff Zylstra

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability Beyond The Narratology Of Normalcy, Christian Lewis Jun 2022

Narrative Side-Stepping: Disability Beyond The Narratology Of Normalcy, Christian Lewis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation theorizes a new mode of reading, narrative side-stepping, that reveals how disabled characters provide a unique opportunity for non-normative narratives. In insisting on the narratological innovations that disability affords, I revise both Lennard Davis’s notion that the novel form valorizes normalcy and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis, which claims that disability is a crutch, and that disabled characters are merely metaphors and/or plot devices. I move beyond these theories to focus instead on the more complicated ways that authors represented disability and used disabled characters to critique societal and narrative norms. I think about …


The Lost And Forgotten Plants: French Botanical Networks In Provincial And Colonial France (1760–1825), Sophie R. Tunney Jun 2022

The Lost And Forgotten Plants: French Botanical Networks In Provincial And Colonial France (1760–1825), Sophie R. Tunney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the eighteenth century, the Jardin du Roi in Paris was the leading monarchical institution for the collection and categorization of plants. A global network emerged that circulated thousands of plants and seeds. Historians of botany have focused on the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the centralization of the network in the hands of different actors, including André Thouin. The dissertation shifts away from a Paris-centered model to one that includes gardens across the metropole and the colonial world. It focuses on the histories of the botanical gardens in l’Ile de France (Mauritius), Cayenne (French Guiana), Brest, Bordeaux, Paris, …


Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes Sep 2021

Afterlives Of Discovery: Speculative Geographies In The Colombian Political Landscape, Heidi A. Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation considers how the temporal remains of the Age of Discovery and its doctrine persist in a racial-geographical ranking of human and non-human, terrestrial and planetary life and worth. Across this work, I interpret a series of historical moments and their objects of speculative geographic cultural production: a state mapping program, a painting, a biomedical project, a de-monumenting protest action. As repositories of codified belief and repertoires of Discovery’s political and affective modes of racialized domination, I read these materials from the Colombian archives of coloniality and liberalism to illuminate their implications for Colombia’s national becoming as a liberal …


Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero Jan 2021

Animal-Human Vocabulary Builder, Domenick Acocella, Rene Cordero

Open Educational Resources

The assignment helps students individually build a usable, expanding vocabulary of terms and concepts, enabling each to further contribute to the ongoing, evolving written, oral, and visual conversations centered on the use of and thought about animals for food, clothing, work, entertainment, experimentation, imagery, and companionship.


Misremembering Risk In The Age Of Hurricanes: The Rhode Island Coast In The 1930s-1950s, Kara M. Schlichting Jan 2021

Misremembering Risk In The Age Of Hurricanes: The Rhode Island Coast In The 1930s-1950s, Kara M. Schlichting

Publications and Research

This paper explores the lost history of New England hurricanes and how the “return” of hurricanes challenged understandings of the environmental vulnerabilities of coastal communities and weather. A series of severe New England hurricanes from 1938-1954 forced Rhode Islanders to reassess coastal vulnerabilities and protection strategies. Before the hurricane of ’38, Rhode Islanders lived with the vulnerability of seasonal erosion and winter storms, but believed their state was, and would remain, safe from hurricanes. In a new era of the shore-at-risk, the Army Corps of Engineers re-wrote the forgotten history of coastal dangers. Dense development along Narragansett Bay and the …


Invisible Inequalities: Persistent Health Threats In The Urban Built Environment, Kara M. Schlichting, Melanie A. Kiechle Dec 2020

Invisible Inequalities: Persistent Health Threats In The Urban Built Environment, Kara M. Schlichting, Melanie A. Kiechle

Publications and Research

A city’s materiality creates health and illness. We both write about air – its movement and its temperature – as it affects human bodies. We offer two topics as case studies, heat and ventilation, and how they exacerbate the effects of each other, to illustrate the long history of seemingly new challenges posed by the novel coronavirus. The environmental inequalities of heat exposure and access to fresh air underscore that cities can only be considered ‘low impact’ on the environment from a top-down, large-scale approach. In writing about air and heat, we direct attention to the feel and the bodily …


Agency And Contemporary Recording Production, Eliot Bates Jul 2020

Agency And Contemporary Recording Production, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

Recording production is a complex, multistep, typically collaborative process that entails a shifting set of individuals inhabiting changing roles within spaces that house consider­ able amounts of specialized technology. As these roles and technologies feature promi­ nently in the aesthetics of Anglophone and Francophone popular music, they have been studied within such milieus for the longest period. This scholarship tends to understand the creative act as either the result of a prominent individual or something determined by the technologies used within studios. However, recent ethnomusicological scholarship has shown it is much more difficult to clearly situate agency within recording production, …


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 …


Ancient Snakebite Literature: The Brooklyn Medical Papyrus And Nicander’S Theriaca, Montgomery Q. Stewart Jan 2020

Ancient Snakebite Literature: The Brooklyn Medical Papyrus And Nicander’S Theriaca, Montgomery Q. Stewart

Publications and Research

The Brooklyn Papyrus is an Egyptian medical treatise on the subject of snakebite cures. It is a part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Charles Edwin Wilbour collection (47.218.48 and 47.218.85). In the 1960s, the papyrus was translated into French by Egyptologist Serge Sauneron. This research paper includes the first full translation of the Brooklyn Papyrus, as well as an introductory essay, which analyzes the structural and religious elements of the work. It also compares the Brooklyn Papyrus to another notable work on snakebites, Nicander of Colophon’s Theriaca.


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 …


Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione Sep 2019

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …


The Crusader And The Dictator: An Exploration Of Ideology And Neurodivergence In Contemporary Technology Practice, David J. Williams May 2019

The Crusader And The Dictator: An Exploration Of Ideology And Neurodivergence In Contemporary Technology Practice, David J. Williams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A common theme in public discourse is the recognition that technology in general, and digital technology specifically, has an enormous impact on the everyday lives of people from all walks of modern life, in almost every corner of the globe. This thesis interrogates the connection between neurodivergence—the presence of neurological variations considered outside the cognitive norm— and individualistic ideology within the information technology industries. Through the biographies, substantial record of activities, public statements, and writings surrounding two influential figures in the contemporary practice of computer science, Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, it conducts an investigation into this convergence and its …


His 34 History And Contemporary Issues In Science And Technology, William Dejong-Lambert Dec 2018

His 34 History And Contemporary Issues In Science And Technology, William Dejong-Lambert

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.


Historical Effects Of Electronic Interfaces, G James Mitchell Dec 2018

Historical Effects Of Electronic Interfaces, G James Mitchell

Publications and Research

Electronic interfaces are a primary tool for most professional and personal communication currently happening. Electronics, like the human mind, are limited by the understanding of executing will, or commands. This can be characterized as “interface limitations” of digital technology. Identifying this bottleneck in technological development has been critical in historical changes to both hardware and software technology. Recent medical research examines a novel user interface to reduce task load. I hypothesize, interface developments that take cues from nonverbal human communication enhance and sustain the significance of those technologies in society. By examining pivotal moments of historical technology we can identify …


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 …


Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley May 2018

Darwin's Failures: Childless Women In The Nineteenth-Century British Novel, Rose P. O'Malley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses feminist neo-materialist and evolutionary theory to examine non-maternal relations among childless female characters in nineteenth-century British novels. In both the nineteenth century and the present day there is a tendency to use the authority of evolutionary biology to define women as essentially reproductive beings; their entire physical and intellectual organization is seen as geared toward childbearing and childrearing. Reading childless female characters with this tradition in mind, as well as the more open-minded counter-narrative of feminist engagements with evolution, opens up new questions about their meaning: Are they truly biological failures, or not? What avenues of physical …


"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma Feb 2018

"Betwixt The World Destroyed And World Restored": Subjectivity And Paradisal Recovery In John Milton's Late Poems, Chihping Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on the discovery of subjectivity through the recovery of lost paradise in Milton’s late poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. This theme revolves around the tension between the affective and the empirical, which also configure the spheres of the sacred and the profane. I explore how the irresistibly emancipatory impulse of recovering lost paradise compels Miltonic subjects to seek ways to return to their originary state or the divine ensemble. During this process, the subject is engaged with his own incapacity or privation while reaching into the sphere of unknown potentiality. In …


Powerhouse Chihuahua: Electricity, Water, And The State In The Long Mexican Revolution, Jonathan Hill Jr Feb 2018

Powerhouse Chihuahua: Electricity, Water, And The State In The Long Mexican Revolution, Jonathan Hill Jr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State formation has for decades been a major analytical focus for historians of Mexico, especially during the armed Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and the “long” political and social revolution which continued for decades thereafter. Since the 1980s, the cultural turn in the humanities has produced groundbreaking works in the field and introduced a model of state formation framed around hegemony, subaltern agency, and the nation. While these reflect prevailing approaches, this dissertation joins more recent interdisciplinary work on Mexico in conversation with a ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Focusing on the policy debates and infrastructural networks which attended …


The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer Feb 2018

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …


Edward Jenner’S 1798 Report Of Challenge Experiments Demonstrating The Protective Effects Of Cowpox Against Smallpox, Alfredo Morabia Jan 2018

Edward Jenner’S 1798 Report Of Challenge Experiments Demonstrating The Protective Effects Of Cowpox Against Smallpox, Alfredo Morabia

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.


Connecting Wikipedia And The Archive: Building A Public History Of Hiv/Aids In New York City., Ann Matsuuchi Sep 2017

Connecting Wikipedia And The Archive: Building A Public History Of Hiv/Aids In New York City., Ann Matsuuchi

Publications and Research

This is an overview of a project that was started in 2015 that was collaboratively designed by archivists and historians with the La Guardia & Wagner Archives and LaGuardia Community College’s faculty/librarians. It involves students in the production of a needed public history of the outbreak and impact of HIV/AIDS in New York City via writing and researching contributions to Wikipedia.


Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo Jun 2017

Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how …


Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie Feb 2017

Ecologies Of The Passions In Early Modern English Tragedies, Roya Biggie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness …


Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo Dec 2016

Rationality, Parapsychology, And Artificial Intelligence In Military And Intelligence Research By The United States Government In The Cold War, Guy M. Lomeo

Theses and Dissertations

A study analyzing the roles of rationality, parapsychology, and artificial intelligence in military and intelligence research by the United States Government in the Cold War. An examination of the methodology behind the decisions to pursue research in two fields that were initially considered irrational.