Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mentality And Fundamentality, Christopher D. Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Extant well-considered problems with physicalism primarily come from two sources: philosophers of mind arguing that subjective experience does not fit into a physicalist world-picture, and metaphysicians trying to figure out the particular commitments of the view. I examine the thesis of physicalism in order to produce a clearer notion of the physical and to help straighten out physicalism’s entailments, while simultaneously providing a strategy for physicalists to sidestep well known anti-physicalist arguments concerning consciousness. This involves both a critical and a positive effort: on the critical side, I expose an issue with a popular way of understanding physicalism called “via …

A Volitional Theory Of Aesthetic Value, John Dyck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I defend a volitionalist theory of aesthetic value. The volitionalist theory is a species of response-based models of aesthetic value: It holds that aesthetic value is based in a kind of human response. Traditional response-based theories of aesthetic value hold that value is based in responses of cognition, perception, desire, or pleasure. The volitional theory offers a new response as the home of aesthetic value: the will. We find things beautiful, I argue, because we orient our selves towards them; we find things ugly, I argue, because we orient our selves against them. The volitionalist theory I …

Privileges For Being Slaves: Christian Missionaries In The Early Qing Court, Litian Swen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation works to elucidate the long-term confusion over the identity of the Christian fathers in the early Qing court. The identity for which this dissertation argues is straightforward: Christian fathers were identified by the Kangxi emperor as his family slaves. The master-slave relationship has long been overlooked because it was overshadowed by an overwhelming focus on the Jesuit Adam Schall, who entered the Manchu court as a Chinese-style minister.

Shifting the focus from Schall, this dissertation starts by showing two seldom mentioned Jesuits, Ludovico Buglio and Gabriel de Magalhaens, who entered into Manchu service as slaves. It was, this …

Little Egypt: A Critical Biography, Katherine Vecchio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Structured as a biography, this thesis investigates the origins of Little Egypt—a stage name assumed by multiple women performing either the danse du ventre or the hoochie-coochie—and considers the character’s cultural legacy. The work draws on nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, advertisements, photographs, and official publications and archival records from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Chapter one takes a new look at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and shows how the presence of dancers performing the danse du ventre on the Midway Pliasance was turned into a flashpoint of controversy by the popular press. This controversy would be key …

Through The Mouth: An Essay On Appetite And Ecocide, Iemanja Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of mourning and resilient joy in the midst of ecocide. Resisting the pervasive classification of the human as inherently destructive, I look to appetite as an aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human. My study considers the intersections of aesthetic production (primarily twentieth-century poetry and visual art), climate science, geology, cultural studies, theory within the contemporary nonhuman turn, and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. I employ an interdisciplinary approach, which helps me explore the various ways that literal and figurative appetite can be a way of sensing and exploring …

Cyborgs For Environmental Justice: East Asian American Stories From The 1991 People Of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, Lisa Ng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this paper is threefold: to serve as an oral history archive of the East Asian American experience at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, to analyze the role of East Asian Americans in the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM), and to fill an ideological and political vacuum that exists in East Asian American communities. This work analyses the experiences of East Asian Americans who were present at the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit--an event scholars have attributed to igniting the EJM. The paper argues that East Asian Americans act as “Cyborgs”—both as their ascribed …

How Racial Injustice Causes Ignorance, Eric Bayruns

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to a (Jones and Saad) 2016 Gallup poll 69% of US whites and 32% of US blacks believe that blacks and whites have equal opportunity in the US job market. Much ink has been spilt showing that this belief is false (Alcoff 2015; Anderson 2010; Bertrand and Mullainathan 2003; Fricker 2007; McConahay 1983; Mills 1997; Mills 2007; Stanley 2015). But if its falsity is well publicized, then why do so many people persist in believing this falsehood? In this dissertation, I argue that racial injustice and whites’ current dominant-group status explains why such a high percentage of people in …

Infinity Wars: Post 9/11 Superhero Films And American Empire, Peter J. Bruno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last two decades, superhero films have accounted for some of the most popular and financially lucrative films of all time. This thesis analyzes some of the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of various superhero films following their post 9/11 boom. Beginning with America’s response to the events of 9/11 and a subsequent retreat into a Manichean world of good versus evil, I introduce the term “empirical reality” in order to account for the ways daily American life is shielded from the worst effects of U.S. foreign policy. On screen this manifests by perpetuating the myth of the “clean war” …

The Position Of A Woman: A Poetics Of Grace Paley’S Political Storytelling, Jamie Zabinsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While literary critics have long shown modest interest in writer-activist Grace Paley’s short fiction, no scholarship has yet focused on her extensive record of nonfiction writing. This thesis concentrates on Just As I Thought, an anthology of Paley’s essays, articles and speeches organized by Paley herself in lieu of any memoir or autobiography. Hannah Arendt’s theorizations of time, thought and standpoint serve as frameworks to establish the essay collection, arranged according to Paley’s political life along a timeline of feminist history, as a political storytelling project. Political storytelling, in the Arendtian sense and in context of this thesis, aims …

Enacting Race And Class Online: Gatekeeping And Meaning Making On Reddit’S R/Brooklyn, Peter J. Sclafani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the following thesis I examine how race- and class-based power structures are conceptualized and actualized in the virtual sphere. The Internet as an “imagined community” upholds the historically embedded power structures that perpetuate deeply-rooted American hegemonic ideals as they relate to race and class.

To demonstrate the conceptualization of power structures in virtual space an analysis of discourse on the social media and news aggregate website, Reddit, that positions online conversations about race and class as an extension of the racial inequality present in social structures offline. Isolating gentrification, and topics related to gentrification such as new business openings …

Being Together: Imaginaries Of Coexistence And Resistance In Contemporary South Asian Writings, Mahendran Thiruvarangan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Being Together is a critical inquiry into selected writings that produce a counter-hegemonic imagination of pluralism, coexistence and cultural resistance to the violence, dispossession and exclusions perpetuated by nationalist, racist and neoliberal forces in South Asian and South Asian diasporic contexts, primarily spaces within or associated with Sri Lanka. Due to the historical role the nation, homelands, native culture, sovereignty, and self-determination have played in liberating South Asia from the clutches of British colonialism in the mid-twentieth century, these ideas have enormous political valence to the socio-political lives of the communities that consider the region their homeland today. While this …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Some Non-Human Languages Of Thought, Nicolas J. Porot

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What might we learn if we take seriously the possibility of non-human Languages of Thought (LoT)? A LoT is a combinatorial set of mental representations. And, since mental representations and rules of combination vary in kind, there are many possible LoTs. Simple LoTs might lack familiar features of the putative human LoT, such as object representations, recursively defined rules of combination, sentential connectives, or predicate-argument structure. The most familiar arguments for the existence of LoTs, such as those from productivity, systematicity, concept learning, and perceptual computation, all fail when applied to non-human animals. But recent empirical evidence motivates attributing LoTs …

Sounds Of Alter-Destiny And Ikonoklast Panzerist Fabulations, Mette Christiansen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is a multifaceted attempt to complicate ideas about study, to think about the critical potential and social implications of certain kinds of stories, and how we might effectively disrupt and reinvent notions and techniques of critique and resistance in the names of hope and social transformation. It looks at the creative practices of Jazz musician and other-worldly being Sun Ra, the dual philosophies of “Ikonoklast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism” of an artist known as Rammellzee, and the concept-engineering of theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun, in an attempt to think through how radically unconventional forms of study might make …

Hermeneutics: A Literary Interpretive Art, David A. Reitman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the historical traditions of hermeneutics and its potential to enhance the process of literary interpretation and understanding. The discussion draws from the historical emplotment of hermeneutics as literary theory and method presented in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism with further elaboration from several other texts. The central aim of the thesis is to illuminate the challenges inherent in the literary interpretive arts by investigating select philosophical and linguistic approaches to the study and practice of literary theory and criticism embodied within the canonical works of the Anthology. The narrative begins in ancient Greece, traverses …

Imagining Africa: An Analysis Of Tropes And Motifs In Turn Of The Century Black Music, Shane Ortale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

References to Africa exist in different forms in diasporic music from every country in the New World. In the case of the United States, an abundance of song lyrics of black writers and musicians from the turn of the twentieth century contain imaginings of the African continent. This thesis analyzes the many ways that these depictions were produced within the minstrel and vaudeville genres. While these artists faced many obstacles that limited the scope of their lyrical content, they used diverse strategies to undermine the racist world in which they lived. By juxtaposing and conflating tropes about black folks in …

Unlearning Don Carlos: Historical And Fictional Elements Of Innovation In César Vichard De Saint-Réal’S 'Dom Carlos, Nouvelle Historique,' Friedrich Schiller’S 'Don Karlos, Infant Von Spanien,' And Giuseppe Verdi’S 'Don Carlos', Maria-Cristina Necula

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The story of the sixteenth-century Spanish prince, Don Carlos, has inspired numerous literary and musical adaptations that, despite the artistic limitations of historically-based content, reflect an astonishing scope of creative freedom. The myth created around Don Carlos originated in European consciousness as early as 1568. Various theories recorded in political reports and in historical works insinuated that the prince had been murdered while incarcerated by orders of his father, King Philip II. Simultaneously, hatred of Spain, intensified by Philip’s violent suppression of the revolt in the Netherlands, determined exiled Flemish nobles to launch an anti-Philip propaganda. The mystery of Don …

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 …

What Rome Really Adopted From Ancient Greece, Christian J. Vella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Roman conquest of the Greek city-states and the appropriation of many aspects of its culture, especially architecture and art, is well known. But what of the many great philosophies that began in the various city-states of Ancient Greece? This piece is made in attempt to answer this question. The scope of these sources will start with the beginning of the Western Philosophical Tradition, with Thales of Miletus and the Milesian, all the way up to, but not including, the foundation of the Christian Philosophical Tradition. After the year 146 BC if a philosopher is born in a Greek-City state, …

Baroque Pianism: Perspectives On Playing Baroque Keyboard Music On The Piano, With Emphasis On Bach’S Fugues In The Well-Tempered Clavier, Chih-Tung Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a famous quote, Schumann described the fugues in Bach's Well-tempered Clavier as pianists’ “daily bread.” This dissertation explains how these fugues can be pianists’ practical daily bread by encouraging them to explore a virtuosity of subtlety. I assert that the compositional complexity in these fugues increases pianistic challenges in both interpretive and technical aspects; these challenges can lead pianists to explore a multi-faced pianistic awareness in a way that they may not encounter when performing other styles of music.

El Caso De Mateo Alemán: La Interaccion Entre El Derecho Y La Literatura En El Informe De La Mina De Mercurio De Almaden Y El Guzman De Alfarache, Cristina Morales Segura

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1593, the Judge Mateo Alemán was in charge of inspecting the quicksilver mines of Almadén in Spain to report on the situation of its workers, prisoners of the Crown, and galley men forced to work in the mercury exploitation. After one month of work, the assignment was cancelled, Alemán was forced to retire from his research, and his work was lost in the archives of the Habsburgs. A few years later, in 1598, Alemán published his famous best seller, El Guzmán de Alfarache.

Alemán’s legal Report, finally found and published in 1966 by Germán Bleiberg, is a narrative text …

Poems To Open Palms: Praise Performance And The State In The Sultanate Of Oman, Bradford J. Garvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered …

The Incorporated Hornist: Instruments, Embodiment, And The Performance Of Music, M. Elizabeth Fleming

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Roland Barthes famously described the “grain” as “the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.” Stated simply, this project asks What is the body in the horn as it sounds? Instrumentality is typically understood as extension and expression beyond the boundaries of the body; brass instrument musicking, however, begins not where the sound emerges from the bell, but at the very least at the meeting point of the player’s breath, the surfaces of the body, and the tube of the instrument. This project of instrumental incorporation understands music as a …

Arts Et Métiers Photo-Graphiques: The Quest For Identity In French Photography Between The Two World Wars, Yusuke Isotani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the evolution of photography in France between the two World Wars by analyzing the seminal graphic art magazine Arts et métiers graphiques (1927-1939). This bi-monthly periodical was founded by Charles Peignot (1897-1983), the artistic director of the largest manufacturer of typefaces in interwar France, Deberny et Peignot. Arts et métiers graphiques has been recognized in previous literature as one of the principal vehicles for the modernization of photography in France, primarily because it functioned as an essential conduit for the radical practices developed outside the country. The interwar period is regarded as the watershed in the history …

“Let’S Call Painful Sex Disorders Sexual Disabilities Instead”: A Feminist Disability Critique Of Feminist Representations And Medical Representations Of Sexual Disorders Of Pain, Oyku Akin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Historically, gender and sexuality have been privileged sites of analysis in feminist theory. Critical feminist engagements with “sexual dysfunction” employ gendered analysis’ of medical and pharmaceutical interventions to sexuality in capitalist modernity in order to underscore the ideological dimensions of modern sexuality. Although sexual disorders of pain received little attention from feminist academics until recently, contemporary feminist work on sexual pain disorders mimic the previous work on sexual dysfunctions in terms of analysis. Analysing recent major feminist contributions employing different epistemological orientations to the study sexual disorders of pain, I show that gender continues to be the privileged common category …

Analyzing Harmonic Polarities: A Tonal Narrative Approach, Stephen J. Whale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to develop an approach to analyzing common-practice repertoire based on the dynamic interplay of centripetal and centrifugal forces. It aims at interpreting various kinds of chromaticism and modulation in terms of the interaction of forces moving away from the tonic or principal key (centrifugal) and those returning to it (centripetal). Centripetal forces also correspond to the force of cadential substantiation of keys, not only the principal key, which I call temporal-centripetal force; temporal-centrifugal forces correspond to the phenomena of tonal instability, of motion through multiple regions.

The dynamic interplay and counterbalancing of these forces is a core …

Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores multiple ways philanthropy builds and undermines the common world. Political science treatments of philanthropy have focused mainly on its role in the development of civil society, with a recent turn towards critiques of philanthropy as an instrument of elite power and tension between private wealth and democratic governance. In this dissertation, I examine how philanthropy can foster enduring spaces of human flourishing, or reduce beneficiaries to objects of pity, surveillance and domination. I trace philanthropy's evolution from ancient to contemporary contexts and propose a framework for philanthropy to, under certain conditions, build and care for the common …

A Series Of Acts That Disappear: The Valparaíso School’S Ephemeral Architectures, 1952–1982, Elizabeth Rose Donato

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1952, Chilean architect Alberto Cruz (1917–2013) and Argentine poet Godofredo Iommi (1917–2001) launched one of the most idiosyncratic experiments in postwar art and architectural pedagogy in the industrial port of Valparaíso, Chile. Founded on the premise that architecture must be “co-generada” with poetry, the so-called Valparaíso School developed an expanded conception of the discipline that encompassed ephemeral forms, from urban drifting to performative and ludic actions. This dissertation examines four specific “acts” in the Valparaíso School’s corpus: the exhibition, the poetic act, the journey, and the game. Across these different forms, I identify a tendency toward openness, improvisation, indeterminacy, …

Claiming The Remains Of The Past: The Return Of Cultural Heritage Objects To Colombia, Mexico, And Peru, Pierre Losson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My research explores the reasons why three Latin American states (Colombia, Mexico, and Peru) claim the return of cultural heritage objects from holding institutions in the Western World, such as museums and universities. The literature on returns and restitutions, which focuses on questions of ownership and possession of objects, opposes two conceptions of cultural heritage: on the one hand, the internationalists argue that the location of a cultural object must be decided according to the interests of science and education, for the benefit and in the name of humankind; on the other hand, the nationalists consider that cultural heritage is …

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678): Converso Composer In Antwerp, Elizabeth A. Weinfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Leonora Duarte (1610–1678), a converso of Jewish descent living in Antwerp, is the author of seven five-part Sinfonias for viol consort — the only known seventeenth-century viol music written by a woman. This music is testament to a formidable talent for composition, yet very little is known about the life and times in which Duarte produced her work. Her family were merchants and art collectors of Jewish descent who immigrated from Portugal in the early sixteenth century to escape the Inquisition; in exile in Antwerp, they achieved enormous success and provided the means with which to educate their children and …