Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Judaism, Conversion, And The Limits Of Christian Orthodoxy: The Jewish Identities Of Joseph Wolff And Michael Solomon Alexander As Detailed In Their Memoirs And Missions To Palestine, Michael Iodice

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Jewish identities of the Anglican missionaries Joseph Wolff and Michael Solomon Alexander by examining their conversion memoirs and evangelical missions to Palestine. It argues that they used Protestant biblical exegesis to emphasize their Jewish heritage and its importance in Christian prophecy.

Studio As Laboratory: Prioritizing Artistic Fluency Through The Morphogenesis Of Paper, Jeannette Lina Neal

Theses and Dissertations

This paper describes a curriculum designed to examine relationships between artistic fluency in middle school art classrooms, and a robust year-long paper curriculum. A sustained focus with one material, such as paper, combined with relevant artists and investigative skills activities was designed to increase artistic fluency during a time when students often experience a decline in identity and confidence. Concerns with the U-curve theory suggest that many factors affect the continuity of art during these crucial years of school. Educational standards of the Reggio Emilia Approach can be applied to secondary education, encouraging both students and educator to create dynamic …

Developing An Artistic Self In Preservice Elementary Teachers: A Studio Art Curriculum To Promote Art Integration, Karilee D. Park

Theses and Dissertations

With the continual use of standardized testing, teaching art in schools, particularly elementary schools, often falls to generalist teachers with little to no experience in art. While art can be integrated into daily curriculum for deeper and lasting learning, without the proper training or support, generalist teachers are left to implement art as they encountered it in the past, if at all. Artistic anxiety and culturally misappropriated artistic experiences result in the arts being used inefficiently or avoided completely. Creating a curriculum for preservice elementary generalist teachers, I explored art integration through developing artistic confidence, skill, and identity for 16 …

Codeswitching In The Egyptian Arabic Movies: How Do Social Variables Trigger Codeswitching?, Randa Hassan

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

This is a qualitative study designed to examine the growing linguistic practice of codeswitching in a sociolinguistic context. For this purpose, 7 Egyptian Arabic films were purposefully selected to investigate what social variables and contexts can be associated with codeswitching. Data was sampled in 43 experts from the 7 films. The data was analyzed in terms of the social variables of education, social class, identity, stance, and age, within the theoretical framework of the critical discourse analysis, the accommodation theory, and the social arena theory. Although the study started with these social variables in mind, data analysis revealed two …

Affectionate Facsimiles, Julio C. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

The paintings in Affectionate Facsimiles are journeys into the expansiveness of color and memory via the accumulation of gestural action. Sporadic freneticism is used to archive desire and time and their relationship to identity. Thin and translucent layers are built up in bursts of intensity as palimpsests of intentioned labor.

Dancing Mi Cultura: The Production Of Ethnic And National Identity In Midwestern Mexican-Americans Through The Performance Of Ballet Méxicano Folklórico, Katrina J. Frank

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies how Mexican Americans living in the northwest suburbs of Chicago produce connections to their Mexican heritage and culture through the performance of ballet Mexicano folklórico. Through ethnographic interviews of current and former folklórico dancers, as well as participant observation of adult folklórico dance practices, I contextualize the experiences of the interviewees using the anthropological theories of habitus, continuous and discontinuous selves, double-consciousness, liminality, and collective effervescence, as well as the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Frantz Fanon, with the discussion of folklórico as an art, and the concept of institutional use of dance as …

Deconstructing Decapitation In Late Roman Gloucestershire And Oxfordshire, Uk, Shaheen M. Christie

Theses and Dissertations

The Roman conquest in Britain (AD 43) led to significant changes in indigenous settlements and agricultural systems, population diversity, social organization, economic activities, and funerary traditions. Archaeological investigations of burials from the first to fifth centuries AD in Britain have revealed a complex array of burial treatments and attitudes toward the dead, including decapitation burials, which are the most common form of differential burial represented in this period. Traditional interpretations of these burials have included infanticide, punitive execution, trophy taking, fear of the dead, and veneration practices. This project investigates a sample of decapitation burials from Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire dating …

Code Switching Use, Attitudes, And Identity: Differences Among Spanish-English Bilinguals In Canada, Mexico, And The United States, Ana Sofia Rubalcava Karmanov

Theses and Dissertations

Code-switching (CS) has been extensively studied for a variety of purposes and under many contexts. In recent years there has been a shift in CS literature to better understand the sociological forces that affect speakers’ use of CS. While in earlier literature, CS was perceived negatively by both speakers and the general public (Milroy & Muysken, 1995; MacGregor-Mendoza, 2021; Anderson & Toribio, 2007; Fishman, 1967), it has since been shown that many bilinguals view CS positively. More recent research suggests that bilinguals perceive CS as an important part of their identity and use it to show they belong to particular …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Return, Leilani Bascom

Theses and Dissertations

Return is a video-based installation which includes sound, performance, and textile elements. Leilani Bascom is the lone actor navigating the water and where the water meets the land in this personal project exploring concepts of the life cycle from birth to death and rebirth. Life's paradox of struggle and release unfolds with imagery of battling through waves to swim deep underwater, fighting a river current and then surrendering to the flow, and carving a hole in the sand to climb into and be held. Viewers are immersed in the movement and sounds of water to witness the power and meaning …

Literacy Identity And Motherhood: Implications Of Hermans' Dialogical Self Theory, Chelsea J. Ames

Theses and Dissertations

This multiple case study shows how motherhood works with and against two women's literacy identities, as interpreted through the theoretical lens of Herman's Dialogical Self Theory. The evidence of this is shown in the tension between their roles as mothers and their personal roles as readers and writers. In many ways, taking on a reader or writer role meant to deny other roles for these women, showing the clash between efforts to consolidate multiple I-positions. While their meta-positions helped them recognize the discrepancies in their I-positions, there was little evidence of mediating third positions to negotiate their roles. This descriptive …

Navigating The Cairene Table: Food And Family Between What Is Ideal And What Is Real, Iman Afify

Theses and Dissertations

Our daily encounters with food, especially during our childhood, play a crucial role in shaping and informing our identity and our habitus. In this research, by using multimodal and auto ethnography, I argue that due to the guiding path that our senses carve for us, we make sense and contextualise our surroundings through our senses, and not only the five senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch, but also through our inner senses of time and temporality, and how time and memory play an important role in the registration of our surroundings through our bodies and senses. I am …

Somebody Is Looking Back At Me, Jesse Jae Hoon

Theses and Dissertations

Somebody is Looking Back At Me, a new play by Jesse Jae Hoon, is a time-jumping fever dream satire following bestselling Asian American author Olivia, who returns to a gentrifying Chinatown. As her new successful friends transform the neighborhood, she must confront the district’s troubled past and her own allegiances.

Against Identity: A Positionalist Approach To Resisting Identity-Based Violence, Barbara Walkowiak

Theses and Dissertations

I develop and defend a positionalist theory of identity as a basis from which to resist identity-based violence. On this account, identities are the social positions that individuals occupy due to belief that operate upon them. This contrasts with and is intended to replace the dominant intrinsicist model, which conceives of identity as something about individuals in and of themselves. Taking gender as a focal point, I develop three overarching positionalist kinds: monogyne, polygyne, and androgyne. I propose that additional sub-kinds (e.g. monogyne woman) be developed in order to more exactly track gender positionalities and the operational beliefs that produce …

Life In/Verse: A Poetry Collection, David A. Estringel

Theses and Dissertations

Life In/Verse: A Poetry Collection embodies the collected poetic works of Xicanx writer/poet David Estringel. The collection sequentially follows his growth as a poet and overall creative development, highlighting organic shifts in poetic voice, use of language and space, theme, and rhythm. Through poetry, the nuances and multiple facets of his identity are explored, ultimately leading to a clearer sense of self and poetic voice, demonstrating maturity and seasoning that can only come with time, experience, and acceptance. Pulling from literary influences, such as Homer, Raymond Carver, and Federico Garcia Lorca, significant and all too human …

Performing Italian Identity: Through The Plays Gemini And A View From The Bridge, Angela Dicarolo Moser

Theses and Dissertations

"Italian Identity"is the set of values and beliefs performed daily, that are markers of what it is to be "Italian,"whether those carrying those beliefs live in Italy or not. The latter point became evident in the United States following the vast wave of Italian immigration during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Italian identity has been greatly influenced by Catholicism and its centering of values and beliefs on the family, heavily defined Italian life in America. One principal mode for constructing and disseminating these values and beliefs among Italian Americans was through the theatre. This thesis provides a close reading of …

Memorias De Mi Familia, Melissa Z. Montero

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

Memorias de Mi Familia is an hour-long personal documentary through which I explore the meaning of “home.” I was born and raised in New York to a Puerto Rican mother and Ecuadorian father and lived between two worlds—sometimes more. While on a visit to Puerto Rico with my mother, Sylvia, I search for belonging and explore my family’s story of migration between the island and the United States.

Through interviews, family films, home videos and photographs spanning over 60 years, I examine the revolving migration pattern common to many Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, a …

Transnationalism And Identity: The Dream Of ‘Better Life’ For Egyptian Migrants In The Uae, Aliaa Ellawaty

Theses and Dissertations

In the modern globalized world, there has been a shift in migration studies that now focus on those immigrants from a transnational perspective. Thus, their lives are not detached from the transnational space that is not only about the point of departure and the point of arrival, but it is more related to the interconnections that emerge in the transnational space. This means that individuals are no longer tied to ethnic and cultural diversities, but by the transformations in the sociality of the transnational space. For many years, the United Arab Emirates has been a great attraction for middle-class Egyptians …

Figures Of Virtue: Margaret Fell And Aemilia Lanyer's Use Of Decorum As Ethical Good Judgment In The Construction Of Female Discursive Authority, Kirsten Marie Osmani

Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how the Renaissance rhetorical curriculum taught style as behavior makes it possible to unite the study of women writers' identities with formal criticism. Nancy L. Christiansen shows that early modern humanists built on the Isocratean tradition of teaching rhetoric as an ethical practice because they adopted and developed lists of rhetorical figures so extensive as to encompass all human discourse, thought, and behavior. For them, knowing, selecting, and applying these various forms was the ethical practice of good judgment, also called decorum. This type of decorum plays an important role in the rhetorical function of two key texts by …

Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fractured Selves is a self-portrait that examines the histories and points of conflation and diversion of my four public personas. In the style of a Zoom meeting, they chat with a host against animated backgrounds. Interactivity creates non-linear consuming of the content and user directed navigation through four timelines

To The Studio, In The Studio, Home, Miquel R. Veldkamp

Theses and Dissertations

A curated series of poems and mini essays that reflect on personal life, politics, art history, folklore, science, identity and race. It addresses the questions that inform my work, and echoes its ethos of play, exploration, curiosity, vulnerability.

Life And Love In Young Adult Literature: A Critical Analysis Of Fragments, Lissette Monrroy

Theses and Dissertations

Fragments will be a series of short stories based on events that have occurred in my life and how they impacted me and my family. They will tell the stories passed down to me, beginning with my grandparents, their lives in Mexico, and their journey to the United States. It will go on to tell stories of my parents’ struggles with raising kids in a society that tries to suppress our Mexican culture, how other family members have struggled with their own families and identities, and how my life has been influenced by these stories.

Significance and Scope of Fragments …

Morkovcha [Korean Carrot Salad], Lidiya A. Kan

Theses and Dissertations

Morkovcha, Korean Carrot Salad is a short documentary that tells a story of ethnic Koreans from Russia and the post-Soviet territories making their new home in New York City. The history of the diaspora is told through conversations with my mother, personal stories, fragmented memories, and my family photo archive. This very personal film is my attempt to revisit the 160-year history of the Russian Korean diaspora and to record and preserve our unique fusion of cultures in the melting pot that is the United States. Its purpose is to help to process and accept the tragic past of my …

Pushing The Limits Of Black Atlantic And Hispanic Transatlantic Studies Through The Exploration Of Three U.S. Afro-Latio Memoirs, Julia Luján

Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation project I intend to push the boundaries, by placing them in dialogue with each other, of both the Black Atlantic and the Hispanic Transatlantic Studies while exploring the cultural production of two groups that are generally excluded from the scholarly research done on the African Diaspora: U.S. Afro-Latinos and Afro-Argentines. While Black Atlantic Studies focuses on the Anglophone world and Hispanic Transatlantic Studies focuses on the Spanish-speaking world, they both ignore the two groups mentioned above as they complicate the boundaries of these fields by sitting at the intersections of race, language, and location.

Furthermore, I explore …

Woman Seeking Mother: The Heroine’S Journey In Waslala By Gioconda Belli, Karisa Saori Shiraki

Theses and Dissertations

Motherhood and maternity are common themes in Nicaraguan author Gioconda Belli’s (1948–) writings, but in Waslala (2006) her exploration of the mother figure dives further into what a relationship with such a figure provides. Through a development narrative, parallel to that of female Bildungsroman and quest-romance, the protagonist, Melisandra, grows in maternal history and culture in her search for mother. This thesis uses the theories of Carol Christ, Dana Heller, Joseph Campbell and others to see Melisandra’s odyssey through the lens of a quest narrative. Along this journey, two maternal figures play an important role in preparing her for her …

The Light Of Descartes In Rembrandts's Mature Self-Portraits, Melanie Kathleen Allred

Theses and Dissertations

Rembrandt's use of light in his self-portraits has received an abundance of scholarly attention throughout the centuries--and for good reason. His light delights the eye and captivates the mind with its textural quality and dramatic presence. At a time of scientific inquiry and religious reformation that was reshaping the way individuals understood themselves and their relationship to God, Rembrandt's light may carry more intellectual significance than has previously been thought. Looking at Rembrandt's oeuvre of self-portraits chronologically, it is apparent that something happened in his life or in his understanding that caused him to change how he used light. A …

Asian American Cultural Identity Portrayal On Instagram, Jesse Lau Kristine King

Theses and Dissertations

Though more recent Asian American representation in media has been lauded, the majority of portrayals have been considered to be stereotypical misrepresentations. Because negative media representations can have a detrimental impact on people's self-concepts and their views of others, it is important to understand how Asian Americans are representing their own identities online. In order to understand how Asian Americans are negotiating their own ethnic, racial, and national identities online, constant comparative analysis was employed to examine patterns and themes in the visual and textual communication of Asian American Instagram posts. Their cultural identities were communicated as a cultural blending, …

...And Yet The Devil Exists, John Hee Taek Chae

Theses and Dissertations

...And Yet the Devil Exists is a project that explores the ways in which ideology determines reality. It is an installation that plots and connects the historical and personal narratives that have defined my sense of identity–narratives in which perceptions of reality shatter, mutate, or hybridize when confronted with power, opportunity, or coercion. The installation component of the project consists of three parts. The first is an infrastructure made of wooden beams upon which paintings and images are installed; I call this the lantern. In the center of this is a round table on top of which is a nonsensical …

Arabic Beyond Arabic, Abir Zakzok

Theses and Dissertations

Arabic is the best and the most complicated language of all time!” Even though this statement seems like an exaggeration, it is what I grew up hearing; from my Arab parents as a child, my Arab teachers as a student, and my Arab customers as a salesperson. The Arabic language has a significant role in Arabs’ identity, yet most Arabs only scratch the surface and do not fully grasp the embedded meaning of the language. I have long been fascinated by the relationship between language and community as well as how it translates to design - specifically, the relationship between …

A Story About A Girl With Snakes For Hair, Kate M. Turner

Theses and Dissertations

My work is autobiographical. I use various art making processes to create a visual archive of my life. By abstracting these memories and experiences, I can examine how culture works surrounding issues of identity. This is my story.