Arts and Humanities Commons^™

“Sparks Fly ”: Connecting Midwestern Historic Forts Through A Comparative Study Of Gunflints, Jeffrey A. Spanbauer

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will outline the temporal changes and choices of colonial powers and individuals as expressed at historic frontier posts in the Midwest between 1683 and 1779 as expressed through their supply and usage of gunflints. Gunflints exist as persistent artifacts at historic sites, and especially so at fortifications like Fort de Chartres, Fort St. Joseph, Fort Michilimackinac and Fort Ouiatenon. These sites exist within the same chronological timeframe, from 1690-1780, and saw occupation by both the French and British, with nearby indigenous groups, and should serve as instructive means to investigate the factors involved in the supply, selection, and …

Braving Shame: The Rhetoric Of Bravery In Contemporary Women's Memoir, Debra Gayle Parker

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation interrogates the rhetoric of bravery as a culturally-infused way of hearing certain kinds of personal narratives. As a cultural rhetoric, “bravery” has deep roots in masculine militaristic ideology in which cowardice, courage, and shame are conceptually linked to a sense of duty. The memoir industry represents one environment that archives what is valued as brave writing. As rhetoric precariously at work in the memoir industry, this dissertation investigates the cultural assumptions that drive literary bravery as it is used to assess contemporary memoirs, particularly memoirs written by women. Braving Shame invokes a new brand of bravery—one that de-emphasizes …

Mass Media’S Cultivation Effect On Islamic, Muslim, And Qur’Anic Prejudice, Shanna J. Carlson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the power of the mass media’s ability to cultivate reality in terms of the threat of Islam. A rhetorical analysis of the messages portrayed by the mass media is then compared to the findings of the study. While the study did not find any significant correlation between consumption of media and fear of Muslims, the Qur’an, or Islam, it did find a strong negative correlation between inter-group contact and salience of stereotypes.

All Hands Bury The Dead, Summer Qabazard

Theses and Dissertations

All Hands Bury the Dead is a collection of poetry, salted with creative non-fiction, and images, exploring trauma, memory, time, nostalgia, mental health, and love in the backgrounds of the Gulf War in Kuwait (1990-1991), domestic violence, relationships, and academia. The dissertation includes a critical preface that theorizes how racist, sexist, and colonialist ideologies can be reproduced in and supported through the uncritical application of theory to practice. The dissertation also includes an exploration of the assumptions about the innateness of creative writing ability that utilizes psychological theories of creativity to build a pedagogy to support the creative potential of …

Out The Window: The Coalescence Of Internal And External Space, Micah Allen Zavacky

Theses and Dissertations

Out the Window: The Coalescence of Internal and External Space is a supportive statement for an exhibition of prints, drawings, and paintings that begin with direct observation. Building on Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinctions of space and place, I examine how these terms reflect my subjective interpretations of objective subject matters. Landscape, still life in domestic interiors, and garden subjects, as observed and interpreted in the prints, drawings, and paintings, not only reveal the shifting roles of space and place but also the ongoing processes of change occurring both externally in the observed environment and internally in my response to it.

Hints Of Wholeness, Dylan Yvonne Welch

Theses and Dissertations

The fertile tension between what we know and don’t know about ourselves is the mystery that invigorates existence. In this essay, I posit that beauty is found in a knot of knowability and unknowability bound together in wholeness. This work contemplates our unique receptivity to that underlying but invisible wholeness which makes its presence known as beauty in nature immediately around us and on a cosmic scale.

José Efraín Ríos Montt: A Guatemalan Nightmare, Ryan Melson

Theses and Dissertations

In Guatemala, dictator Efrain Rios Montt's seventeen month regime, from 1982 to 1983, had countless human rights violations. After being deposed from leadership in 1983, Rios Montt's supporters have displayed enduring loyalty to him. As a result of this, Rios Montt's beliefs and desires have held considerable political and social wealth in Guatemala's political and social spheres. Rios Montt's political and social power in Guatemala has given him impunity within the justice system. The Guatemalan justice system has created a fractured state, and paved the way for more violence.

A Vision Of Peace Through U.S. Leadership: President Jimmy Carter's Moral Foreign Policy Vision And The Panama Canal Treaties, Holly L. Welsh De Paula

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines President Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy and his administration’s campaign to promote the ratification of the Panama Canal treaties from 1977 to 1978. I argue that President Carter’s administration developed a coherent foreign policy vision that was inspired by moral convictions and aimed to promote international peace. The fundamental aspects of this vision are reflected in the Panama Canal treaties. During the turbulent Senate debate over the treaties, opposition arguments attacking President Carter’s moral policy encouraged the Carter administration to favor more pragmatic arguments in support of the treaties, which ultimately obscured President Carter’s overarching foreign policy vision. …

Systemic Noise: Investigating The Posthuman Rhetorical Movement Of"You Did N'T Build That", Maclain Bernabei Scott

Theses and Dissertations

While campaigning for reelection in 2012, President Barack Obama gave a speech in which he uttered the sentence “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” In the aftermath of the speech, the phrase “you didn’t build that” circulated widely in political discourse, generating a variety of responses from campaigns and commentators as to what the phrase means. This thesis uses a posthuman rhetorical framework to investigate how “you didn’t build that” influenced and was transformed by political discourse systems. Specifically, I synthesize scholarship on complex systems, enthymeme, and new materialism to argue that the ambiguity of the phrase …

Split Wounds: Diverging Formations Of Trauma In The Diagnostic And Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders V, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, And The Rat Laughed, And Once Were Warriors, Emily R. Johnston

Theses and Dissertations

Split Wounds interrogates naturalized, normalized trauma wisdom—particularly the individualization and pathologization of sexualized trauma. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of discursive formation, explicated in The Archaeology of Knowledge as a set of conditions that enables history, this dissertation elucidates differing discursive formations of trauma in contemporary medical documents, literary texts, and films. The introductory chapter explicates how founding texts in the field of trauma theory construct trauma as a preverbal, psychological experience that can only be represented through fragmented, non-linear, anti-narrative textual strategies. Chapter two exposes such Euro-American modernist ideology in the American Psychiatric Association’s clinical definition of posttraumatic stress disorder …

Black-\`Blak\, Venise Keys

Theses and Dissertations

My studio practice explores themes of identity derived from the basic question of Langston Hughes, What does it mean to be a Black artist? My artwork draws from memory, Black Feminist literature, along with the aesthetics of the African diaspora and the Black Arts Movement. In this essay, I reexamine childhood experiences in my mother's hair salon; beauty rituals of U.S. Black women; and the consuming male gaze in Western art to explain how these influences manifest in the artwork of Black-\`BLAK\.

Collateral Impact Of Maternal Incarceration: Burdens Placed On Child Caregivers, Daniel Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Although parental incarceration is both a maternal and paternal issue, it is particularly detrimental to the family when the mother is incarcerated. The number of children with a mother in prison has more than doubled since 1991 (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008). Although there are more children of incarcerated fathers than mothers, it is particularly important to note that sixty-four percent of mothers were the primary caregivers to their children at their time of arrest (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008; Mumola, 2000). The incarceration of a mother is often more detrimental than that of the father as it typically results in displacement …

New Influences On Naming Patterns In Victorian Britain, Amy M. Hasfjord

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a major shift in naming patterns that occurred in Victorian Britain, roughly between 1840 and 1900, though with roots dating back to the mid-18th century. Until approximately 1840, most new names in England that achieved wide popularity had their origins in royal and/or religious influence. The upper middle classes changed this pattern during the Victorian era by introducing a number of new names that came from popular print culture. These names are determined based on a study collecting 10,000 men's and 10,000 women's names from marriage announcements in the London Times. Many of these new names were …

Hillman College Is A Different World From Where You Come From: A Thematic Analysis Of Relationships In A Different World, Natilie Williams

Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the identity and relationships portrayed in the television series, A Different World. Although the popular series ended in 1993, this show continues to resonate with the African-American community. Specifically, Ron, D. Wayne, and Whitley are the primary characters of focus. Ron and D. Wayne maintain a brotherhood, while Whitley and D. Wayne maintain a romantic relationship. Both of these relationships include implicit expectations, illustrate varying levels of reciprocity, and provide identity-shaping communicative feedback.

Writing Resistance: Agency And Politics In The Postmodern And Contemporary Novel, Bradley Michael Poling

Theses and Dissertations

This project seeks to substantiate a key ambivalence at the heart of contemporary literature: what does it mean to "return" to politics? Critics of contemporary literature have outlined the new literary aesthetic, using social and political engagement as a key component in distinguishing the contemporary novel from its postmodern predecessor. This project, in response to this claim, will examine both the discursive and representation politics of two landmark postmodern novels, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Don DeLillo's Libra, while examining Jennifer Eganâ??s A Visit from the Goon Squad as a descendent of this literary lineage. This project argues that the …

Queer Horizons: Queer Assemblages And ( Re ) Visioning The"Coming-Out"Trauma Narrative In Fiction, A Critical Introduction, Eric Jason Pitman

Theses and Dissertations

The experience of many queer subjects in "coming-out" often results in a great deal of continued adversity over the course of their lifetimes, in spite of what popular, exceptionalized narratives such as the "It Gets Better" campaign might suggest. "Coming out" often entails a great deal of trauma, thus making the need to continue "coming out" a source from which anguish continues to emanate and affect queer bodies. Unfortunately, there are few fictional texts dealing specifically with "coming-out" trauma narratives. Queer subjects who continue to endure trauma through the act of "coming out" often discover that the written worlds of …

A Law For Rulers And People: David Davis, Ex Parte Milligan, And Constitutional Liberalism During The Civil War Era, John Lewis Moreland

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the political life of Judge David Davis, his drafting of Ex parte Milligan, and the opinion’s impact on the partisanship and political instability of Reconstruction.

The 1622 Powhatan Uprising And Its Impact On Anglo-Indian Relations, Michael Jude Kramer

Theses and Dissertations

On March 22, 1622, Native Americans under the Powhatan war-leader Opechancanough launched surprise attacks on English settlements in Virginia. The attacks wiped out between one-quarter and one-third of the colony's European population and hastened the collapse of the Virginia Company of London, a joint stock company to which England's King James I had granted the right to establish settlements in the New World. Most significantly, the 1622 Powhatan attacks in Virginia marked a critical turning point in Anglo-Indian relations.

Following the famous 1614 marriage of the Native American Pocahontas to Virginia colonist John Rolfe and her conversion to Christianity, English …

Disparities In Moldovan Place-Identity A Product Of Systemic Stratification, Robyn Savacool

Theses and Dissertations

Place-identity is a concept that examines the corresponding relationship between the self and space. Much work has been accomplished on this topic in environmental psychology and geography, but sociological research on this concept is scarce. This project employs reflexive participant photography, qualitative methods and an analytical framework derived from place-identity theory to research the affect of socioeconomic status on place-identity in the Republic of Moldova. Socioeconomic status consists of four sub-variables - parents's professions, formative loci and experience from formative loci - which further represent class-status and community-society constructs, respectively. These constructs were compared to assess the predominate variables in …

Virginity And Intellectual Construction: The Function Of Virginity Within The Early English Novel, Jayna Morgan Leipart Guttilla

Theses and Dissertations

This project situates the state of virginity as both a narrative and mode of behavior within Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela. By challenging the supposition that feminine virginity in eighteenth-century novels is presented as both an intellectual and physical disability, this thesis allows for a reconsideration of how virginity functions in the early novel. I place virginity in three distinct and yet simultaneous modes of thinking that contributed to the conflicting and contradictory images of women that were available to purchase in print: virginity as moral intelligence and form of resistance; virginity as an intellectual disability, and the loss of virginity …

Woodland Period Rockshelter Use In The Upper Great Lakes: A Multiscalar Perspective From Grand Island, Michigan, Kelsey Hanson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the integral role that caves and rockshelters have traditionally played in archaeological inquiry throughout North America, they have largely been neglected as a focus of study and recorded examples have been poorly integrated into regional discourse in the Upper Great Lakes region. Most rockshelters in the Upper Great Lakes region formed as sea caves during higher lake level stages and became increasingly terrestrial as lake levels receded, resulting in an abundance of rockshelters and other shoreline features that are now inland from the current shoreline, very few of which have been subjected to archaeological investigation.

To address this disparity, …

Spatial Organization Of Lithic Technology At The Mather-Klauer Lodge Site: A Terminal Woodland Occupation On Grand Island, Michigan, Andrew L. Mallo

Theses and Dissertations

The Mather-Klauer Lodge site is a Terminal Woodland (c.a. AD 600- AD 1600) occupation of the west side of Grand Island, Michigan, where Echo Creek empties into Lake Superior. Excavations by Illinois State University field schools and the Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group identified a buried, compact, greasy living surface containing four hearth features, a storage pit, and over 20,000 pieces of lithic debitage. Analysis of the lithic assemblage shows that the organization of lithic technology at the Mather-Klauer Lodge site utilized the bipolar reduction technique to reduce locally available quartz cobbles with the goal of producing flakes of various shapes …

Arts Integration: Establishing Teacher Candidates' Self-Efficacy When Engaging With The Arts, Michael J. Vetere Iii

Theses and Dissertations

Many teacher candidates who enter teacher education programs have received altered curricula that addressed the new common core of reading, writing, and mathematics (Beveridge 2010). This new common core curriculum neglects the importance of arts education. These students who have not been exposed to arts education, are reluctant to engage in the arts and fully participate in an arts education course as part of their teacher preparation (Hallam, Gupta, & Lee, 2008). These teacher candidates exhibit a low level of arts engagement and arts teaching self-efficacy and are therefore less confident with engaging and teaching the arts (Garvis, 2009). The …

Using A Visitor Based Framework To Observe Engagement In A Children's Museum Makerspace, Sara Mccubbins

Theses and Dissertations

Many challenges still exist in finding ways to measure the impact of informal learning environments. Much of the research that does exist is anecdotal in nature and examines engagement by intuition or informal feedback. The purpose of this concurrent mixed methods study was to better understand engagement and learning by converging both quantitative and qualitative data. In the study, an observation protocol was used to measure the engagement levels of children in a museum makerspace, and field notes were collected to explore the context in which this engagement takes place. The observation protocol used in this dissertation was the Visitor …

Betwixt: Temporality And Comfort, Laura Newman

Theses and Dissertations

I push against traditions of ceramics by purposefully inviting breakage within my work. Destruction expresses fragility, temporality, and impermanence. I consider themes of frugality, familial relations, collections and nostalgia through my investigations of clay, steel, and glass.

Branching Topology: The Aesthetics And Symbolism Of Glass Trees, Michael Lyn Tracy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses my glass artwork which I make to help me understand the world. Trees, specifically bonsai trees, are used as inspirational imagery. The work explores the physical and symbolic aspects of the trees and the relationships that develop between the maker, the object, and the viewer. The series of work split into two distinct styles and the relationships of the styles as they relate to aspects of my personality are explored.