Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Mediterranean Connection: French Ambassadors, The Republic Of Venice, And The Construction Of The Louisquatorzien State, 1662-1702, Sherrod Brandon Marshall

Dissertations - ALL

Abstract

Historians of Louis XIV’s reign have debated evolutions in the king’s administration. Such studies, despite heterogenous conclusions, better define our understanding of absolutist authority in the ancien régime as manifested through a process of so-called bureaucratic centralization. Scholars debate to what extent the monarchy achieved centralization amid the interests of individuals and corporations suspended in traditional hierarchies and socio-cultural expectations. Recently, scholars have posited that Louis’s government accommodated the concerns of its ministers through gratifications and social advancement compelling obedience to the Bourbon dynastic state. This dissertation considers for the first time how a politics of accommodation characterized the …

Brothers In Blood: The Significance Of Land And Loss In The Creation Of Jewish And Native American Ethnic And Religious Identity, Michael Eron Chaness

Dissertations - ALL

Volunteering at the Onondaga Nation School and collaborating with Chief Jacobs has exposed me to a new and subversive underbelly of American political and religious life. Working on sovereign Native land also provided valuable on the ground experience in Onondaga language and Haudenosaunee culture - food, humor, lacrosse, art, ceremony, government, education etc. Throughout my tenure at Onondaga I have used comparison as the backdrop for my experiences collaborating with Native peoples as well as the methodological backbone for this dissertation project.

My dissertation project, Brothers in Blood: the Significance of Land and Loss in the Creation of Jewish and …

Enhancing Engagement For Individuals With Physical Or Cognitive Decline Through The Use Of Multisensory Activities, Jodi Taylor

Dissertations - ALL

Traditional care models typically have a pre- schedule list of activities for elders to engage in, for the purpose of leisure, enjoyments and fun. However, there are questions remaining about the long term benefits of activities and how many residents participate. “RenewedMe” is a service design project with the goal of “Enhancing engagement in individuals with cognitive or physical decline through multi-sensory activities. This project was inspired by the Montessori method principles of education that foster development, engagement and relationships through developmentally appropriate activities. My approach was to create an “environment” that fosters/sustains individualism, builds confidence and sensorial input and …

Identity Creation And World-Building Through Discourse In Video Game Narratives, Barbara Jedruszczak

Dissertations - ALL

An exploration of how characters develop identity through language use in a video game’s narrative, specifically in video games that do not allow for players to make narrative-altering choices. The concept of literacies is used to create a critical framework through which to view video games themselves as a literacy, as well as to view them as a discourse. This thesis analyzes how dialogue is used to develop and showcase gender, sexuality, personality, moral identity in characters in and out of the player’s control, as well as how dialogue builds the narrative world in which these characters exist. This thesis …

Seeing Right From Wrong: A Defense Of A Posteriori Ethical Intuitionism, Preston John Werner

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation develops and defends the claim that our epistemic access to

moral properties is grounded in a posteriori perceptual experiences. It is divided into

two parts. In part I, I present the epistemic access problem for realist moral

epistemology, and then argue against several a priori attempts to resolve the problem. I

begin by defending an understanding of evolutionary debunking arguments according

to which the problem is grounded in a lack of epistemic access to sui generis, non-causal

moral facts. Next, I argue that even the most sophisticated versions of reflective

equilibrium fall victim to the “garbage in, garbage …

Unusual Children: Queerishness And Strange Growth In A Wrinkle In Time And The Giver, Olivia Morris

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This project examines two different pieces of modern children’s literature, Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Lois Lowry’s The Giver, in terms of their protagonists’ respective strange identities. I begin with Katherine Stockton’s theory of sideways growth, which outlines the unusualness often found in child protagonist. I use Stockton’s work as a jumping off point to examine the queerishness of two protagonists, L’Engle’s Meg Murray and Lowry’s Jonas. Meg is unfeminine, and her experiences with language and definitions defy gender binaries and easy definitions; throughout the course of the novel, she learns to embrace her “flaws” (her unfeminine, …

Stillwater: An Exhibition That Explores Touch And The Everyday Through Ceramic Objects And Photography, Lily Fein

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The exhibition, stillwater, is a Capstone Project that showcases ceramic-based installations in addition to photographs by Ian Sherlock. Both Ian and myself use material and process in its raw form. The work that Sherlock exhibits in stillwater is a series of pinhole camera exposures of the sun passing. He sees this simple yet profound passing of time as an opportunity to gain tacit knowledge of the sun. In my work, I gain parallel knowledge in the medium of clay, as I am physically invested in every mark that I make. There is no smoothing over or correcting; every moment is …

A Spy Of His Own Confession: A Revolution In American Espionage, Cole Ellenbogen

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The most well known spies are usually the ones who were caught. But what about those who took their secret lives to the grave?

In the summer of 1778, arguably one of the biggest players in the United States’ fight for independence was released from a rebel-controlled prison in Connecticut. Abraham Woodhull, arrested earlier in the year for smuggling, was offered his freedom in exchange for his loyalty to the continental army. His friend, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, was looking to replace the dated espionage methods employed by his superior officer and contentious rival.

In just a few short years, the …

Applying Linguistics: Analyzing The Differences Between Human And Machine Translation Of Selected Texts, Nicole Howell

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Machine translation systems experience a trade-off between efficiency and efficacy: while quicker and easier than human translation, machine translations are less accurate and comprehensible.

This study analyzes two sets of English to Spanish translations to compare the differences between human and machine translation and evaluate the performance of machine translation. Google Translate—the best-performing machine translator—represents machine translation as a whole in producing English to Spanish translations of the given text. The primary investigator—a non-native speaker and graduating student of Spanish Language, Literature & Culture at Syracuse University—serves as the benchmark for the average non-native speaker of Spanish at the advanced-mid …

The Lonely Nineties: Visions Of Community On Television Between The End Of The Cold War And 9/11, Paul Andrew Arras

Dissertations - ALL

“The Lonely Nineties” provides a close reading of six popular series on primetime American television in the 1990s, setting their depictions of community within the context of late 20th century problems and developments in civic disengagement. This dissertation examines Seinfeld, N.Y.P.D. Blue, Law & Order, The X-Files, Touched by an Angel, and The Simpsons within their respective genres, revealing what makes nineties television distinctive, and connecting those distinctions to related developments in American social and cultural history. In the final decade when the medium still offered regularly a simultaneous experience of mass culture, television imagined communities in various states of …

Whose Honey, Whose Hive?: Genre And Rhetorical Agency In The U.S. Colony Collapse Disorder, W. Kurt Stavenhagen

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation analyzes the rhetoric surrounding the environmental crisis of the honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder, commonly known as CCD. Since 2007, the United States has lost on average a third of its honey bee colonies each year to CCD. The crisis has potentially serious environmental consequences. Without honey bee pollination services, over $14 billion worth of crops in the United States alone are in jeopardy. Drawing on environmental rhetoric, genre theory, and agricultural rhetorics, I offer a rhetorical analysis and genre analysis of the narratives surrounding CCD from select popular press newspaper articles, documentaries, nonfiction works, and personal interviews …

Soil For Your Soul: African American Women & Social Entrepreneurship, Markova Casseus

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This study seeks to take a look at the growing trend of African-American women in social entrepreneurship, more specifically their motivations for pursuing this career path. In the traditional business model, we find that women are underrepresented at every level of the corporate pipeline, especially in upper level positions. For African-American women, these numbers are even smaller. As such in the recent years, we have seen more and more women turning to entrepreneurship, with African-American women becoming the fastest growing segment of the women-owned businesses population. At the same time, we are also seeing a rise in social entrepreneurship, which …

Escape From Amherst: Emily Dickinson’S Life Of Freedom, Maria Whitcomb

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Through Escape from Amherst: Emily Dickinson’s Life of Freedom, I endeavored to create an immersive art song recital experience through which I explored the character of Emily Dickinson, hopefully rendering her ambiguous, iconic character somewhat more comprehensive to modern day audiences. Enclosed in the following chapters, please find the formal research I performed in examining Emily Dickinson’s character, an explanation of my own artistic journey, the program that I distributed to audiences during the concert (containing analyses of the Emily Dickinson texts that I performed), stage directions illustrating actor/singer intention and movement onstage, and lastly an explanation of my …

Incompatibilist Alternative Possibilities, Yishai Cohen

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation has two primary aims. The first aim is to defend the position that the alternative possibilities that are required for basic desert moral responsibility are incompatible with causal determinism. The second aim is to investigate such incompatibilist alternative possibilities, specifically in relation to manipulation, deliberation, and Molinist counterfactuals of freedom.

In chapter 1, “Fischer’s Deterministic Frankfurt-Style Argument”, I examine John Martin Fischer’s deterministic Frankfurt-style argument against the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). Fischer attempts to show that if causal determinism rules out an agent’s moral responsibility, it is not in virtue of its eliminating the agent’s alternative possibilities. …

The Post-Colonial Language And Identity Experiences Of Transnational Kenyan Teachers In U.S. Universities, Rosemary N. Nduati

Dissertations - ALL

ABSTRACT

This qualitative interview study explored how transnational Kenyan teachers experienced marginalization of their African languages and identities in both the Kenyan and the United States contexts, but reclaimed those languages and identities as important assets in their teaching of English language. The study asked: What are the post-colonial language and identity experiences of transnational Kenyan teachers in graduate education programs in the United States in the following domains: a) their primary and secondary schooling in Kenya b) their teacher preparation in Kenya c) their teaching experiences in Kenya; and d) their graduate education in the United States?

Post-colonial theories …

The Epistemologies They Carry: An Investigation Of Feminist Writing Assignments, Kathryn Elizabeth Navickas

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines feminist writing assignments as one pedagogical site that influences students’ engagement and thinking. Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, feminist pedagogy, and composition scholarship on writing assignments, I argue that because writing assignments are genres that position students in particular subjectivities and carry implicit arguments and values, they are texts that should be revised for their theoretical and pedagogical features. The dissertation examines feminist writing assignments in the history of feminist composition scholarship, in a collection of 73 feminist-oriented writing assignments contributed by teachers who self-identified as enacting or being influenced by feminist pedagogy, and in one of …

The Impact Of A Supplemental Reading Intervention On The Literacy Skills Of English Language Learners And Native English-Speaking First Grade Children, Theresa Marie Dussling

Dissertations - ALL

A growing body of research has shown that interventions originally developed to help monolingual students with early reading skills offer the type of instruction necessary and effective for English language learners as well. While the research on effective early reading interventions for English language learners is expanding, the majority of the research focuses on students whose native language is Spanish. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of a supplemental reading program that emphasizes phoneme awareness and phonics with small groups of both native English-speakers and ELLs whose first language is not Spanish. This study utilized …

Introducing Alexandra Moniqué: A Journey Through The Music Industry, Alexandra Mayo

Honors Capstone Projects - All

The music industry is a wide field with careers ranging from artist management, publicity, marketing, promotions, and music litigation to songwriting, producing, recording, and mastering. The list goes on and on; but there is a clear distinction between the artistic side of the industry and the business side of the industry.

This Capstone Project is my journey through the music industry both artistically and commercially. As a singer/songwriter, I wrote, recorded, and released an EP under my artist persona, Alexandra Moniqué. I then tackled the business side of the industry by promoting the album as a manager, publicist, and marketer. …

Personal Memory And Digital Mobile Media: How A Product And A Web Platform Can Improve Digital Memory Archiving, Sarah Folger

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Our technology has been evolving so rapidly and our ability to capture our moments has been become so accessible, we are creating hundreds of thousands of digital files. When we were operating with analog methods of memory making and archiving it was much easier to organize our files because we had fewer or them and they were often all sentimental because of their value. Today, it is hard to distinguish between all of our digital files to determine which ones are most important and even to determine where they are. The creation of social media has created an interesting dynamic …

The Art Behind The Baroque Violin, Carolyn Goldstein

Honors Capstone Projects - All

Since the age of three, I have been playing the violin; however, I was uninformed about the history of the violin or how the instrument works in a mechanical sense. Inspired by my love of the music of the 1700s, I chose to study how violins were made, how their physical properties affected performance practice, and how to play Baroque violin—a project that allowed me to combine elements of my two majors, Music History and Cultures and Violin Performance. I narrowed my area of focus to the late Baroque (1700-1730) because renowned violin-maker Antonio Stradivari was considered to be in …

Ethnography And Analysis Of The Effects Of Racism And Creating A Black Family Tree, Courtney Garvin

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This research looks at the effects slavery and racism has had on the ability to make an accurate family tree. This research is spurred by both the desire to document my family and by the unfortunate events of the Mother Emanuel AME Church massacre on June 17th, 2015 in Charleston, South Carolina. Using archival research, interviews, and family documents to build an accurate family tree, this research looks at the ways in which systematic oppression has played a generational role in my family. By looking at my own family for this research, I look at the stigmas, behavioral, regional, and …