Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Las Almanegras: Trazando Caminos De Territorialidad En La Poética Afrofemenina Colombiana, Maria Catalina Rojas Blanco

Doctoral Dissertations

Within the panorama of black women’s writings in Latin America and the Caribbean, the literary production associated with Colombia has blossomed and currently stands as out as an important artistic expression and literary movement. This literature has an immense aesthetic, vital, social, and political value since it is through such poetics that Afro-descendant women are increasingly prominent globally. My study focuses on the development and trajectory of this writing and seeks to contribute to this process by analyzing the writings of María Teresa Ramírez Nieva, Mary Grueso Romero, and María Elcina Valencia Cordoba, three poets from Cauca recognized as the …

A Critique Of John Mcdowell's Theory Of Moral Perception, Edward Ray Falls

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines an argument that John McDowell’s view is structurally analogous to Protagoreanism, and that arguments structurally analogous to Plato’s arguments against Protagoreanism apply to McDowell’s view. Through philosophical investigation, the dissertation shows that Plato’s arguments do not perfectly apply to McDowell’s view, but that the view nevertheless is unable to address the metastasized problem of constraint. The metastasized problem of constraint arises in at least two kinds of circumstances: situations where cultural relativism is a concern, and situations where there is pressure to adapt to unforeseeable natural developments.

Cross-National Variation In Women’S Rights: Europe And Civil War, Nourah Shuaibi

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation evaluates the impact of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on Women’s Social, Economic and Political rights in post-Conflict countries. In order to evaluate the relationship with sound causal logic, I set out to study multiple relationships to understand the impact of the variables in question. Looking at the nature of the relationship required an evaluation in 3 ways, which culminated in the writing of 4 separate chapters. Chapter 2 demonstrates the importance of understanding Women’s Rights and their role in economic development and peace building. This places women’s rights in context to set the scene for the rest of …

Deaccessioning Relationships: The Role Of Academic Museums In Modern Postsecondary Education, Jeffrey Martin Elliott

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this qualitative exploratory study was to examine the role of academic museums in modern American postsecondary education. This research examined the relationships developed by academic museums in support of the mission of their parent institutions with special attention to the impact of the sale of donated objects from the museum collection for the purpose of relief from financial exigency. The study included document review, interviews, and reflexive notes.

The four thematic findings of this exploratory study depict an academic museum as a complex entity within its parent institution that has inward-facing and outward-facing components which support the …

Oppression, Civility, And The Politics Of Resistance, Alex M. Richardson

Doctoral Dissertations

Oppression based on social group membership has been and remains a major injustice which thrives in modern liberal democracies like the United States. Organized political resistance to oppression and the structures that perpetuate it has taken many forms throughout history, from the early acts of revolution that founded the United States, to the nineteenth century abolitionist movement against slavery, to the New Deal-era labor struggles and Black civil rights movement of the twentieth century and the LGBTQ+ rights movement of recent history. The moral and political legacy of these historical struggles, as well as the extent to which the surrounding …

The Inner Tragic Of The Sturm Und Drang And Its Dramatic Trilogy: Lenz’S Die Soldaten, Schiller’S Die Räuber, And Goethe’S Faust I, Charles Brown

Doctoral Dissertations

My research examines three German dramas – J. M. R. Lenz’s Die Soldaten (1776), Friedrich Schiller’s Die Räuber (1781), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: eine Tragödie (1808). The three plays exhibit with remarkable parallel a three-phase dramatic structure that serves as the inner framework for a tragic process. This shared inner tragic process is suggestive evidence of an enlightening intertextuality within the purview of the Sturm und Drang. Featuring prominently in this tragic trilogy of the Sturm und Drang is Lenz, the tragic innovator whose template for inner tragic not only influences works of literature in this sequence of …

What's In A Mode: Writing Program Administrators' Perception, Value, And Implementation Of Multimodality In First-Year Writing, Carolyn Alice Johnston

Doctoral Dissertations

This study focuses on writing program administrators’ (WPAs) views towards the definition and value of multimodality within their first-year writing program curriculum. Furthermore, the study seeks to discover how first-year writing programs go about integrating a multimodal focus, including support structures that are in place, such as training, equipment, technology, and other resources. Multimodality has become a popular topic of discussion for those in Rhetoric/Composition, yet its program-wide implementation remains low. This study updates a 2005 study published in Composition Studies, which provided an overview of what participants labeled as multimodal or new media for their Composition classroom instruction (Anderson, …

Divine Cosmos: Emergent Ecology And Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Lucas R. Nossaman

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s profound influence on nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Humboldt was a household name in mid-nineteenth-century America, often interchangeable with his most celebrated work, Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe (1845-1859). By demonstrating that Cosmos influenced how a range of scientists and literary writers represented the natural world, this project seeks to dispel the sense of historical inevitability that surrounds the midcentury with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) looming on the horizon. Although Humboldt’s Cosmos did help move natural science into nonreligious territory, the …

An Ethics Of Amusement, Ashley Caroline Mobley

Doctoral Dissertations

Human beings often hold one another morally responsible for what we find funny or fail to find funny. Though this practice is common and so demands philosophical attention, it remains underexplored in the literature. The purpose of this project is to devote attention to this practice by developing an ethics of amusement.

In chapter 2, I argue for why amusement is an emotion according to incongruity theory—the dominant theory of humor and amusement. With this in mind, I argue in chapter 3 that we are responsible for our emotions insofar as we have emotional agency. In particular, while we cannot …

Asturleonés Medieval; Una Aproximación Sincrónica Y Diacrónica A Sus Rasgos Fonéticos Diferenciales Y Su Dominio Lingüístico, Alfonso Hernanz

Doctoral Dissertations

Unlike other romance varieties in the Iberian Peninsula Middle Ages, the Asturleonese dialect didn’t get to evolve into a fully differentiated language system due to several historical and sociocultural issues that thwarted its historical development. However, the distinctive features of the dialect survived until present time featuring a complex dialectal system along the geography of the ancient Kingdom of León. This research focuses on the building of the Asturleonese Linguistic Domain and the phonetic characterization of its distinctive phonetic features from a synchronic and diachronic perspective with the purpose of identifying in medieval documents, from IX to XIV centuries, the …

Emerging Adults’ Experiences As Receivers Of Sexually Transmitted Infection Disclosures From Sexual Partners: A Three-Part Examination, Kayley D. Mcmahan

Doctoral Dissertations

Each year in the United States, over 20 million cases of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are diagnosed, mostly among those in the developmental period of emerging adulthood (ages 18-29). Research on STI disclosure to romantic and sexual partners has increased over the last two decades, but this research has (a) generally lacked a developmental and theoretical focus, (b) not examined disclosure recipients, and (c) not been systematically and critically synthesized. To address these limitations, I conducted a three-part examination. First, I systematically reviewed the STI disclosure literature and summarized findings, critical limitations, and future research and intervention directions. Next, I …

A Collective Metamorphosis Of Breastfeeding Mothers: A Phenomenological Exploration Of A Face-To-Face Healthcare Provider Facilitated Peer Support Group, Emily Alexandria Tucker

Doctoral Dissertations

This research study used phenomenology to examine a face-to-face healthcare facilitated breastfeeding support group. Participant observations and phenomenology were used to address the following research questions: 1) what are the lived experiences of the women participating a breastfeeding support group, 2) how does the group influence their lived experiences, and 3) what were the common experiences of these women? The support group participants were observed while the researcher acted as a participant observer over the course of an eleven-month period. There were a total of seven women interviewed about their lived experiences breastfeeding and attending the support group. Data from …

The Wilderness Experience: Imitatio Christi And The Demonic Encounters Of Italian Holy Women Of The Quattrocento, Amy Huesman

Doctoral Dissertations

During the fifteenth century, when Christian spirituality had become increasingly feminized, a number of women in the northern and central regions of the Italian peninsula chose to embrace fully the vita apostolica, and certain of them led lives of such austere piety in imitatio Christi that they were later deemed worthy of beatification or canonization. They were sante vive—living saints—revered for their miraculous powers and regarded as agents of the divine. These women took vows as nuns or associated themselves with a religious order as tertiaries, and they dedicated themselves to strict lives of prayer, extreme fasting, and …