Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Understanding Adolescent Physical Activity In The Early Nutrition Transitioning Country Of Haiti, Haley V. Becker

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The nutrition transition is underway in Haiti, giving rise to the dual burden of malnutrition. Physical activity (PA) plays an important role in mitigating the negative health consequences of nutrition transition and the dual burden, but heretofore this data has been unavailable for Haiti. This dissertation undertook an exploratory needs assessment providing baseline PA data for Haitian adolescents. It evaluated two different PA data collection methodologies: a cross-sectional survey adapted from the IPAQ long-form and objectively measured PA via Actigraph GT1M accelerometers. Next, it identified initial covariates of self-reported and objectively-assessed PA behaviors; data was operationalized as meeting the World …

Intersecting Variables Of Second And Foreign Language Reading: Self-Assessment And Comprehension With Adolescents And Adults Across Languages, Haley Dolosic

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, more individuals are seeking to learn a second language (L2) or foreign language (FL) than ever before. These individuals are language learners who intend to use their growing L2 knowledge to traverse linguistic and national boundaries in order to achieve their personal and professional goals (Callahan & Gándara, 2014). To realize these goals in the digital era, L2 learners must be more prepared than ever to use their knowledge with written media, making L2 reading a central skill to successful use of their L2 knowledge. Yet, when language learners attempt to use their L2 skills in their daily lives, …

Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias In Queer American Literature From Walt Whitman To Willa Cather, Benjamin Meiners

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In “Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias in Queer American Literature from Walt Whitman to Willa Cather,” I argue that the colonial discourse of primitivism played a central role in the queer literary imaginaries of both canonical and non-canonical U.S. authors. Building on the work of historians of sexuality who trace the complex development of the twentieth-century homo-/hetero- binary, I show how literary works produced in this historical moment—roughly 1860 to 1925—explored and in some instances even advocated alternative queer modes of citizenship and erotic imagination and practice. Focusing on the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Willa …

Ming China As A Gunpowder Empire: Military Technology, Politics, And Fiscal Administration, 1350-1620, Weicong Duan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the transformation of Ming China in the gunpowder age. Focusing on the relation between military technology, politics, and fiscal administration, it closely traces the change of the Ming state in association with the gunpowder revolution. Two aspects of institutional change receive special attention. The first aspect is the formation of an absolute authority in the Ming period, a development exhibiting many parallels with the absolute monarchies of other major gunpowder states in Europe and the Islamic world. The second is the modification of the Confucian bureaucratic government. The revolutions in gunpowder technology had a complex impact on …

Singing As A Therapeutic Technique To Improve Gait For People With Parkinson Disease, Elinor Harrison

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract of the Dissertation

Singing as a Therapeutic Technique to

Improve Gait for People with Parkinson Disease

by

Elinor Clare Harrison

Doctor of Philosophy in Movement Science

Neurosciences

Washington University in St. Louis, 2018

Professor Gammon Earhart, Chair

Gait impairment is common in older adults and even more prevalent for people with Parkinson disease (PD). Gait dysfunction is often characterized by reductions in speed, step frequency, and step length. In addition, decreased ability to regulate step length and step frequency may contribute to increased gait variability, making walking less stable and increasing risk for falls. As gait deficits are often …

Washington Park Cemetery: The History And Legacies Of A Sacred Space, Terri Williams

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Washington Park Cemetery (WPC) is an historically African American cemetery that has struggled to endure countless years of mistreatment and negligence. It is important to identify not only the cemetery itself as sacred, but also the legacies and stories of those who are laid to rest in the space. Provided is a comprehensive history of the once prominent African American cemetery that examines its origins, various controversies, and current physical state. Since the history of this cemetery has never been collected and compiled into a comprehensive document, this research serves as a historical tool that allows individuals to learn about …

Acknowledging Native American History In Missouri, Molly Tovar, Chris Leiker

Buder Center for American Indian Studies Research

Histories typically omit or downplay the seizure of Native lands and attending harms, but ancestral ties persist, and the losses remain vivid in the hearts of Native peoples.

The Role Of Personality In The Development Of Health Disparities During Late-Mid Life, Juliette Mcclendon Iacovino

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objectives: The current study examined race/gender disparities in initial levels and trajectories of self-reported physical and mental health, and health care utilization, as well as the impact of personality and stressful life events on race/gender disparities. We hypothesized that health disparities would remain stable or decrease over time; that at-risk personality traits (e.g., high neuroticism) would have a more robust negative impact on health for black participants; that trust would mediate racial disparities in health; and that personality traits would moderate the association between stressful life events and health trajectories differentially across race/gender. Methods: Analyses utilized the first six waves …

From The Inner Chamber To To The Marketplace: The Reception And Re-Creation Of The Woman Writer Ye Xiaoluan, Tian Ding

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the reception and re-created history of the woman writer Ye Xiaoluan. Emphasis is on the changing literary images and related cultural products created and circulated by members of the literati class from the late Ming Dynasty to the early modern period. I argue the process can mainly be divided into three stages: 1) the formation and iconization of her image among the cultural elite in the late Ming period; 2) the deconstruction and consumption of her images in Qing dynasty; and 3) the substitution and fade-out of her images in early modern period. In the course …

Thirty-First Annual Bibliography 2017 (Contemporary German Literature Collection), Brian Vetruba, Leon Wiese, Paul Michael Lützeler

University Libraries Publications

The 31st bibliography for 828 volumes added to Washington University Libraries' Contemporary German Literature Collection. All published in 2017, these acquisitions include novels, poetry, short story collections, essays, autobiographical works, and literary and cultural periodicals from publishers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Organized by author or editor, the bibliography includes local call numbers as well as subject and genre descriptors. This Collection serves as the research arm for the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature's Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature. A bibliography of items added the previous year is compiled each year by Washington University's Department of Germanic …

Kastra: Architecture And Culture In The Aegean Archipelago, Constantine E. Michaelides

Books and Monographs

Final version of Kastra: Architecture and Culture in the Aegean Archipelago, published Summer 2018. “Kastra: Architecture and Culture in the Aegean Archipelago,” is a sequel to “The Aegean Crucible: Tracing Vernacular Architecture in Post-Byzantine Centuries,” published in 2004. “The Aegean Crucible” focused on the vernacular architecture of the Aegean archipelago, while “Kastra” focuses on the collective fortification, a building type vital to survival in the region, during the thirteenth-to- eighteenth-century period. “Kastra” was also written on the conviction that what we identify today as the vernacular architecture of the Aegean islands emerged from the building of Kastra, the medieval collective …

Body; Broken Things, Seohyung Kay Lee

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Our bodies are the first of everything. They’re the first thing we encounter, and first space that we inhibit. Life ends when we leave the body behind. They’re our only means to reach with the world, with everything. From the beginning of time, we have strived to interpret the body and the its place in the world. However, the female body was never fully appreciated nor acknowledged. It is impossible to understand the body of women without considering the pain and violence they encounter, which is often easily overlooked.

In my body of work that I’ve produced this semester, Body; …

The Bambi Portal, Zoe Grieze

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

An investigation into the multiplicity of Walt Disney’s 1943 film Bambi — including both the content generated as a result of the film and the way in the film exists ephemerally in mass memory — develops into an investigation into the film’s use of appeals to “nature” to reinforce the gender roles of the traditional American nuclear family. Through the creation of an interactive “portal” utilizing distorted video, these themes are pulled out from the usual world of the film and presented in an alternate format for critical consideration. However, a tension between this critique and genuine sensory enjoyment of …

In The Margins, Savannah Bustillo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

A margin is defined relative to something else. A ruled line. A body of text on a page. The margins are the excess, outside of the value we can qualify or quantify. Our understandings of the habitability of the margins are too often framed as fundamental differences between those that inhabit value and the rest that do not. What would happen if we reframed the margins beyond a simple dichotomy? What could we gain if the margins were a habitable space around and between the things we prioritize in defining? By analyzing a body of my own art, I …

The Continuous Movement Of Water And Time, Ryan Brandt

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Water has a relationship with every living thing on earth, and represents a force that both gives life and can eliminate it. In my work, I use water, color, and the figure to explore the sublime, death and decay, the passage of time, and overwhelming emotions. I have looked at my work in relation to Marilyn Minter’s photography, Mark Rothko’s color field paintings, Julie Evans’ and Henri Matisse’s cut-out works, Sam Gilliam’s continuously changing canvas installations, and Ekaterina Smirnova’s investigation into the meaning of an individual’s place in the universe. By seeing the different ways in which these artists and …

Overlapping Entities: Visualizing The Space Between Nature And Culture, Zoie Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my work I generate forms that occupy the space between our false conceptions of nature and culture. I subvert binaries–both between nature and culture and between women and men–through the physical conflation of microscopic and macroscopic spaces. Nature itself is a cultural concept; the notion that we are separate from nature at all is a fallacy. The body of work discussed uses ideas from Environmental Sociology and my definition of intersectional Ecofeminism to visualize the intersection of these cultural binaries within physical space. The pieces included utilize light responsive technology as a means of mediating our experiences with the …

It's Pink And Nice But We Are Done With It, Taylor Elizabeth Yocom

Graduate School of Art Theses

My work in video, installation, performance, sound, and photography is influenced and inspired by my experience of being a woman. In my work, I draw pink flowers and create pink backdrops. I smash things, eat, drink, drop things, smile, nod, and look at you. Through these works, I explore the gender performativity of female niceness, synthesizing these two separate theories as a social condition and expectation for women. I argue that female niceness consists of bodily and linguistic patterns that women must perform in order to be perceived as feminine.

In my video and installation work, I use a “sickeningly” …

The Nature Of My Nature; A Story About Relationships, Andrew Mcilvaine

Graduate School of Art Theses

Abstract

As a second generation Hispanic, I am a painter whose work is informed by my personal experience of displacement and longing to belong. In turn, I hope, this longing inspires an important dialogue about place, memory, otherness and belonging. I work in small, intimate scale, evoking narratives of vastness yet also of solitude. The landscape and the natural environment I represent, become populated by anonymous creatures. Both animal and human, posed in semi-natural and semi-artificial settings.

I was born in Texas and grew up in Missouri. The images I produce are often tranquil and surreal yet are grounded through …

The Memorial, Sihyun Max Shin

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

When people die from political movements, their deaths are used by other people, often painted and printed on the piquets aggressively held by angry protesters. Being the visible evidence of social suppression, the images of the deceased is capable of easily arousing people’s anger and hatred against the source of malice, which, in many cases, is the government. Indeed, their deaths can be the effective stimulators for public activism. People would justify their exploitation by saying that they are expressing their lamentation for deaths by attacking back what caused the tragedy in the first place.

In the following essay, I …

Mind In Hand, Anna Olson

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This thesis explores the intersection of art and psychology as it manifests in my art practice, particularly in the medium of weaving. The contemporary frameworks of memory and archive provide the basis of this discussion, as well as findings from the field of Art Therapy. Difficult emotions like loss and grief often show up in my work, and I will discuss how artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sophie Calle also utilize these concepts. In weaving, I capture my internal mental states, memories, and perceptions of the future in a variety of found and gifted objects. Guided by the precedents set …

(Fear Of) (An Exploration Of Empathy), Caroline Schmidt

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

How much can you understand what another person is feeling? How much can they understand what you feel? This is the territory that my capstone investigates. Utilizing a mixture of informal and formal language and experimental footnotes, I describe the concepts and process behind my most recent body of work, the (Fear Of) series of animations, and its relationship to empathy. I follow this discussion with an explanation of my choice of fears and eyes as vehicles for this project, and end with an appendix featuring a sample of the interview-based monologues and my notes on which the project was …

Learning Culture: Cultural Relationship In Masked Lanterns, Yuxuan Ding

Graduate School of Art Theses

Culture shock, or culture conflict, is the unfamiliarity or disorientation an individual experiences after encountering a culture different than their own. To better understand the people around us who share a different culture and the way of life it creates, we need to first respect and understand their culture. In general, Chinese culture stresses that individuals must see themselves as part of a larger group for the benefit of society, while American culture stresses the importance of individualism.

Based on my experiences in graphic design, I decided to further my studies in a studio art context to understand how the …

Observance | A Passage, Charis Schneider Norell

Graduate School of Art Theses

My art practice consists of drawing with fibers within handcrafted frame looms. I position these drawings as expanded, three-dimensional “drawing spaces,” creating medium-scale installations. I wish to expand drawing’s definition beyond its traditional material limits to simply be the process of leaving marks. Fiber is my medium, and the space within the frame loom’s warp and weft becomes my support. I see the drawing process to be the gestural residue of thought, and call these works my “fiber drawings.” While I use traditional weaving methods and materials as I work, I do not call myself a weaver. I see myself, …

Four Sights Of The Patient (Ophelia), Cecily Ann Fergeson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I make work in a variety of media, largely dealing with the imagery and material of the human body. My current work attempts to reckon with the following subjects: a reclamation of the notion of the so-called medical gaze and its historical record in photography; the idea that receiving the medical gaze transforms patients’ bodies; the idea of illness as an uncanny and intimate experience; and, finally, the act of metaphorically retracing the body’s material journey through the medical institution as it exists today. In this text, I discuss my practice in the context of critical theory, a recent observation …

Mediated: An Investigation Of Print Media's Impact Of Self, Rachel Hertzman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In the 21^st Century print media is often overlooked for the masses of images available at everyone’s fingertips on the internet. This thesis is an exploration of the ways in which those original forms of mass produced images, specifically fashion/ beauty magazines and newspapers, alter one’s sense of self. The magazines have a proven negative effect on women consumers who internalize the singular thin beauty ideal persisted in this media. A similar internalization happens with the constant viewing of news papers, creating a sense of shared cultural memory. The Artist takes an in depth look at how these ideas …

Tracing Patterns: Making Sense Of Experience, Isabelle Davis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my life, I have developed several practices in attempt to preserve my memories in a way that I can relive them, knowing exactly how I felt at the time. Two of these practices are the practice of frequently journaling, and the practice of keeping objects for their sentimental value. For my thesis, I used journal entries and sentimental objects as a starting point for creating a metaphor for how I process emotions in my life. I created a quilt out of 36 excerpts of journal entries from throughout college to symbolize the way it is comforting to me to …

Invisible Territories, Lydia Seaman

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Layering geography, space and time, my work urges viewers to embrace the equivocal and create a desire for the impossible. To explore this notion, Invisible Territories is an analysis of my practice, examining how I mediate specific references into abstract and universal interpretations. My work employs subjects that document the world by analyzing the layers and simulacra that form our visual information; focusing on the intervals between “things” as the subject matter themselves. Looking to the words of Italo Calvino as a conceptual guide, this paper discusses the practice of mapping through drawing, etching and painting.

I'M Sorry For Everything, Hille Sennott

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

My work is rooted in the fact that women are practically conditioned to apologize for everything, and tells the intimate story of my life. By recording my apologies for several months and deeply examining my behavior, I noticed themes and made work based on these — work that exposed my private moments. I noticed a disconnect between times I needed to apologize, and this compulsive need to take on the blame for every little thing. I examine the feminine battle of soft and strong, eventually coming to the conclusion that there are occasions calling for both. Women are taught to …

A Document That Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction And Reality, Seth Lewis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In A Document that Transcends Itself: Between Abstraction and Reality, I first present a historical analysis of photography that complicates traditional assumptions of how photographs operate in the world. Rather than functioning as merely an objective record, the photograph takes on a dual status as both a document and an abstraction from reality. The photograph’s ability to selectively decontextualize the origins from which it came from and present itself as something other than what it simply records becomes the core of my artistic practice. This paper will also discuss my conceptual investigations into how we perceive photographs when they …

Chinese-American Landscape, Jessica Wen

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Cultural hybridity is an unwillingness to succumb to the notion of choosing sides when it comes to mixed heritage and culture. The approach taken to identity has a place in the artistic sphere as well. Through an investigation of my art practice in painting alongside a contemporary and historical context, the hybrid space between Chinese and Western landscape painting is explored and determined. The goals of nature depicted through distorted perspective, abstraction and simplification of objects, and emphasis on texture are techniques employed by both artistic spheres. By utilizing these goals and mixing materials of both Chinese and Western painting, …