Arts and Humanities Commons^™

African Poetry Libraries-A Global Collaboration, Lorna M. Dawes, Charlene Maxey-Harris

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

In 2014, the African Poetry Book Fund (APBF) and the University of Nebraska (UNL)literary magazine-thePrairie Schooner established African Poetry Libraries in five countries; Ghana, Kenya,Uganda, Gambia and Botswana. The purpose of these libraries wasto support the creativity of aspiring and establishedpoets in their local communities. The University of Nebraska Libraries was asked toserve as consultants on the initiative by working with local volunteers to set up thelibraries and provideongoing assistance and advice to the new libraries during thefirst three years of their inception. The goal of the librariesis to support thelocal community of poets through access to contemporary poetry, and …

Representations Of Women In The Literature Of The U.S.-Mexico War, Janel M. Simons

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation examines figures of women as represented in the literature of the U.S.-Mexico war in order to think through the ways in which the border conflict was preserved in nineteenth-century U.S. American collective memory. Central to my dissertation is a consideration of the intersections of history, myth, legend, and fiction in the memorialization of this war. This dissertation demonstrates that a close look at fictionalized accounts of women’s experiences of and roles in the U.S.-Mexico war highlights the ways in which historical fictions influence how we remember this moment of our collective past.

Focusing on popular accounts of the …

Adventure Book Club, Rose Wehrman

Honors Expanded Learning Clubs

Afterschool club that reads "The Boxcar Children" and integrates hands-on activities to help students connect to the story, think critically, and build interdisciplinary skills.

Letters From Olive Fremstad To Willa Cather: A View Beyond The Song Of The Lark, Jessica Tebo

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In 1913, Willa Cather met opera-diva Olive Fremstad and the two formed a friendship that would span at least a decade. Fremstad has long been recognized as an inspiration for the character Thea Kronborg of Cather’s Song of the Lark (1915) but has not been portrayed as influential in any other aspects to Cather’s career. Letters sent by Fremstad to Cather have recently been located, and they reveal an ongoing and interdisciplinary dialogue between the two women that negotiates issues surrounding art and professionalism. I locate these letters within the broader context of Cather’s public and fictional statements about art …

Review: Architectural Involutions: Writing, Staging, And Building Space, C. 1435–1650. Mimi Yiu., Kelly Stage

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Mimi Yiu’s Architectural Involutions is an expansive, impressive, and largely interdisciplinary study. Many recent books have touched on related topics—probably most relevantly Henry Turner’s The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts 1580–1630—but this one reads from architecture and space forward rather than seeks answers about the theater foremost. The book’s main focus is to theorize the “inward journey” made possible by modes of understanding, building, and reading space in early modern Europe, although England is central to much of the work’s concerns. As Yiu explains in her introduction, the book “suggests a method for spatial mapping …

Race, Slavery, And Evasion: Whitman And Melville’S Changing Perspectives And Their Glancing Poetic Treatment Of The Core Civil War Issue, Said Fallaha

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Whitman and Melville’s poetry about the Civil War is almost completely silent when it comes to slavery. Both writers depict a newly emancipated person in their poems about the Civil War, but they seem to do so almost as an afterthought. Both Whitman's “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” and Melville's “Formerly a Slave” represent an elderly African American woman. These poems stand alone in their representation of an African American. Peter J. Bellis argues that both writers were concerned with how to negotiate national emotions and policies by the end of the war and these “emotions” and “policies” were vital to …

The Earliest Surviving Version Of Charles Chesnutt's "Rena Walden," The Short Story That Became "The House Behind The Cedars", Dominic Yarabe

Honors Theses

My research project presents an edited version, with an introduction, of the earliest surviving version of “Rena Walden,” the short story that ultimately became the novel The House Behind the Cedars. The novel is a passing story in which a light-skinned, mixed race girl enters white society to live life as a white woman. Interestingly, however, the short story on which the novel was based began as a fiction with no white characters whatsoever. As the manuscript of this story is often difficult to read because of hard-to-decipher handwritten revisions, I had to create my own editorial policy to …

Reading Charlotte Bronte Reading, Madhumita Gupta

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This essay considers the significance of undirected childhood reading on an author’s mind and the reason some authors reference specific real books in their fiction. I argue that independent reading (as against schooling or formal education), and the direct and indirect references to certain books in Jane Eyre^[1] were deliberate, well-thought-out inclusions for specific purposes at different points in the story. When a title pointedly says Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, it is probable that a significant part of the author’s life has seeped into her creation which makes it essential to consider the relevant parts of her life to …

Patterns, Collaboration, Practice: Algorithms As Editing For Historic Periodicals, Elizabeth Lorang

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

This presentation positions my recent work on the algorithmic “discovery” of poetic material in historic newspapers within the contexts of my various roles as an editor of periodical literature and also consider how duplicative processes and algorithms encode principles and values and function as editorial acts. Ultimately, I hope to pose a range of questions to prompt discussion around the place (or not) of machine learning in identifying and selecting texts and bodies of work; what ideas we’re actually exploring/are able to explore when we enlist technology in stages of this work; and the stakes of these activities, whether human …

Vistor Parking Only, Jeremy Caldwell

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

VISITOR PARKING ONLY is a thesis comprised of 40 poems and a fifteen-page introduction that travels simultaneously through the climatic seasons and familial generations, creating a cyclical effect of inevitable loss and regrowth. The poems start in late spring, early summer and dive into adolescent wonder, vulnerable, and loss of innocence. Gradually as the seasons change so does the speaker, diving into young adulthood and parenting and the sense of responsibility, guilt, and confusion that has played such a large role in developing me as a person. The poems transition into the winter months where older generations, such as my …

"Maybe He's The Green Lantern": Low Socioeconomic Status In The University Writing Center, Wyn Richards

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

University students with low socioeconomic status face a variety of unique challenges. With income inequality rising amongst the general population in the US, the gap between students with high socioeconomic status university students identifying as having low socioeconomic status is also increasing. This master’s thesis examines scholarship regarding students with low socioeconomic status at the higher education level, through the lens of composition studies, turning the spotlight on writing center studies. Through an Institutional Review Board approved, qualitative research study, the gap in scholarship on the role socioeconomic status plays in the university writing center is examined. This qualitative study, …

Parallels Of Morality: Wilde And Nietzsche’S Challenge To Social Obligation, Amzie A. Dunekacke

Honors Theses

This thesis explores Irish author Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in relation to a selection of texts by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. To demonstrate the similarities between Wilde and Nietzsche’s challenges to European morality, this work considers these themes, which are present in the ideologies of both Wilde and Nietzsche: the body and sensual pleasure, social construction, and the hypocrisy of altruism. Both radical thinkers castigate Platonic notions of the body as ignoble and weak, and they mock European propriety’s shyness of the body. In addition, Wilde and Nietzsche offer similar criticisms of social laws, adopting a …

The Reality Of Escape In Fantasy, Abbigail Mazour

Honors Theses

This paper seeks to examine the instances of escape experienced by the characters in popular fantasy novels such as The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and looks at how this escape teaches its audiences lessons about the real world and philosophical truths. It answers the question of whether or not fantasy is escape and why, accepting fantasy as escapist, this genre—and escape itself—is valuable to its audiences. The method for completing this project was a close analysis of the primary texts The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter along with the research and writing done by Tolkien …

The Victorian Body, Peter J. Capuano

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The nineteenth century is extremely important for the study of embodiment because it is the period in which the modern body, as we currently understand it, was most thoroughly explored. This was the era when modern medical models of the body were developed and disseminated, when modern political relations to the body were instantiated, and when modern identities in relation to class, race, and gender were inscribed. While questions about the distinctions between personhood and the body were studied by the ancients, nineteenth-century developments in technology, economics, medicine, and science rendered such categories newly important for Britons who were the …

Walt Whitman: The Man Behind The Words, Sara Duke

Honors Theses

Walt Whitman is often considered to be one of the greatest American poets. His ways of writing were unconventional, inappropriate to a degree (according to Victorian standards), yet they intrigued readers not only of the New World, but also those of the Old World. But his writing was not the only thing he was known for. The “Good Gray Poet” was also known for being gentle and warm-hearted, with a striking face and piercing blue eyes. He was welcoming to his neighbors, visitors, and passers-by on the street.

This thesis seeks to understand the man behind Leaves of Grass. …

Interim Performance Report, Lg‐71‐16‐0152‐16, Extending Intelligent Computational Image Analysis For Archival Discovery, February 2018, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, John O'Brien

CDRH Grant Reports

No abstract provided.

Balance Of Limits And Experimentation, Viangri Sontay L.

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

In science, there is an equilibrium between advancements in knowledge, ethics, and reason. Equilibrium is when two contrary sides are in balance and, typically, once one side becomes disproportionate, there will be a disturbance. In the novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley portrays how going beyond the limits of science can cause a disturbance to human nature. One of the main characters, Victor Frankenstein, fabricated a living creature out of unliving parts. Victor is displeased with the result, leaving the Creature neglected and destined to feel loathing toward his creator. The consequences of seeking glory brought about torture. Aside from providing entertainment, …

Willa Cather On A “New World Novelist”: A Newly-Discovered 1920 Vanity Fair Essay, Melissa J. Homestead

Department of English: Faculty Publications

The ability to quote from and publish Willa Cather’s letters is a relatively recent development for scholars. However, the republication of her critical prose began shortly after her death, when Cather’s partner, Edith Lewis, appointed literary executor in her will, facilitated the publication of Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (1949). In line with Cather’s own approach to her early career, which she often dismissed or mischaracterized, this volume collected only her critical prose published from 1920 forward, including magazine essays, prefaces, and one previously unpublished fragment. This volume supplemented Cather’s own collection encompassing critical …

Isolation And Revenge: Where Victor Frankenstein Went Wrong, Gabby Escalante Manzano

Nebraska College Preparatory Academy: Senior Capstone Projects

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley describes the dangers of revenge and isolation caused by abandonment, following the mistakes made by Victor Frankenstein with the creation of a monster. All the events of the novel support one main theme: revenge caused by isolation. Throughout the novel, the reader witnesses the life of isolation that the creature is forced to live. As the story progresses, the question of why revenge becomes an outcome of isolation is asked. Living a life where you are ostracized by everyone, including your own creator, would drive anyone mad, especially a creature that was brought back to life …

“Always Up Against”: A Study Of Veteran Wpas And Social Resilience, Shari J. Stenberg, Deborah Minter

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments.

Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the …

From A Distance “You Might Mistake Her For A Man”: A Closer Reading Of Gender And Character Action In Jane Eyre, The Law And The Lady, And A Brilliant Woman, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Peter J. Capuano, Julius Fredrick, Matthew L. Jockers

Department of English: Faculty Publications

This research examines and contributes to recent work by Matthew Jockers and Gabi Kirilloff on the relationship between gender and action in the nineteenth-century novel. Jockers and Kirilloff use dependency parsing to extract verb and gendered pronoun pairs (“he said,” “she walked,” etc.). They then build a classification model to predict the gender of a pronoun based on the verb being performed. This present study examines the novels that were categorized as outliers by the classification model to gain a better understanding of the way the observed trends function at the level of individual narratives. We argue that while the …

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction, Daniel Hirschman, Philip Schwadel, Rick Searle, Erica Deadman, Ijlal Naqvi

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel

Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle

A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman

Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi

In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And …

Review Of John James Audubon: The Nature Of The American Woodsman, By Gregory Nobles, Matthew Guzman

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When we think about American ornithology, John James Audubon is often the first name that comes to mind. As evidence to Audubon’s lasting ability to enrapture readers, it bears repeating that an original Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America sold for an astounding $11.5 million in 2010 (2). Yet, for a man who produced such stunning and memorable visual and literary work on the avifauna of North America, some of the important details of his life and origins have remained highly contested. Even though Gregory Nobles’s new biography is not explicitly tied to the study of the Great Plains, …