Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Virtue-Driven Leadership: Powering Excellence In Organizations, Joseph Scherrer

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I seek to answer the question “What makes a good leader?” I approach this question systematically, starting in Chapter 1 by asking “What is Leadership?” In attempting to formulate a response, I find that the concept is slipperier than it first appears and difficult to pin down. All the same, I construct a thematic, contextually pertinent definition that provides reasonable precision for the purposes of this study. In Chapter 2, I present a representative survey of the social-scientific academic literature in order to establish the prospect that a philosophy of virtuous leadership can be empirically validated in …

Laywoman Of Right Faith: The Religious Writings Of Wang Peihua (1767-1792), Meijie Shen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONLaywoman of Right Faith: The Religious Writings of Wang Peihua (1767-1792) by Meijie Shen Doctor of Philosophy in Chinese Language and Literature Washington University in St. Louis, 2022 Professor Beata Grant, Chair

This dissertation is a case study of an eighteenth-century Buddhist laywoman named Wang Peihua (1767-1792) from the affluent Jiangnan area of imperial China. This period saw the flourishing of women’s education and writings, thanks to which we have collections left behind by them that document their own lives and in their own voice, which enabled us to explore their religious experience. As women started to …

Representations Of The Cuban Revolution In The American Gaze: The Case Of African-American Activists, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For more than six decades, the Cuban Revolution has been the object of representation by foreign authors―historians, anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and also poets and writers. After the triumph of Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959, his revolution captured the imagination of U.S. intellectuals and activists. Many of them traveled to Cuba to become witnesses of the radical transformations that were taking place there. In my dissertation, I suggest that visiting Cuba was important for them to authenticate their views. Writing from Castro’s Cuba lent legitimacy to their narratives, with which they hoped to influence U.S. public opinion.My focus is …

La Esfera Lúdica: Entretenimiento Popular En El Espacio Público Urbano Del Río De La Plata, 1870-1933, Maria Soledad Mocchi Radichi

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I focus on popular ludic and cultural practices that shaped the urban spaces of Uruguay and Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. I argue that by inhabiting the public sphere in close dialogue with modernization and urbanization, popular entertainment became a main protagonist within everyday life. Cultural practices such as carnival, theater, soccer, radio, and cinema, presented intersections between each other. These intersections generated what I term the ludic urban sphere, to underscore not just the overwhelming presence of play and entertainment as central elements in the urban landscape, …

Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory And British Literary Modernism, Samuel Smith

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Modernist Amateur Economists: Heterodox Economic Theory and British Literary Modernism, I argue that a range of British writers of literary modernism responded to a moment of institutional and economic instability by engaging with heterodox economic theories in their literary works. Paying close attention to the institutional history of the academic disciplines of Literary Studies and Economics and to the state of heterodox economic theorization in the first half of the twentieth century, I assemble a group of writers I term “Modernist Amateur Economists,” who rejected the tendency of professional economists to abstract economic questions from broader cultural contexts. In …

Betwixt And Between: A Treatise On Madness In Literature, Film, And Art, Ed Koslin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alternative Theories on Madness

The Feeling Mind, Maria Doulatova

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to standard conceptions of agency, our reasons and intentions guide our actions. That is, goal-directed intentions play a key role in practical deliberation, planning, and execution of action. Furthermore, purposeful, goal-directed behavior warrants attributions of responsibility or “reactive attitudes” like resentment, anger, gratitude and forgiveness. However, recent developments of the dual-process theory of mind cast doubt on the empirical adequacy of this picture. While people take themselves to be responding to relevant reasons, they are often bypassed by irrelevant affective or automatic reactions. In this work I go beyond the dual-process theory of mind to offer a mechanistic account …

Cuerpos Humanos, Cuerpos Urbanos: Representaciones Contemporáneas De Violencia En Literatura Y Cinematografía De Chile, Colombia, México Y Guatemala, Angela Maria Plefka

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Human Bodies, Urban Bodies: Contemporary Representations of Violence in Literature and Cinema from Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Guatemala, analyzes three literary and one cinematographic depiction of four violent events: Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990), the army attack on the Palace of Justice in Colombia (1985), the War on Drugs in Mexico (2006-2012), and the political context of genocide’s (40’s¬ – 90’s). These events profoundly changed the sociopolitical and economic landscape of these countries, and decades later, Nona Fernández’s La Dimensión Desconocida (2016), Marta Orrantia’s Mañana no te presentes (2016), Natalia Almada’s El Velador (2011), and …

Psychological Construct Validity, Caroline Marie Stone

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A primary concern for any psychological research project is determining how to measure unobservable mental entities, such as "implicit memory", or "intelligence". Psychologists say that a measure has construct validity when they believe that a measurement method measures the construct they intend it to measure, where a construct is any theoretical term that refers to a mental entity. Construct validity, then, is the process of justifying one's belief that a measure has construct validity. My dissertation seeks to answer three related questions, 1. What is construct validity?, 2. What is the best epistemic theory of justification for construct validation?, and …

The Pursuit Of Holiness In Early Modern Southern Italy, Mary Andino

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My research explores lay understandings of holiness and sanctity in Palermo and Naples in the period 1563-1734, with particular attention to the entanglements of religion, gender, and culture. To get at contested notions of holiness, I study putative saints, persons who in their lifetimes gained a reputation for holiness but were never formally canonized. I include both false saints (persons tried by the Inquisition for pretending to be saints) and stalled saints (those for whom a canonization process was opened but never concluded). I show how sanctity engaged local communities as well as the Church hierarchy and bring to light …

Modeling Semantic Structure And Spreading Activation In Retrieval Tasks, Abhilasha Ashok Kumar

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Considerable work in the past decade has focused on representational accounts of how semantic information is acquired and organized, leading to the advent of modern Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn word meanings by extracting statistical information from large text corpora. However, mechanistic accounts for how meaning-related information is accessed and retrieved from semantic representations to ultimately produce responses within semantic tasks remain relatively understudied, especially for production-based tasks that require the selection of a single response amongst several activated competitors, such as in free association and sentence completion tasks. This dissertation evaluated the extent to which state-of-the-art DSMs combined …

Racism-Based Trauma And Policing Among Black Emerging Adults, Robert Motley

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Community violence exposure (CVE) among Black emerging adults ages 18-29 in the United States is a major public health concern. However, an unknown is the nature of the relationship between Black emerging adults CVE and substance use when the perpetrator(s) of the violence are the police and the violence is experienced as a race-based traumatic event. The Classes of Racism Frequency of Racial Experiences (CRFRE) measure assesses individuals’ exposure to perceived racism-based events. However, the CRFRE hostile-racism scale does not capture the range of police violent events that are most salient for a population. To fill the noted gaps in …

Safekeeping: Slavery, Capitalism, And The Carceral State In Washington, D.C., 1830-1863, Brandon Wilson

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

By the 1830s, incarceration emerged as a two-pronged solution for racial control and economic expansion. Local and federal government built jails around the District of Columbia to detain "rowdy negro boys," men, and women, as a means to stymie their rapid movement and fuel a burgeoning domestic slave trade. People were jailed, fined, and often sold to the Deep South, providing a wellspring of capital for enslavers, justified through the lens of criminality. For the crime of petty theft, missing free papers, or in at least one case "using foul language," black people of the Washington region could find themselves …

Landesque Capital And Community Organization In A Maya Economic Center: A Case Study At Salinas De Los Nueve Cerros, Guatemala, Alexander Ernesto Rivas

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many ancient Maya lowland cities developed water-rich landscapes that met the multiple needs of growing populations. The development of landesque capital, in which permanent changes in infrastructure, water procurement, and agricultural productivity are best understood at sites with a long history of occupation. Salinas de los Nueve Cerros was an ancient Maya center that was occupied for approximately 2000 years, surviving the ‘Maya Collapse.’ This site, located in the Maya lowlands, had ties to both highland and lowland communities through its primacy in exporting salt. However, what is not yet understood is whether the commercial population of Nueve Cerros practiced …

Rompiendo Alambres: Immigrant Youth Navigating School And Life In St. Louis, Julia Campus Macias

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project focuses on educational and life trajectories of Central American youth in St. Louis, Missouri, who have immigrated unaccompanied from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. By tracking and telling their stories, I hope to amplify these young immigrants’ voices, and complicate others’ perceptions of their place and worth in this country. Current immigration policies and enforcement practices have made the entry process more punitive, restrictive and deadly. The immigrant experience, especially for young people, confronts many state institutions, chief among them the educational system. Institutions like schools become entry points for immigrants but can also be spaces for …

Oscar Levant: Pianist, Gershwinite, Middlebrow Media Star, Caleb Taylor Boyd

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Following George Gershwin’s death in 1937, his friend and fellow pianist Oscar Levant (1906-1972) constructed a multifaceted professional career across many forms of modern media that not only helped him build and maintain his popular status as a Gershwinite, but also helped establish Gershwin’s piano music in the American concert hall canon. For nearly twenty years, Levant – more often than any other pianist – performed Rhapsody in Blue and the Concerto in F in concert halls, in outdoor stadia, on radio, and in films. He first came to national attention in 1938 as a regular panelist on the radio …

Subjectivities Of Struggle: Charting Inscriptions Of Violence And Refusal On The “Cuerpo Territorio” Of Peru’S Defensoras, Natalia Guzmán Solano

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

“Subjectivities of Struggle: Inscriptions of Violence and Refusal on the ‘Cuerpo Territorio’ of Peru’s Defensoras” calls into question the colonial assumptions underpinning contemporary understandings of extractivism. The sixteen months of ethnographic research I conducted with the defensoras (women ecoterritorial defenders) of Cajamarca is situated at the fraught extractive frontier where social conflict paralyzed the expansion of a large-scale mining project and generated a coalitional struggle against extractive-led economic development. This dissertation conceptualizes extractivism as a modern/colonial product of power and knowledge that has feminized the land and inhabitants from the time of the European invasion of the Americas. While recent …

Sustaining The Republic: The Power Of Political Prints By Honoré Daumier, Édouard Manet, André Gill, And Alfred Le Petit, Maxime Valsamas

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The fight for the liberty of the press was an ongoing struggle in France since the French Revolution in 1789 and it remained a factor until July 1881, when liberal press laws were enacted by the Republican officials in charge of governing the country at the time. The press was the life and soul of political life in nineteenth-century France. Prints formed a core currency of communication; they were the most important vehicle of visual information as they reached a far greater percentage of the population than did artworks in other media, and they had the force to unite people. …

Crip Time In Fin-De-Siècle Spain: Disability, Degeneration, And Eugenics, Erika Rodriguez

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A period of intense nation-building, the late nineteenth century was marked by the search for medical and legal solutions to the increasing number of bodies that did not align with culturally constructed expectations of productivity and reproduction in Spanish modernity. Authors of this time used representations of disability to engage in urgent political questions about population control and the rights of individuals in the face of increasing medical intervention. In carrying out this analysis, I raise the question of how representations of disability created a space to reconfigure the social values that determined what lives matter. Focusing on canonical realist …

In Praise Of The Peaks: Science, Art, And Nature In Kojima Usui’S Mountain Literature, Aaron Paul Jasny

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

During the Meiji period (1868–1912), a newly constituted Japanese nation sought equal standing among the global powers it encountered with increasing frequency, by updating and modernizing in various fields of knowledge and cultural production. Science and technology were adopted and adapted from the nations of the West in order to bolster the economy, improve infrastructure, and ensure the health and well-being of the Japanese people. Meanwhile, literature and the arts were refashioned to make them more suitable for dealing with modernization, urbanization, empirical and rational thinking, and a regard for individual autonomy and subjectivity. Meiji Japan witnessed numerous innovations, which …

Affective Materiality: Latin American Science Fiction At The Turn Of The Twenty-First Century, Kyeongeun Park

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores diverse shapes of the future as represented in literary production at the turn of the century—from the late 1980s to the present day—through examining the science fiction (sf) of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. I focus primarily on materiality as an actor and on the agency of things in dialogue with human society through an investigation of the material and cultural productions of sf texts by further scrutinizing the impact of new networking technology. While analyzing the absence and presence of material culture and technological ecology in the selected texts, I work to identify the unique shades and …

The Afterlife Of Corpses: A Social History Of Unburied Dead Bodies In Qing China (1644-1911), Joohee Suh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation began with the reading of numerous Qing-dynasty records pertaining to dead bodies that remained on the ground without proper burial. These bodies were not necessarily the victims of extraordinary events such as wars or natural disasters, but the remains of ordinary people whose families failed to arrange a burial site. A wide range of historical materials recorded the presence of these bodies, such as commentaries and critiques on popular burial customs written by the imperial government and literati elites, and Qing popular tales where these bodies were described as man-hunting zombies (jiangshi 僵屍). These sources demonstrate unburied dead …

Living In This World: A Social History Of Buddhist Monks And Nuns In Nineteenth-Century Western China, Gilbert Zhe Chen

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation relies on about 600 legal cases from the Ba County Archive that survive from the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century to investigate the social life of ordinary Buddhist monks and nuns. Although they played a crucial in maintaining the survival and proper functioning of Buddhism at the local level, they have remained significantly understudied. This dissertation adopts a bottom-up approach to investigate ordinary monastics’ involvement in various socioeconomic activities. By shifting the analytical focus from elite monks to their more mundane counterparts, this study illuminates how deeply ordinary monastics were embedded in their communities. The shift also …

Methods Of Teaching Latin: Theory, Practice, Application, Morgan A. Nicoulin

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I present a way to effectively blend modern theories of language acquisition and the contemporary practice of teaching Latin. I intend to demonstrate that a curriculum is able to balance both traditional and innovative philosophies by adapting Second Language Acquisition Theory’s idealized way to learn a language to fit the realistic limitations of the classroom. I begin with a discussion of the history of language pedagogy, focusing on Latin’s influence on the study of language learning from antiquity to present. Next, I present the key topics in SLA and the practical implications of this research for today’s …

Moral Pathology, Katie Rapier

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the relationship between morality and mental illness. Mental illness is often thought to impair moral functioning but careful examination reveals that mental illness offers its own insight into moral functioning. While we learn a great deal about moral responsibility and exempting conditions (psychopathy and addiction), we also discover that there a multiple ways to be moral and that many individuals act morally despite ongoing conditions (high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and recovered borderline personality disorder). I conclude that these insights ought to shape our ethical theories.

Sinning Men, Sinful Places: Spatial Politics Of Moral Transgressions In The Franco-German Borderland, Oguz Alyanak

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Where do Muslim Turkish men who live in Strasbourg go after work? What are the kinds of places they socialize? Is it home? Is it the mosque? Or is it elsewhere, like coffeehouses, or wherever the car takes them in Strasbourg, and beyond, such as nightclubs, drinking alleys, bistro-casinos and brothels in Kehl and other neighboring German cities? And if it is the latter, and it rarely should be, as the imams would warn the pupils attending religious conversation circles, and the Friday sermons, how do these men justify their presence in these spaces? How do they reflect on their …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …