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The Calculus War: The Ultimate Clash Of Genius, Walker Briles Bussey-Spencer

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Railways And Regret: Revising Mobility Myths In Victorian Literature And Culture, 1857-1891, Kathryn Winslow Powell

Doctoral Dissertations

Since 1979 when Wolfgang Schivelbusch applied Marx’s phrase “annihilation of time and space” to the nineteenth-century railways, the idea that locomotives revolutionized mobility and restructured life has undergirded historical analysis. Recent scholarship challenges this long-standing assumption, countering that transportation networks expanded through evolutionary change and that cultural adaptation occurred by resisting the imposing forces of modernity. My study joins this critical departure but proposes a new conceptual model defined by regret and revision. This dissertation argues that fiction written between 1857-1891 illustrates railway growth as a recursive and participatory process. I show through the writing of Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Riddell, …

Mediating Machines: Human Mechanisms And The Modern Stage, Kerri Ann Considine

Doctoral Dissertations

Vast changes in technology during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fundamentally altered the way living bodies related to the machines they increasingly encountered in everyday life. One consequence of this shift was a preoccupation with questions about bodily agency and creative authority that would continue into the modern era. While artists of all kinds engaged with these issues, the theatre proved uniquely suited to addressing the relationship between living bodies and their mechanical environments by not only cultivating a theoretical understanding of the relationship between live bodies and mechanism, but also necessitating the practical enactment of this relationship.

Modern theatre …

Linearly Preconditioned Nonlinear Solvers For Phase Field Equations Involving P-Laplacian Terms, Wenqiang Feng

Doctoral Dissertations

Phase field models are usually constructed to model certain interfacial dynamics. Numerical simulations of phase-field models require long time accuracy, stability and therefore it is necessary to develop efficient and highly accurate numerical methods. In particular, the unconditionally energy stable , unconditionally solvable, and accurate schemes and fast solvers are desirable.

In this thesis, We describe and analyze preconditioned steepest descent (PSD) solvers for fourth and sixth-order nonlinear elliptic equations that include p-Laplacian terms on periodic domains in 2 and 3 dimensions. Such nonlinear elliptic equations often arise from time discretization of parabolic equations that model various biological and physical …

Rational Engagement As A Way Of Showing Respect To Oneself And Others: How We Ought To Respond To Persons Who Hold Unreasonable Beliefs, Elizabeth Cargile Williams

Masters Theses

We often encounter persons who hold unreasonable beliefs. I explore how respect informs our response to these persons. I conclude that we ought to be willing or disposed to engage in rational discussion sometimes and to some extent with persons who hold unreasonable beliefs as a way of recognizing and respecting their rational nature. I describe what the duty of rational engagement looks like in practice and apply the duty to individual cases. I then explore various considerations, including the consideration of self-respect, that influence whether we have reason to engage and how we should respond in different cases.

“Get Your Geek On”: Online And Offline Representations Of Audiotopia Within The Geekycon Community, Sarah Frances Holder

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the musical community of GeekyCon, a convention centered around popular media, such as Harry Potter, Broadway, and Disney. The GeekyCon community results from the connection between the unofficial convention Facebook group and the yearly physical event. This interconnectivity allows both the live and mediated space of GeekyCon to function as a heterotopia, a concept first conceived by Foucault (1967) as a separate space outside of the dominant society in which ideas and identities can be freely explored. Through ethnographic research, including participant observation as well as interviews, I present the music of GeekyCon as an audiotopia, a …

The Korean Comfort Women Commemorative Campaign: Role Of Intersectionality, Symbolic Space, And Transnational Circulation In Politics Of Memory And Human Rights, Jihwan Yoon

Doctoral Dissertations

Since the end of WWII, Korea has experienced a miraculous economic development despite its devastated economic and political conditions originating from Japanese colonialism and the Korean War. However, while Korean society has concentrated on its socioeconomic advancement, few victims having traumatic memories of Japanese colonialism have been cared for by systematic and social treatment until recently. Especially, comfort women, who were sexually abused and exploited during WWII by the Japanese army, had not been able to testify their narratives in military brothels due to structural oppressions and distorted views against women in Korean society. In this respect, Wednesday Demonstration encouraged …

Translating Chopin's Parrot: Local Color Louisiana And The Limits Of Literary Interpretation, 1865-1914, Matthew Paul Smith

Doctoral Dissertations

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, national periodicals such as Harper's, The Century, and The Atlantic Monthly eagerly solicited and published literature depicting small, often isolated regional communities within the United States – literature collectively referred to as local color. This project examines a tension that exists between two conflicting impulses that drove local color writing – one that sought to participate in an ethnographic project rooted in literary realism, the other that reveled in representing local spaces as sites of ambiguity, uncertainty, illegibility, and impenetrability. "Translating Chopin's Parrot" argues that literary historicists, drawn to the …

Capitals Of Punk: Paris, Dc, And The Circulation Of Urban Counternarratives, Tyler William Sonnichsen

Doctoral Dissertations

In the history of underground music in the punk era, few cities’ scenes have garnered as much respect and influence as Washington, DC. Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Scream, Rites of Spring, Fugazi, and a deep catalog of other regional groups have accrued legendary status among fans of hardcore and have become subjects of popular books and documentaries. However, few accounts have investigated DC’s underground influence on other urban landscapes outside of the United States. This dissertation focuses on that relationship between DC and another iconic Western capital with a largely unheralded hardcore punk history, Paris.

Using qualitative, ethnographic methods, this …

Privileged Killers, Privileged Deaths: German Culture And Aviation In The First World War: 1909-1925, Robert William Rennie

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines aviation’s influence on German cultural and social history between 1908 and 1925. Before the First World War, aviation embodied one of many new features of a rapidly modernizing Germany. In response, Germans viewed flight as either a potentially transformative tool or a possible weapon of war. The outbreak of war in 1914 moved aviation away from its promised potential to its lived reality. In doing so, the airplane became a machine which compressed time and space, reordered the spatial arrangement of the battlefield, and transformed the human relationship with killing. Germany’s fliers initially served as observers, noting …

Population, Consumption, And Procreation: Ethical Implications For Humanity’S Future, Trevor Grant Hedberg

Doctoral Dissertations

Human population growth is a contributing factor to a number of significant environmental problems. My dissertation addresses both the negative environmental effects of human population growth and what ought to be done to curtail them. Specifically, I defend two main claims: (1) we have a duty to reduce human population, particularly those of us with large ecological footprints, and (2) morally permissible social policies can satisfy this duty.

I begin by addressing three well-known issues in population ethics that could serve as the basis for objections to reducing population: the Repugnant Conclusion, the Non-Identity Problem, and the Asymmetry. I then …

The Beauty Of Understanding: Aesthetic Methods Of Theory Evaluation, Devon Craig Bryson

Doctoral Dissertations

Philosophers use a variety of methods to evaluate theories, theories that are sources of greater understanding. My dissertation argues that judgments of beauty are a justified part of how we evaluate theories. That is, I argue that beauty is part of what makes a philosophical theory better. I reach this conclusion by analyzing two powerful and popular methods of theory evaluation: reflective equilibrium and simplicity. The literatures on both reflective equilibrium and simplicity clarify how these methods work and why they are justified methods of theory evaluation. But I argue that the going accounts of reflective equilibrium and simplicity have …

Food Justice And Practices In The Five Points Community Of Knoxville, Tennessee: A Survey Of Residents Living In An Urban Food Desert, Sylvia Isabel Duluc-Silva

Masters Theses

This thesis identifies the views related to traditional and alternative food systems and practices among residents living in East Knoxville, Tennessee, which has been designated by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a food desert. These views were obtained from a mail survey sent out to adult residents living in the community who were responsible for obtaining food for their household. Its foundation is based on general place-based theory and findings associated with environmental and food justice literature. It builds upon this work by identifying and describing key variables and how they may be related via a theoretical …

“This Is A Woman Speaking”: The Feminist Writing Of Three French Journalists, Holly Anne Gary

Masters Theses

Over the past several centuries, women in France have been attracted to journalism as a forum for self-expression and a way to promote the causes that they cared about, particularly women’s rights. This paper examines the work of three French women journalists who wrote in favor of equality of the sexes and more active social roles for women. In the 18th century, the radical Madame de Beaumer shocked royal censors in her Journal des Dames. In the 19th century, the first bachelière Julie-Victoire Daubié wrote extensively about women in poverty. In the 20th century, Louise Weiss fought for suffrage and …

Notker’S Demons: Entertaining And Edifying Charles The Fat Through The Gesta Karoli Magni, Klayton Amos Tietjen

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the curious depictions of demons found in the biography of Charlemagne written by Notker the Stammerer in the late ninth-century. The demons appeared in tales that were unrelated to the biography’s subject matter. Historians of earlier generations dismissed the biography altogether as uninformative to a historical understanding of the late Carolingian empire. More recent historians, however, have revived Notker’s text to show that it has much to offer modern readers in understanding the ninth-century. This study shows that the demon stories are informative for a historical understanding of the period as well. They illustrate a special relationship …

Turning The Tide: How The Uss Nautilus’S Trip To The North Pole Transformed America’S Cold War Propaganda Into A Popular Culture Phenomenon, Emma Evans

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Cross-Linguistic Phonosemantics, Raleigh Anne Butler

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Care Connectors In Knox County, Tennessee, Beatriz E Satizabal

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Formal Displacement, Savannah Grace Dixon

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Visual Rhetoric And Semiotics In Scenic Design: A Pedagogical Analysis, Chris Guzzardo

Masters Theses

Scenic designers are professionals in theatre who design sets for the stage that communicate aspects of a performance, such as time of day, location, and era. Sets are supposed to lay a foundation to performances as they communicate information to audiences through visual design. Since visual rhetoric and semiotics play a big part in the successful completion of transmitting messages, knowledge of both concepts should be taught to scenic designers. This thesis provides a content analysis of ten popular books used by scenic designers and their respective education programs. The analysis provides a structured search for visual rhetoric and semiotic …

The Importance Of Disguise In The Middle English Romances, Sarah Catherine Moore

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the literary motif of disguise in the context of the Middle English romances. The thesis seeks to explore the various manifestations and functions of disguise, and how they relate to the familiar exile-and-return structure of the genre. Chapter I discusses the conversation of genre description of the Middle English romances, and presents the scholarship reviewed for this project along with relevant terms to the discussion at large. Chapter II explores disguise as it relates to a character’s social mobility in King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and The Tale of Gamelyn. Chapter III looks at …

The Destruction Of Property And The Radical Nature Of The Boston Tea Party, Holly K. Nehls

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Immersion Schools And Language Learning: A Review Of Cherokee Lanugage Revitalization Efforts Among The Eastern Band Of Cherokee Indians, Elizabeth Albee

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Labor Standards For Mexican Workers: The Failure Of The North American Agreement On Labor Cooperation, Emily Kristin Massengill

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Color-Blind Stancetaking In Racialized Discourse, Abigail Christine Tobias-Lauerman

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I examine how language constructs and constrains racialized discourse in post-Jim Crow contemporary America. Drawing on rhetorical and sociolinguistic work set forth by Booth, Shotwell, Bonilla-Silva, Omi and Winant, and others, it is apparent that racial organization— and racial identities and categorization— in the US is reliant upon specific markers that signify racial meaning. Such markers are assimilated into wider, unconscious discourse through what Shotwell and Booth describe as seemingly inherent— yet ultimately constructed— matters of “common sense,” and are expressed through evaluative stance acts. I explore the origins and construction of these markers and the relationship …