Digital Commons Network^™

The Métis And The Manifest Destiny Of The Canadian Northwest, Donald Holler

The Ozark Historical Review

As the United States, hoping to pursue “Manifest Destiny,” attempted to expand until North America truly was the “American” continent, the newly formed Dominion of Canada, ever fearful of its expanding neighbor to the south, tried to cobble together a trans-continental nation and forge its own unique identity and destiny. These two competing impulses came to a head in the long neglected Métis Red River Rebellion of 1869–1870 which sealed the future of the North American continent.

An Assessment Of Transformations In American And Canadian Women Homesteaders In The Mid-Nineteenth To Early Twentieth Century Wests, Rachel Albinson

The Ozark Historical Review

Every woman’s western experience was not the same, regardless of whether they were from the United States or Canada. Therefore, the various physical, social and psychological transformations of each woman who made the journey west cannot be grouped into one generalization. Yet a great deal can be said for the amount of women who did and did not experience such significant changes during the rough journey westward, changes that are determined by the differences in each woman’s attitude and behavior prior to and after their arrival in the western regions of North America.

The Italian Colony Of São Paulo: Race, Class, And Cultural Capital In Brazil, Giulia Riccò

Race & Ethnic Studies

WINNER, 2024 ALDO AND JEANNE SCAGLIONE PUBLICATION AWARD FOR A MANUSCRIPT IN ITALIAN LITERARY STUDIES, MODERN LANGUAGES ASSOCIATION

Introduces a way to study migration that privileges literary analysis over and against sociological data and insists on the importance of culture in the production of political identities

This book argues that Italians first became racialized as white in São Paulo, Brazil, at the turn of the twentieth century. Whereas Italians in the United States struggled with xenophobia and were often not fully acknowledged as white, in São Paulo, due to a series of social, economic, and cultural fac­tors, Italians became closely …

Healing The Sacred: The Fight To Restore Onondaga Lake And Honor Indigenous Land, Adam Dj Brett, Betty Lyons Hill

International Journal on Responsibility

The Onondaga Nation is petitioning the Organization of American States (OAS) for land rights to Onondaga Lake, a notoriously polluted body of water in Central New York State. The Onondaga Nation is one of six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois), and Onondaga Lake is the sacred site where Gayanashagowa, the Great Law of Peace, was established. As Keepers of the Central Fire, the Onondaga Nation bears the responsibility of maintaining unity and peace within the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. This article examines the history of the lake, its significance to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the consequences of its desecration through …

Make It Pink: Superman, Pink Kryptonite, And Fandom, Tom Ue, Kristofer Starzomski-Wilson

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper explores several representations of pink kryptonite. In Doug Murphy’s animated short film True Colors (2017), Superman (Jason J. Lewis) transforms into a woman when he’s exposed to this substance. This short, as we have shown elsewhere (2025), offers a useful lens for examining the perpetuation and the critique of gender stereotypes in superhero media: Superman may be equally capable regardless of his sex, but the film pokes fun at, rather than celebrates, his transformation. Pink kryptonite rarely appears in the canon. A single panel in Supergirl (2003) has received perhaps the most sustained attention. Tom Ue’s archival work …

How Subversive Is Shipping Really? An Analysis Of Heteronormative Elements In Same-Sex Relationships Focused On German-Language Anime And Manga Fan Fiction, Saskia Dreßler

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This study investigates whether German-language fan fictions featuring lesbian and gay characters within the anime and manga domain can be regarded as genuinely queer. It situates these fan works within the specific traditions and practices of German fandom. Employing qualitative content analysis, the research examines two prominent fandoms, Naruto and Sailor Moon, focusing on the presence of heteronormative narrative patterns in fan fiction with queer protagonists. The study analyzes which aspects of the original media are adapted and how these adaptations shape the portrayal of queer identities. Furthermore, fan comments are examined to assess the extent to which readers …

Post-Finasteride Syndrome: Medically Unexplained, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

Post-Finasteride Syndrome (PFS) is a controversial illness associated with a host of distressing symptoms—most notably sexual dysfunctions—reported to persist long beyond the intake of finasteride itself. It appears the PFS population consists exclusively of younger patients with alopecia, even though millions take a higher (if pharmacologically similar) dosage of finasteride for benign prostatic hyperplasia. This dichotomy is not what one would expect to observe if finasteride caused PFS. No medical explanation of this one-sided syndrome exists. The surge of cases of PFS following a publicity spike in 2011 and 2012 suggests that PFS owes much nonbiological factors. The present analysis …

Civilization: The Gaze Of Photography, William Alexander Ewing

Comparative Civilizations Review

If the lifetime of our species were imagined as a single 24-hour day, then civilization makes its appearance at the 23.02 mark. And photography? It comes on stage under a minute before midnight.

How marvelous it would have been to have had photography recording our lives throughout those millennia.

The God Prompt And Deus Ex Machina: Techno-Theological Tropes And Operational Metaphors In Generative Media, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

This study reframes two durable tropes—the ―God Prompt‖ and the deus ex machina—as analytic lenses for understanding how contemporary generative systems stage beginnings and endings of cultural production. The ―God Prompt‖ denotes command-driven synthesis in which minimal textual instructions instantiate content on demand, crystallizing a production loop of input, model execution, and post hoc evaluation that orients anticipation toward instantaneous yield and controllable variation. The deus ex machina names an externally imposed resolution that interrupts causal development—historically a crane-borne god, functionally an algorithmic override—thereby concentrating attention on closure mechanics rather than world-building continuity. Read together, the pair offers a compact …

Towards The Systematic Cross-Civilizational Comparison: How Civilizations Work - Case 1: The Monotheistic Civilization, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The purpose of this essay is to offer several hypotheses based on the concept of civilization and the conceptual scaffolding for the study of the cultural reality, proposed in the Spring 2024 CCR paper, regarding the three civilizations coexisting in the world today: the monotheistic, the Sinic, and the Indic. It introduces the modal dimensions along which civilizations may differ on the level of the individual mind — cognitive (pertaining both to the structure and contents of thought), moral, and emotional; and that of the society (separate institutions and institutional systems) and history.

From Tradition To Innovation? A Diachronic Corpus Analysis Of Simplified Technical English In Aviation, Amber Wanwen Wang, Eric Friginal

Journal of English and Applied Linguistics

Reading comprehension and fluency are fundamental for successful text processing, particularly in high-stakes environments like aviation maintenance where unclear technical documentation can have fatal consequences. This risk is amplified by the significant proportion of non-native English speakers in the global aviation maintenance workforce. While Simplified Technical English (STE) was introduced in the mid-1980s as an international specification to address these challenges and has evolved through continuous user feedback, its effectiveness in reducing text complexity and improving comprehension remains underexplored. This research examines language changes in aviation maintenance documentation from pre-1990 to 2024, analyzing linguistic variations across two generations of technical …

Christian Higher Education (Book Review), Carl P. Fictorie

Pro Rege

Reviewed Title: Christian Higher Education by Perry L. Glanzer, Theodore F. Cockle, and Jessica Martin. Abilene Christian University Press, 2023. 176 pp. ISBN: 9781684264124.

Love Amid The Rage: Feminist Affect In Women's Life-Writing, Genesis Siverio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis is to show the ways women’s emotions or affect, particularly rage and love, are described by women writers in their most intimate stories. I discuss the way emotion has been demeaned, and how feminist scholars have instead viewed the body as a place of insight, reclaiming a knowledge from the senses. In the midst of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, women give voice to their affectual experiences and cultivate the feelings they have so often been denied. Focusing on the particular ways women’s anger manifests in their lives and in their bodies, I zoom in on …

Imagined Empires: Roman And Chinese Constructions Of One Another In Antiquity, Elizabeth S. Tsang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the Roman and Han Chinese empires conceptualized one another during the first centuries CE, despite never establishing sustained direct contact. It argues that mutual perceptions were shaped less by firsthand experience than by mediated reports, commodities, and the political interests of intermediaries. The study proceeds in four parts. The first explores how Roman authors employed the ethnonym Seres to frame China as a land of wonder, wealth, and alterity. The second analyzes the Chinese designation Da Qin, showing how it projected Han imperial ideals outward by casting Rome as a mirror-image polity. The third turns to …

Dónde Están: Searching For Desaparecidos Of The Argentine Dirty War, Paula Fleischer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is a data physicalization textile representing the 30,000 'desaparecidos' from the Argentine Dirty War of late 1970s. The large quilt visualizes the official count of 9,000 missing persons in the shape of a headscarf worn by their mothers and grandmothers, while the overall dimensions of the quilt acknowledges 30,000 missing persons. The quilt and accompanying missing persons posters encourage the viewer to interact with the data, however the observed reluctance to engage influenced the direction of this discussion about the hegemonic disinclination to get involved when authority figures 'disappear' fellow residents of our communities.

Giving Voice To The Frames Of War: A Digital Humanities Framework For Evaluating War Crimes Databases, Leila Markosian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Developments in digital technologies have complicated existing debates around the ethics of cataloging war crimes and human rights violations. Digital humanities methods of evaluating digital scholarship can help to construct a framework for evaluating war crimes databases, a process which requires a fine-tuned critical analysis aimed towards understanding the purpose of compiling the database, the platform or media template through which the database is presented, and the communicative potentials of the database. The following paper presents a survey of the existing literature on war crime databases and the politics of memory; a model of how war crimes database analyses may …

Choreographies Of Care: Disability And Relationality In Performance, Kiera Bono

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation explores enactments of what I am calling “choreographies of care” in interdisciplinary performance practices in the 21^st century. Working across disability studies, race and ethnicity studies, queer theory, and performance studies, I investigate the ways in which chronically ill and disabled artists have generated multisensorial movement, sound, and performance works that resist normative understandings of time, space, bodies, and interactions between bodies. Focusing mostly on performances and events that I have attended in New York City or virtually over the past decade, my project engages directly with disability arts communities in which I have been deeply embedded …

Tradition, Individuality, And Innovation In Western Classical Music Performance: A Quantitative Analysis Of Bach’S Fourth Cello Suite Prelude, Clare Monfredo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Why do we seek out new performances of a commonly performed piece of music? An essential tradition of Western classical music (WCM) is the performance of canonical works by composers, an activity that requires the interpretation and execution of written scores by individual performers. In this practice, performers are not only expected to determine the composer’s “intentions,” but also somehow (paradoxically) share these in a “unique” performance interpretation. In musical education, performers are trained by teachers to create these “unique” interpretations by learning how to intuit composers’ intentions in a system that passes down interpretative traditions through master-apprentice one-on-one lessons. …

Stamps Of The World: Treatment And Research Of A Three-Volume Stamp Collection, Devon M. Blankenbaker

Art Conservation Master's Projects

This master’s project focused on three key areas: cataloging materials, treating book structures, and investigating green stamp pigments. Each section was chosen to build my skills as a conservator. By applying archival processing techniques, I gained a deeper understanding of the collection and identified the albums in the project. Diagrams and a finding aid improved my confidence in archival work. Treating album structures offered valuable experience in dry cleaning, tear repair, and board reattachment, helping me apply knowledge across multiple volumes and prepare for future treatments. The scientific analysis, using XRF and FTIR, provided insight into green stamp pigments and …

Week 1: Can I Get A Witness?, Calvin University

Campus Ministries Resources

No abstract provided.

The Fragrance Muse: Musk As A Symbolic Tapestry In Classical Persian Poetry, Akbar Shirini, Shen Xudong, Zhao Dan

Comparative Civilizations Review

This paper explores the symbolic representation of musk in classical Persian poetry, uncovering its role as a multifaceted emblem of Iranian cultural identity and human experience. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of primary texts from the Ganjoor archive and secondary sources, the study traces musk’s historical significance across China, Iran, and Islamic world. In China, musk is prized for its rarity, medicinal properties, and metaphysical roles; in Iran, it intertwines with mythology, Zoroastrian cosmology, and trade; in Islamic contexts, it holds commercial and therapeutic value, cherished by figures like Mohammad. Within Persian poetry, musk transcends its material origins, symbolizing blackness …

Towards The Systematic Cross-Civilizational Comparison: How Civilizations Work Case 2: The Indic Civilization, Monika Monika

Comparative Civilizations Review

Building on Liah Greenfeld’s (2024) framework of Systematic Cross-Civilizational Comparison, as outlined in her Spring 2024 CCR essay, this paper examines the cultural realities of the Indic civilization. Civilizations differ at both the individual level, including cognitive aspects (the structure and content of thought), moral dimensions (values and principles guiding behavior), and emotional patterns (typical emotional responses); and the societal level, i.e., distinct institutions, institutional systems, and historical trajectories (Greenfeld 2024).

In each civilization, these modal dimensions stem from and are shaped by the first civilizational principles — the foundational ideas framing the reality unique to that civilization. In Indic …

Merit Transference And The Paradox Of Merit Inflation, Matthew Hammerton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Many religious traditions and ethical systems hold that individuals accrue merit through their good intentions, acts, and character, and demerit through their bad intentions, acts, and character. This merit and demerit, accumulated by individuals throughout their lives, gives each person a kind of ethical “score” that can determine what they deserve, and influence whether good or bad things happen to them (e.g., divine punishments and rewards, a favourable or unfavourable rebirth, etc.). In some traditions (most notably Buddhism, but also to a limited extent in Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity), “merit transference” is a feature of these merit-based ethical systems. This …

Review Of Jerusalem And Other Holy Places As Foci Of Multireligious And Ideological Confrontation, Rivka Ulmer

Other Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

The Mercy Seat Of The Risen Christ: Atonement And The Glory Of God In Romans 3:21-26, David Westfall

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Scholarship on Romans 3.21–26 typically isolates the death of Jesus on the cross as the moment when Paul says the righteousness of God was disclosed, leading to the justification of all who believe the gospel. In this paper I argue that, although the death of Christ relates in important ways to Paul’s claims in the paragraph, this reading does not fully account for his metaphorical description of Christ as a ‘mercy seat’ (ἱλαστήριον), nor his assertion that those who believe are ‘justified through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus’. I show that Paul uses this language and imagery to …

Interspecies Responsivity In Early Modern Drama And Animal Performances, Taylor C. Culbert

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation proposes an expansive, interspecies definition of performance that uses behavior rather than cognition as the decisive feature and illustrates how such a definition can reshape our approach to theatre and performance history. Using the concept of responsivity, which refers to the embodied and affective ways that humans and non-human animals acknowledge and react to one another, I trace human–animal interactions across a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century performance genres, from the aristocratic stag hunt and entertainments involving trained animals to the plays of Molière and Shakespeare. Drawing on my experience training animals, I offer a new perspective on …

The Crisis Of Safety, Well-Being, And Belonging Facing Lgbtq Children: Mad/Crip Of Color Critique Towards A Curriculum Of Radical Care, Jameson Goetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I turn toward the study of educational experience, defined broadly to include lived experiences both within and outside of formal schooling institutions. I approach curriculum as an ongoing project of self-understanding in which one becomes mobilized for engaged pedagogical action alongside others in the pursuit social justice. I am guided by the following question, foundational to the field of curriculum studies: for those of us who work alongside LGBTQ children, what knowledge is of most worth? Critically reflecting on ways of working alongside LGBTQ children in the pursuit of social justice, I formulate a mad/crip of color …

The Disappearance Of The Popular Song: Authenticity In The Age Of Ai Generated Music, Leah C. Kinzer

Proceedings of the New York State Communication Association

In the past several years, the prevalence of AI has become undeniable. From AI features on Google to ChatGPT, AI is providing us with instant knowledge and answers. But what happens when AI enters the creative sphere? Specifically, what happens when AI is used to create music mimicking the style and voice of artists who already exist? Is this stealing? Can this be described as true, authentic art? This paper discusses difference instances of AI generated music (AIGM) in pop culture as well as the philosophical and legal implications in an attempt to further the discussion about the role of …

Contrariétés, Indocilités, Indisciplines : La Poésie Au Croisement Des Savoirs, Nathalie Dupont

Faculty Journal Articles

The poetic works of Suzanne Doppelt and Véronique Vassiliou take shape from an intriguing combination of technical devices and knowledge usually attributed to extra-literary disciplines, ranging from science and technology to the arts, and from the occult to domestic ecology. With a clear propensity for encyclopedism, their interdisciplinary works—which in fact have everything to do with indiscipline—orchestrate a playful confrontation of divergent domains, bringing to light innovative objects of thought around which to articulate multiple leçons de choses (object lessons) about more or less proven theories, from ancient Greece to the extreme contemporary moment. As a …

Restorationland: The Lost And Found Objects Of Atlanta's Doll's Head Trail, Thomas Fish

Faculty Articles

The Doll’s Head Trail is a grassroots, low-art installation nestled within a Southeast Atlanta wildlife preserve. Constructed by volunteers and visitors from decades of environmental debris, the trail converts waste into folk art-inspired “junk” displays. The creative upcycling ranges from a miniscule shrine to “Toxic Masculinity” to a stark shoe pile commemorating child gun violence. This article details how queer theory’s “temporal turn” provides insights into material performance as collaborative regeneration. The curious vignettes playfully invert hierarchies, revealing the merits of small-time memorialization. Through these defiantly unofficial grassroot performances, the Doll’s Head Trail both remembers and restores community ruins, demonstrating …