Digital Commons Network^™

Reigniting Identity: Rediscovering My Teaching, Lifelong Learning, And Myself, Rachel Griffith

Master of Arts in English Plan II Graduate Projects

A culmination of two years of work and self-discovery represented through three different types of writing, two academic and one creative. The academic works explore communication and autism in the English classroom, as well as teaching technical writing in practice ways. The creative work is a poetry portfolio that is one of the author's proudest works from their degree track, covering a variety of topics from love to nostalgia to inner turmoil. Together, they narrate three reasons why the author writes, teaches, and lives.

The Course Of Empire Causes Us Much Grief: Imperialism, Slavery, And Genocide In The Theological Education Of Berkeley Divinity School, The Episcopal Seminary At Yale, Alden Fossett

Yale Divinity School Theses

The history of Berkeley Divinity School, the Episcopal seminary at Yale, traverses centuries and thousands of miles between Ireland, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Abundant institutional narratives concerning Berkeley Divinity School’s origin and development over time rehearse a mythology connecting the Anglo-Irish philosopher and bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753) and the establishment of Berkeley Divinity School in 1854 by Massachusetts-born professor and bishop John Williams (1817–1899). This thesis intervenes in the historiography of Berkeley Divinity School by situating John Williams’s allusion to George Berkeley’s unfulfilled dream to establish a college training Anglican missionaries on the island of Bermuda within a British imperial …

Tropical Hardware, Shane Chase

Student Theses

A collection of poetry.

Preface: In the spring of 2022 I lived in Bethnal Green, a once working-class neighborhood in East London. I grew attached to the area as it gave me a life I couldn’t have back in Florida. Everything needed to subsist was contained within walking distance. My connection to the place grew strong each time I walked through Middleton Green or passed Keeling House rising up out of the fog as I made my way to work. Gradually, I developed a sense of isolation, smelling the salt from the gulf, an ocean that wasn’t there. The threat …

Selfown, Richard Hollman

Student Theses

A play.

Tarot - Reimagined: Monotype Tarot Landscapes, Eleanor B. Nelson

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Printmaking is a form of artmaking that utilizes transferring marks from the matrix to the final piece of paper, often through a press. These processes are able to create an edition of multiple identical prints. This is typically considered the highlight of using print processes; however, the process of making monotypes allows for one original piece. Through the process of researching and creating watercolor monotypes, I made a collection of ten original pieces, all depicting different landscapes throughout the Tarot deck. Each piece is 9” x 12” printed on a 13” x 17” piece of paper and created with watercolor, …

From Feeling To Faith: How Affective Experience Gives Rise To Religion, Asia Wewel

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

This paper argues that religion is the intelligible, structured response to distinct pressures arising from within human experience itself. Drawing on Schleiermacher, Otto, Kant, and Becker, the paper traces religion's emergence through four phases. The first establishes that religious feeling is pre-conceptual and categorically distinct from ordinary emotion. The second works through Otto's correction of Schleiermacher: the genuinely religious encounter is not dependence intensified but the numinous. The third shows that Kant, arriving from an entirely different direction, reaches the same destination: practical reason diagnoses a radical evil the will cannot correct alone, demanding an ethical commonwealth that mirrors …

"Naija First Aid Al" - A Voice-Activated First Aid Assistant In Local Nigerian Languages, Esther Blessing Onoruke

Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media Culminating Experience

There are now major structural obstacles preventing Nigerian households from receiving emergency care right away. Manageable domestic events can turn into avoidable tragedies due to language barriers, delayed emergency response times, and a lack of basic first aid expertise. In addition to these health issues, Gender-Based Violence (GBV) continues to be a serious epidemic where survivors cannot safely seek assistance due to social shame and unequal power dynamics. A contemporary equivalent that is suited to the low-resource settings of today is required, much as the introduction of first aid manuals in 1901 effectively taught the public and democratized emergency care. …

Trinities In World Mythology: Why Separate Cultures Construct The Same Cosmology, Autumn Scott

Undergraduate Fellows' Research

Numerous cultures throughout the world construct mythologies and cosmologies which include a triad, triple deity, or three world cosmology. Specifically, this refers either to belief in a singular deity with three forms, belief in a distinct group of three divine beings with a common characteristic, or belief in three cosmic realms, such as the human world, underworld, and divine world. This phenomenon occurs within Europe, South Asia and East Asia, as well as North America. While many may be familiar with the Greek Moirai and the Christian trinity, this pattern appears well beyond the ancient and medieval cultures who inhabited …

No Place But Here, Dillon Bryant

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The writing in this document is a dovetailing of fragments ranging from critical inquiry, analysis, scripts, and other observations that relate to the body of work in “No place but here”. It is an accompanying document attempting to enrich the visual work rather than a direct illustration. The installation of “No place but here” at the Rogers Creamery is an investigation utilizing collage, text, and other constructed photographs, images, and objects to play with and against familial and broader narratives of power, control, and ambiguity associated with the American West. Underpinned and intersected by interior questions revolving around artifice, connection, …

Leveraging Generative Artificial Intelligence To Launch An Independent Game Studio, Douglas Evans

Theses

This project report examines how Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) can be integrated into the early formation and operations of an independent/indie game studio. Using a qualitative, practice-based single-case study approach, the project focused on Boar’s Head Studio, LLC. A human-in-the-loop approach was maintained with Generative AI used to support company formation, ideation, planning, documentation, analysis, coding assistance, marketing preparation, and community-building preparation

The report concludes that Generative AI can serve as a meaningful system integrated into the studio pipeline when used with structured, repeatable, human-in-the-loop processes. The project contributes a practical, case-based framework that may be useful to other …

Eurydice | Tigers Be Still: Technical Direction Between Two Studio Sets, Rory G. Galada Brownell

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Theses, Student Research, and Creative Work

This thesis examines the technical direction processes for two studio productions, Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl and Tigers Be Still by Kim Rosenstock, produced during the 2025–2026 season at the Nebraska Repertory Theatre. Through comparative analysis, this document explores how differing design styles—metaphorical and installation-based versus grounded realism—impact the planning, communication, and execution responsibilities of a technical director within a constrained academic production environment. Both productions operated within similar parameters, including limited budgets, student-based labor, and a shared performance space, allowing for a focused evaluation of process rather than resources. The Eurydice production emphasized abstract scenic elements, including large-scale string installations …

The Oncoming Light: An Experiential Approach To Psychological Exposition Through Dialogue-Driven Narrative, Benjamin G. Dewitt

Honors Theses

Narrative is a lens through which we understand ourselves, our histories, our futures, and our ties to those around us. Narrative form has undergone vast transformations over time, and in the case of “postmodern” literature, pushes the boundaries of form into the experimental, questioning the truth of knowledge itself. While these experimental works can give rise to uniquely powerful emotional experiences, some components of narrative, when abandoned, may only hinder the immersion of the reader. This thesis evaluates several experimental, dialogue-driven narrative works against these components: linguistic, literal, emotional, and intellectual significance, in a hierarchy of importance as proposed by …

Catalyst, David Steck

Theses and Dissertations

Catalyst is a short documentary that explores why Hip Hop happened much later in Chicago than in other cities. It focuses on the story of Duro Wicks, a young Black music lover who overcame the city’s segregation to launch the first weekly Hip Hop open mic night. At the weekly $3 Sunday Hip Hop Show held at the Lower Links, young people came together from across the divided city to create a community. Though more successful than anyone could have imagined, Wicks’ dream proved unsustainable. However, it forever transformed the lives of the people it touched and launched a sustainable …

Living Doll: Puppetry, Performance, And The Art Of Greer Lankton, Madison Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that puppetry is the animating logic of Greer Lankton's practice. Drawing on archival evidence—including letters, planners, and drawings—it recovers an engagement with puppetry spanning childhood through her final years, and applies puppet theory to argue that Lankton understood selfhood as something made, not given.

Wind In A Dry Glass, Khia Hong

Theses and Dissertations

Khia Hong’s paper unfolds in five sections, tracing the ontological and epistemological inquiries behind her sculptures. When the sculptures stepped down from the pedestal and entered the plane of lived reality, the question “What is sculpture?” expanded into “What is sculpture, the self, and the world?” Through reflections on the self, Hong details how these questions emerge and are addressed in her material encounters.

Beauty Over Perfection: The Idealization Of Drapery In Classical Greek Sculpture And The Stylistic Reinvention Of Roman “Copies”, Lauren M. Grover

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Margarete Bieber’s claim that the drapery of Greek sculpture accurately reflects ancient garments. I introduce a method of tracing drapery to capture the garment pattern of sculpted drapery and argue that the drapery of Greek originals and Roman “copies” is an idealized representation of ancient dress.

Bugs, Birds, Blue: Queer Ecologies Of Embodiment, Kinship, And Survival, Celeste B. Newcomb

Theses and Dissertations

bugs, birds, blue is a multi-channel audiovisual installation that examines queer ecology as a framework for understanding transgender embodiment, kinship, and survival amid environmental crisis and ongoing political attacks on trans life (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson). Through sculpture, projection, sound, reflective surfaces, and biological imagery, the installation places human bodily matter alongside microbial and aquatic life forms to challenge narratives that frame trans existence as unnatural, recent, or isolated. Instead, the work proposes transness as relational, adaptive, and deeply entangled with broader ecological systems. The installation is composed of two interconnected environments. On one side of the space, three aquariums rest …

Granted, Emily Weissman

Theses and Dissertations

Granted is an Alice in Wonderland-style psychotic break of a play about trying and explosively failing to dodge the landmines of being an artist–only to become your own worst enemy: a gatekeeper.

Controlling Death: Analyzing Formal Structures In The Music Of Chuck Schuldiner, Cory Cogley

Theses and Dissertations

From 1987 to 1999, the metal bands Death and Control Denied released eight total albums, with music primarily composed by guitarist and vocalist Chuck Schuldiner. This corpus study analyzes the form of these records to demonstrate Schuldiner's compositional idiolect adhering to recognizable formal structures, specifically AABA and ABA.

Lovepilled, Zhiliang Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

"Lovepilled" is a collection of essays and stories about love, the longing for it, and where it takes place.

Embodied Archives: Cultural Memory And Material Rhetoric In Dindga Mccannon’S Fiber Arts Practice, Mary Lisette Morris

Theses and Dissertations

“Embodied Archives: Cultural Memory and Material Rhetoric in Dindga McCannon’s Fiber Arts Practice” examines mixed-media artist Dindga McCannon’s interdisciplinary career and practice. It argues that her research-driven homages to Black women’s lives and achievements challenge divisions of fine art and craft through cultural memory, material rhetoric, and textile-based archival strategies.

Do Clothes Make The Man? Ftm Crossdressing In The 18th-19th C. Anglo-American World, Aidrian Graber

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to analyze the legacy of "Female Husbands" and other female-to-male crossdressers in the 18/19th c. Anglo-American world and how such people can illuminate the field of transgender history.

Cannibalizing The American Dream: Memory, Materials, And Manifesting, Juan Hinojosa

Theses and Dissertations

Juan Hinojosa’s thesis explores collage and assemblage through discarded materials, pop culture, and personal history. He transforms found objects into layered works that reflect consumption, memory, and American identity. Moving between sculpture, painting, and installation, his practice examines excess, nostalgia, and the tension between what is consumed and what consumes him.

One Long Yawn, Dylan Musler

Theses and Dissertations

Dylan Musler contextualizes her painting and ceramic work. She explores themes around time, the grotesque, transference, holes, and dirty snow piles.

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite, Lauren Cline

Theses and Dissertations

In “Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite,” artist Lauren Cline uses her process-based approach to painting as a metaphor for the relationship between mundanity and eternity. Utilizing various frameworks, including the autobiographical writings of Hélène Cixous and the theology of Simone Weil, as well as examples from her own artworks,  the artist suggests that there is a universal human need for the dissipation of the singular, isolated self, and explores various ways that this can be achieved.

Heirloomed: An Italian-American Daughter Weaving Past And Present, Catherine Santino

Theses and Dissertations

Amid a string of family deaths, writer and journalist Catherine Santino found herself preoccupied by the idea of lineage and inheritance. As she digs into her Sicilian heritage, she explores how the traditions and values set forth by her family’s matriarchs have shaped the woman she’s still becoming. From grappling with the shame caused by the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings of purity to examining how Italian food customs impacted her body image, Santino interrogates the complicated truth that the belief systems she was raised with offer both comfort and torment.

Public Art And Military Technology At The Mexico-U.S. Border: Disrupting Boundaries On Battlegrounds, Anna Luise Kaunert

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how contemporary artists Rubén Ortiz Torres, Chico MacMurtrie, rafa esparza, and Cassils transformed military technologies into powerful artworks that interrogate the Mexico-U.S. border as a battlefield. Together, their works illuminate militarization and surveillance technologies at the border and the violent enforcement of U.S. immigration policy.

Hanne Darboven: Bismarckzeit (Bismarck Time), Lindsey J. Poremba

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines post-war German artist Hanne Darboven’s 1978 work Bismarckzeit (Bismarck Time). Bismarckzeit is a significant work where images, quotations, and equations meet and explore history. This thesis studies the different visual languages in Darboven’s installation, comparing her work with that of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project.

Containment, Quin Mittelstead

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores “containment" (the act of keeping something within limits) as both oppressive control and a mode of self-regulation, grounded in the author’s experience with epilepsy. Paintings deploy grayscale grounds, restrained palettes, and contrasting rapid/slow gestures; emergent color, texture, and altered substrates map psychological states, bodily impulses, and reactive processes. Research into witchcraft, remedial items, and eugenics (notably Buck v. Bell) informs works that link historical censorship and institutional violence to contemporary stigma. Sculptural installations (nets, jute, flawed Faraday-like enclosures) and cannibalized studio materials probe systems that restrain thought, media, and bodies. By introducing unpredictable variables with found supports, …

A Preliminary Study On A Variant British Recension Of De Excidio Troiae, Kailee M. Rowe

History Undergraduate Honors Theses

Dares Phrygius’s De excidio Troiae (“On the Destruction of Troy”) is a fifth or sixth century historical account of the Trojan War that gained significant attention during the medieval period in western Europe. Surviving in over 200 manuscripts, De excidio Troiae had been widely disseminated, developing different traditions in Latin as well as inspiring translations and adaptions in vernacular languages, such as Irish, Middle High German, and Old Icelandic. Dares was considered one of the most reliable sources on the Trojan War, partly because of the decline of Greek in Western Europe, but also partly because of its claim to …