Digital Commons Network^™

America’S First Comic Role, “The Negro”: An Analysis Of Historical Caricatures And Their Influence On African American Characters And Archetypes, Skyla A. Praylow

Senior Theses

A stereotype is defined as “a set of ideas that people have about what someone or something is like, especially an idea that is wrong.”1 Even though stereotypes are understood to be harmful, “contributing to prejudice and discrimination,” they are still believed to have some “kernel of truth,” and are viewed as “overgeneralized beliefs about social groups in society.” These stereotypes are then used as propaganda to reinforce oppressive systems in the US.2 Stereotypes create the basis of opinions that are used to create caricatures. A caricature is “a picture, description, or imitation of a person in which certain striking …

(Un)Celebrated Women: Three Women Authors And Their Imprint On The Gullah Geechee Literary Tradition, Raven Mariah Gadsden

Theses and Dissertations

Three women authors, Laura Middleton, Julia Peterkin, and Zora Neale Hurston, are responsible for the creation of some of the most important Gullah Geechee literary images in the 1920s and 1930s. By examining the historical moments and movements which were active while these women were writing, it is obvious why these women are at the center of this conversation. Each of these women’s writing plants the seed for a Renaissance of Gullah Geechee representation. While Middleton's work never gets published, her documentation of black life in South Carolina for the Federal Writers' Project worked as a counter narrative to texts …

Destruction, Possession, And Power: The Treaty Of Hartford As A Prototype For United States Indian Policy, Madyson Anne Buchalski

Theses and Dissertations

Amidst a growing interest in the field of Native American legal history, this article aims to bridge a gap in the scholarship between the colonial period and the United States’ nineteenth- and twentieth-century federal Indian Policy. By examining the terms presented in the lesser-known Treaty of Hartford, signed in 1638 following the Pequot War, it is demonstrated that many foundational legal precedents which reappeared in later centuries emerged much earlier than typically assumed. By highlighting this overlooked agreement and comparing it against later proceedings, this article takes a fresh approach to Native American legal history by drawing a throughline from …

Gta Anxiety: Teacher-Development For Graduate Students In English, Gracie Rose Warda

Theses and Dissertations

As composition studies turns its attention toward graduate pedagogy, scholars like Macauley and Jankens suggest that teacher-development programs, that is teacher- support courses for graduate students just beginning as university instructors, might be one place to start. Many GTA instructors enrolled in the teacher-development course demonstrate an ironic ambivalence that mirrors that of their First-Year Composition (FYC) students. The following case study style research draws upon the lived experiences of four scholars in English departments across the United States, as well as my own experience from the researcher positionality of a current GTA. Synthesizing these lived experiences is an attempt …

Weaponized Nostalgia And The Modern Woman: Patriarchal Insecurity In A Lost Lady And The Sound And The Fury, Grace Nicole Becker

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the patriarchal nostalgia that resulted from men’s perceived feminization in modernity and how it manifests in the narrative framing of modern women in modernist literature. Niel Herbert from Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady and Jason Compson from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury each embody contrasting masculine responses to the feminization of white manhood. Niel exemplifies the mourning of white masculinity that does not hinge on being antithetical to femininity, a sentiment which Greg Forter similarly identifies in Cather. Jason personifies an aggressive masculinity and repudiates women, blaming them, and other minority groups, for his own …

Recollection Of The Archaic Psyche: A Comparative Study Of Viacheslav Ivanov’S Realistic Symbolism And Carl Gustav Jung’S Analytical Psychology, Jack Wilson Dedmondt

Theses and Dissertations

While nominally appearing disparate in their construction, the theoretical systems pioneered by Russian Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov and Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung operate under parallel hermeneutics of inference concerning the symbolic comprehension of reality. This dichotomy is drawn between an immediate (conscious) stratum of sensible reality of Apollonian, concrete, individual, and intelligible forms, and a transcendent (unconscious) stratum of Dionysian, associative, collective, and nominally unintelligible forms. In the present investigation, we aim to identify the proximity between Jungian analytical psychology and Ivanov’s “Realistic Symbolism” in order to provide the groundwork for future application of Jungian methodologies as an interpretive …

Caribbean Movements In Alejo Carpentier’S Écue-Yamba-Ó And Maryse Condé’S Traversée De La Mangrove, Gisselle Lopez

Theses and Dissertations

One of the broad questions this essay examines is how literature represents Caribbean cultural identity. This essay continues the conversation of how Caribbean cultures are formed, depicted, and defined in twentieth-century literature, specifically, in Alejo Carpentier’s Écue-Yamba-Ó and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove. Although the novels are published within about fifty years from one another, both writers consider the question of what Caribbean cultural identity may look like. Carpentier’s Écue-Yamba-Ó follows the life of Menegildo, an Afro-Cuban man who works in the sugar plantations, who ends up killing a Haitian man. In his first novel, Carpentier writes from a …

Intimate Networks: Sapphic Women’S Activism In Revolutionary Dublin 1916, Justine Nicole Rennekamp

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the often-overlooked role of sapphic women in the Easter Rising of 1916, arguing that queer intimacy and political activism were deeply intertwined within Irish revolutionary networks. While traditional historiography has privileged male, Catholic nationalist narratives of the Rising, this study foregrounds the lives of Dr. Kathleen Lynn, Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Margarett Skinnider, Elizabeth O’Farrell, and Julia Grenan to demonstrate how women’s same-sex relationships influenced their political participation, modes of survival, and visions of national belonging. Drawing on diaries, letters, witness statements, photographs, and archival silences, this thesis employs queer theory to read practices of visibility, gender performance, and …

The Development Of Sonata-Allegro Form Through The Lens Of Classical Guitar, James Treadwell West Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

This study reframes sonata-allegro form from the classical guitar’s perspective, addressing the piano-centered bias in existing literature. Its purpose is to provide guitarists with an instrument-specific way to study, analyze, and perform pieces that use sonata-allegro form by showing how the guitar’s range, sustain, polyphony, and timbre reshape the form. This study is organized into four chapters.

The primary objective of Chapter one is to provide an overview of the evolution of the sonata-allegro form, explaining its origins and development from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Chapter two consists of an in-depth analysis of the selected pieces, examining the …

“Why, Marcus, So She Is”: An Examination Of The Father/Daughter Relationship In Shakespeare’S ‘Titus Andronicus’, Anna Elizabeth Cunningham

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is concerned with the father/daughter relationship between Titus and Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Scholarship on this relationship is sparse, and chapter two discusses the context that it is typically understood within, namely the father/daughter chastity pattern—in which fathers jealously protect their acquiescent daughters’ chastity from violation, ending in the daughter’s death. It is asserted that Titus and Lavinia fall outside of this pattern. Chapter three examines Titus and Lavinia’s relationship before her assault, asserting that Titus assumes the role of Roman first and father second, which guides his treatment of all his children. Lavinia is connected to …

The Relationship Between Members’ Characteristics And Their Group Cohesion Perceptions In A University Band Program, Andrew M. Connolly

Theses and Dissertations

Scholars have labeled group cohesion the most important construct to consider when studying group dynamics and often describe it as the result of factors that attract members to the group and encourage their continued involvement. Generations of researchers have studied group cohesion in sports teams and military units, but few have examined the construct in music education. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between collegiate wind band members’ (N = 45) characteristics and their perceptions of group cohesion within their ensembles. I conducted this quantitative, non- experimental study to examine relationships between demographic factors (major and …

The Graduate Piano Student With Adhd: Learning And Practicing With Ongoing Challenges In Executive Function, Molly Alyse Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders in the United States. According to the DSM-5-TR, ADHD is characterized by inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. It is widely considered a disorder for children and adolescents, however, there is a growing number of adults receiving an ADHD diagnosis in adulthood. Because of this later diagnosis, it is unlikely that adults with ADHD have developed effective coping strategies for management of daily responsibilities. While ADHD symptoms create challenges for individuals with ADHD, deficits in Executive Functioning (EF) are one of the foremost contributors to issues with personal, …

Laughing Feminism: A Rhetoric Of Laughing Feminists, Heather Marie Buzbee

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops “laughing feminism” by providing frameworks for interpreting laughter within feminism. More specifically, I seek to understand laughter in feminism that is unexpected, out of tune, and oftentimes decoupled from humor and to analyze its rhetorical potentials in feminist practices, politics, and theories. I use both Cicero and Cixous as heuristics to lead my project. I adopt Cicero’s general rhetorical perspective – his focus on what laughter does rather than what it is – however, his model of laughter is ultimately a masculine one. Thus, I turn to Cixous for a feminist rhetorical model, using Medusa’s laughter as …

“Get Out To Vote, No Time To Stay At Home”: Grassroots Pedagogy And Political Organizing Of The Johns Island Citizenship School, Anne Elizabeth Mineri

Theses and Dissertations

The 1957 Johns Island Citizenship School emerged from the everyday actions of local leaders like Esau Jenkins, Septima Clark, and Bernice Robinson as a foundational site of grassroots pedagogy and organizing that reshaped the political landscape of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Situated within the critical years between 1957 and 1961, a formative moment in the modern Black freedom struggle, the school demonstrates how local activism laid the groundwork for broader regional and national movements. In a state where literacy tests functioned as mechanisms of disenfranchisement, learning to read and write became a direct challenge to systems of exclusion. Through …

Reading The Criminal Mind: Victorian Pseudoscience And The Fear Of Degeneration In “The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde”, Abigail Jasa Sommer

Theses and Dissertations

This paper argues that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) functions as a gothic critique of late-Victorian pseudoscience and the cultural desire to make morality legible on the body. Situating the novella amid phrenology, physiognomy, criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, and evolutionary psychology, it shows how scientific discourse circulated beyond professional institutions to shape popular assumptions about deviance, identity, and social order. Through Jekyll’s experiment and Hyde’s emergence, Stevenson stages the collapse of the “scientific gaze”: Hyde appears to confirm the period’s criminal typologies, yet his deformity remains simultaneously undeniable and indescribable, exposing the …

Return Or Retain: A Case Study Of The Repatriation Of The Infamous “Elgin Marbles”, Camille Marguerite Ferguson

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, I will evaluate the infamous acquisition of Lord Elgin of Grecian Marbles, which are housed in the British Museum, with the goal of supporting the case for repatriation. I will first explore the historical background of the Acropolis, its monuments, and the destruction that has taken place over centuries. Then I will discuss the actions of Lord Elgin, Parliament, and the British Museum Board of Trustees. Additionally, in examining the liability of the international and governmental institutions, such as the United Nations and European Union, who are complicit in the case, we can find a path to …

The African Sky And The Human Spirit: Ethics, Exile, And Women In Saint-Exupéry And Camus, Snezana Popova

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers a comparative study of Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint- Exupéry, focusing on their representations of women and the ethical visions that emerge through them. While Camus is often associated with the philosophy of the absurd and Saint-Exupéry with transcendence and spiritual hierarchy, this study argues that both writers articulate a shared moral humanism grounded in responsibility, solidarity, and fidelity to human presence. The figure of the woman—whether as mother, beloved, or silent moral witness—becomes a crucial site through which these ethical commitments are revealed.

Through close textual analysis of major works—including La Mort heureuse, L’Étranger, La …

El Mal, Miedo, Y Caos Urbano: El Neogótico Latinoamericano En El Siglo Xxi Como Estrategia Para Analizar La Violencia Transpolítica En La Narrativa De Mario Mendoza, Andrés Felipe Arroyave

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how the core concern of Mario Mendoza’s work is the notion of evil and how the Latin American neogothic genre provides an apt framework for its exploration. His narrative exposes the eruption of evil, fear, and psychological terror in urban life, portraying a chaotic and desolate Bogotá. Mendoza’s novels conceive evil as an internal human condition that emerges in the minds of both protagonists and secondary characters, becoming a mirror of the city’s social reality. The study analyzes Satanás (2002), Diario del fin del mundo (2018), and Akelarre (2019) to show how these works articulate emotions such …

The Framing Of Sherlock Holmes, William Charles Wren

Theses and Dissertations

In the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James offers a metaphor for how we should look at novels: a view that pictures a million windows in which we can see a million different stories. Through James’ thinking with a million windows comes a million frames, a narrative device that became popularized in the late Victorian novel. This narrative framework is used by Arthur Conan Doyle, William Morris, H.G. Wells, among others, which brough forth new self-reflexive developments in plot and character development. Arthur Conan Doyle uses narrative framing devices to great effect throughout The Adventures of Sherlock …

The Mountains Call: Escaping To Zones Of Seclusion, Alec Lee Parry

Theses and Dissertations

The biographical and thematical overlap between the literature of Austrian authors Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, and Swiss writers Max Frisch and Fleur Jaeggy, is established in literary scholarship. However, similarities in the role Alpine spaces play in their works remain unaccounted for. The Alps represent a cultural and geographical boundary between linguistic identities and international borders. Protagonists across this dissertation’s three chapters face internal crises, prompting them to move to “zones of seclusion.” Within these “zones of seclusion,” characters spark discussions of collective memory even if they are isolated themselves. These peripheral locations force recollection, often on collective memory, …

The Unstable Horizon Of Composition: The Demonstrations Of Expertise And Ethos By Freelance Composers Within Destabilized And Precarious Digital Environments, Mary Elizabeth A. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation centers the demonstrations of ethos and expertise by freelance composers operating within destabilized digital environments enabled by the gig economy. As labor, and particularly the labor of writing, increasingly grows more precarious, composers have adopted nonstandard forms of communication that entail financial, socioeconomic, and material precarity and that break from conventions in highly hierarchical and standardized professions. Because freelance composers exhibit an alternative to institutional and hierarchical structures, composition must account for these growing precarious forms and conditions of labor. These composers represent the unstable horizon of composition and the diverse and destabilized practices of knowledge and composing …

The Enchantment And Disenchantment Of The Virgin Mary From Late Middle Ages Through The Reformation, Quentin Jameson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Virgin Mary’s role in late medieval and early modern high magic, arguing that her presence and absence in magic display cases of enchantment and disenchantment. Starting in the twelfth century, debates on Mary’s immaculate conception and purity gradually reshaped and elevated her status in Latin Christendom. This enabled Mary to be an active agent within magic as a purifier and advocate. However, early modern natural philosophers and leaders of the Reformation removed these divine abilities from Mary, producing a disenchanted Virgin within high forms of magic.

This thesis applies Karen Barad’s concept of intra-activity and continuous …

The Secondary City: Georgetown And The Waccamaw Neck Within A Global Maritime Perspective, 1740-1850, John Paden Wilson

Theses and Dissertations

Georgetown is not and has never been the primary city on the South Carolina coast. Its harbor is shallow and muddy and its urban development lacks the commercial density found in more prominent Atlantic port cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Despite all indicators to the contrary, this marshy backwater outpost became the second richest port in the United States prior to 1850 through rice and indigo exportation. As a result, the port drew people, goods, and ideas from around the Atlantic. Despite its small size and limited cultural relevance, Georgetown was a regional node for international …

Paisajes Virales: Vih/Sida En La Literatura Cuir Latinoamericana Contemporánea, Cristian Camilo Garcia Tengono

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis proposes the concept of viral landscapes as a critical tool for analyzing representations of HIV/AIDS in contemporary Latin American ‘queer’ literature. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard's notion of poetic space and Sara Ahmed's theory of bodily orientation, this work understands the landscape not as a descriptive backdrop but as a principle of literary creation. Similarly, it adopts cuir — a phonetic and political adaptation of the English ‘queer’ into Spanish — as a critical position specific to the Latin American context, one that inscribes sexual dissidence within genealogies shaped by coloniality, racialization, and structural inequality. From this framework, the …

A Compilation Of Works For Soprano By Moravian Composers From North Carolina, Laura Kay Hutchins

Theses and Dissertations

Moravians are among the first people to compose art music for both instrumental ensembles and works for solo voice in the American colonies. However, if you examine the repertoire taught and available to students of singing, you’ll find the songs of the Moravians are notably missing. To increase awareness, narrow the gap in research, and point teachers toward solo vocal repertoire, this document provides biographical information on several Moravian composers who lived and worked in North Carolina, as well as a compilation of selected works for solo soprano. As a secondary goal, the paper also highlights the contributions of several …

A Conductor’S Guide To Charles Villiers Stanford’S Songs Of The Sea & Songs Of The Fleet, Brian Niu

Theses and Dissertations

Charles Villiers Stanford is best known for his contributions as a composer to the sacred choral genre and his role as Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music in London during the Second English Musical Renaissance. Beyond his church music, which is still regularly performed today, Stanford’s secular compositions are largely underperformed, especially for a composer and teacher of his stature. This document provides a conductor’s guide to Charles V. Stanford’s two works: Songs of the Sea and Songs of the Fleet. These two choral-orchestral works are less than 25 minutes in duration each and are scored for …

The Czech Double Bass School: The History And Development Of Bass Education Through The Prague Conservatory, Geordan Raisler

Theses and Dissertations

As a member of the violin family, the double bass has existed for the majority of the instrument's history in an ephemeral state. Across Europe the instrument varied regionally, and differing performance practices hampered the development of pedagogical materials for the instrument, of which wouldn't be developed until the turn of the 19th century when the instrument’s construction began to stabilize.1

The focus of this document emerged from noticing a pattern between the increasing quality of bassists in Central Europe, particularly in the genre of solo music, and the development of pedagogical materials for the double bass during this time. …

The Importance Of Being Present: Presence Over Performance, De'on Turner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the development of presence as the foundational element of the actor’s craft through a sustained analysis of four major roles performed during the Master of Fine Arts Acting program at the University of South Carolina: Walter Lee Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (Spring 2024), Kesi/the Astronaut in Moon Man Walk (Fall 2024), Dennis in Mauritius (Spring 2025), and Jack Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest (Fall 2025).

The central argument of this thesis is that the actor does not bring the character to life — at full depth; it is the character who brings …

The Art Of Dicky Wells: An Analysis Of Improvisational Style From 1927-1948, Larry Nathan Duvall Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

William “Dicky” Wells was a swing era trombone soloist for the bands of Lloyd and Cecil Scott, Fletcher Henderson, Buck Clayton, Jimmy Rushing, Rex Stewart, Count Basie, and countless others throughout a career that spanned more than five decades. During his career, Wells recorded albums with famed artists Django Reinhardt, B.B. King, James Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, and Buddy Tate, as well as his own albums as band leader. His time with the Count Basie Orchestra coincided with the height of the band’s popularity, 1938-1945 and 1947-1950, totaling nearly eleven years and eighteen records. Through a selection of exemplary recordings spanning …

Negotiating Tradition And Modernity: The Development Of The Chinese Piano Concerto In Twentieth-Century Cultural Transformation, Ruxi Wang

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the development of the Chinese piano concerto from 1930 to 1990 within the context of modern Chinese cultural transformation. Combining historical research with musical analysis, it examines how the Western concerto genre was adapted to express national identity under changing political conditions. Beginning with early works by Jiang Wenye and Zhang Xiaohu, the study traces the negotiation between Western symphonic form and Chinese musical materials. It then explores the impact of Soviet influence and socialist cultural policy, focusing on The Youth Piano Concerto and the Yellow River Piano Concerto. The final section analyzes Du Mingxin’s Piano …