Digital Commons Network^™

Bridging Tradition And Technology: Ai As A Catalyst For Heritage Preservation And Humanities Research, Kholoud Ghaith

International Journal of Emerging and Disruptive Innovation in Education : VISIONARIUM

It is an empirical study examining how AI can be the driving force for cultural heritage and humanities conservation. As the AI tools that digitize, analyze, and conserve cultural resources have become in recent years, they have led to digital transformations in machine learning, digital twinning, and natural language processing. These technologies answer the industry's most challenging problems, such as the loss of historical material, access restrictions to heritage sites, and the labor-intensive nature of traditional conservation techniques. In implementing AI in heritage, institutions can document more accurately, keep records predictively, and offer more interesting public experiences via rich digital …

Theorizing Graphic Embodiments: A Feminist Perspective, Lisa Detora, Jeannie Ludlow

All Faculty Scholarship

In response to the increasing politicization and polarization of discourses around gender, sexuality, and the body, feminist theorists like Judith Butler call for feminism to strive toward flexibility and responsivity. This essay lays out some of the theoretical considerations that inform studies of graphic embodiment—or studies of embodiment in graphic narratives—both generally and within feminist studies, then examines several graphic texts by Tillie Walden and Élodie Durand that exemplify feminist theories of embodiment, with particular attention to the creative co-construction of embodied narratives.

Dr. Alison Krӧgel Faculty Spotlight, Rachel Jaeger

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

An interview with Dr. Alison Krӧgel of the University of Denver's Department of Spanish Language, Literary & Cultural Studies.

Du Undergraduate Showcase Abstracts: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works, Kabe Aberle, Nadia Kako, Kateri Mcrae, Brooke Agulnek, Sky Palmon, Yasmine Ramirez, Francisca Aguirre Beltran, Ashley Juarez, Bridget Kim, Tessa Appel, Sterling Kerr, Spencer Ingley, Gabe Meyer, Robin Tinghitella, Dale Broder, Lily Baeza, Chloe Beers, Julia Coakley, Whitney Kelsey, Sydney Gainforth, Gabi Wing, Audrey Martin, Aaliyah Amore Berry, Brooke Watley, Kiruthika Venkatesan, Rachel Bienstock, Annabella Brotherston, Madison Bryant, Mia Burgener, Emma P. Lieb, Rachel A. Johnson, Jennifer L. Hoffman, Kania Campbell, Kiena Campbell, Courtney Cassidy, Sage Krzyzkowski, Maddox Jones, Skylar Abookire, Luke Hawkins, Sunnah Yoon, Andrea Chu, Yan Qin, Nyah Cubbison, Brian Gearity, Daniel Mcintosh, Mariely Cruz, Edward Garrido, Grady Dionne, Nicole Doris, Lyndsie Salvagio, Ann-Charlotte Granholm-Bentley, Anna Dymov, Hannah Eckert, Gabrielle Welsh, Erica Larson, Charlie Ernst, Anna Zhou, Sarah Watamura, Larissa Fedorovich-Klein, Georgie Fields, Kimberly A. Guevara, Aven Mccall, Ben Peltier, Feruz Yahia, Patrick Flores, Jadyn Floyd, Sophia Forcier, J. Von R. Monteza, Peter Sokol-Hessner, Gwendolyn Geiger, Scott Nichols, Camryn Gunter, Kendal Hengst, Charlie Bednarz, Issy Garside, Addison Baker, Rachel Mina, Brooke Hermanson, Amanda Klingler, William Highfill, Sydney Jaques, Kerstin Lewey, Allison Grossery, Daniel Linseman, Ethan Lim, Jagger Livengood, Owen Mantelli, Gabby Pappas, Abby Mcdonald, Madeleine Dierking, Eve Miller, Emma Loeber, Anna Marlow, Michael Kerwin, Ella Mathews, Hillary Hamann, Khadija Mohamed, Vivian Nguyen, Gabri Notov, Ifunayachi Ogbonna-Ukuku, Sunil Kumar, Charles Baysah, Sarah Olson, Don Sullivan, Anna Paradiso, Jay Parrish, Mira Pronobis, Alisha Pravasi, Kerstin Haring, Diego Ramirez, Christopher Reardon, Juliana Ramirez, Casey Doherty, Ella Kestner, Teagan Weindel, Cate Billings, Pablo Torre-Walter, Lucy Rand, Samantha Reynolds, Mark Siemens, Khadeeja Rashid, Laine Satterlee, Piper Heilbronner, Lily Pound, Ben Whitehurst, Anna Respet, Lizzie Lesoing, Sydney Hertel, Aya Saad-Masri, Brooke Ballenger, Max Proske, Hannah Rosenberg, Ellia Nakahara, Sophia Espinoza, Ivan Woolhouse, Simon Ruland, Gorkem Er, Timothy Sweeny, Melaku Saketa, Michela Schenk, Maren Lynch, Madi Hamm, Grace Schroeder, Michelle Rozenman, Rana Seif, Jackson Hall, Marisela Simental, Daniel Paredes, Aaron Mena, Preston Spaan, Evelyn Stovin, David Andrew Swartz, Anh Tran, Daniel Pittman, Luke Farchione, Emily Boyer, Ukari Verner, Lacey Conrad, Jonathan Velotta, James Weiner, Jagger Gossett, Noah Sherry, Sam Proud, Ben Block, Avi Narayana, Zoey Weiss, Alyssa Wilson, Gabrielle Walsh, David Zonana, Keely Wright, Kena Riveria, Lillybelle Deer, Jena Doom, Elysia Davis, Isabelle Yaremenko, Caitlyn Young

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

Abstracts from the DU Undergraduate Research Showcase.

Directional Poetics: An Interview With Ed Simon On Pittsburgh, Appalachia, And The Memories Of Geography, Ed Simon, Scott C. Mcdaniel

Critical Humanities

An Interview with Ed Simon

Fire In The Hole: Appalachia’S Elemental Narrative In Harlan County, Usa And King Coal, Somak Mukherjee

Critical Humanities

In Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s documentary King Coal (2023) coal is being referred to as a matter that is “not dirty or clean, but elemental.” The acclaimed film centers on the complex histories and cultures of coal in Central Appalachia, based on the perspective of Sheldon, a coal miner’s daughter, and a West Virginia native. The elemental nature of coal is explored in the film by situating coal less as a resource and more as a mythic foundation for the community's cultural history. This article puts King Coal in conversation with Barbara Kopple's seminal Harlan County, USA (1976) which narrates the …

Appalachian Archipelagos: "Writing From Measureless Location” In C.S. Giscombe’S Geopoetics, Jay Butler

Critical Humanities

This essay begins with a speculative gesture: what if we read Appalachia not as a bounded, landlocked region, but as an archipelago—where coherence lies not in contiguity, but in multiplicity and geopoetic drift? Drawing on the poetry of C.S. Giscombe, which spans the Caribbean to Appalachia and unsettles geographic conventions by inhabiting “measureless location” – not as a metaphor but as a method, materially grounded yet elusively meaningful – and guided by R.A. Judy’s Sentient Flesh and its theory and practice of para-semiosis and poiesis-in-black, this essay follows Giscombe’s pragmatic and prismatic geopoetics as it upends dominant frameworks of …

“Here’S To The Long Haul: Dark Green Religion And Planetary Thinking In Appalachian Environmental Movements”, Joseph Witt

Critical Humanities

Environmental humanities scholars have worked to develop alternative frameworks for understanding and relating to Earth’s systems in the hope of reforming the exploitative and extractive practices and attitudes characteristic of the Anthropocene. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty argued that addressing climate change necessitated appreciating the entanglements between global (human) and planetary (Earth systems) scales. While Chakrabarty noted that ancient and Indigenous cultures may have retained approaches necessary for this work, he was skeptical of the ability of modern secular intellectual traditions focused on global justice perspectives to ultimately facilitate a planetary non-anthropocentric ethic. However, by only briefly engaging with themes of …

Book Review: River Fiction Of India: Intersectional Flows Of Narratives, Geographies, And Histories, Nilay Patel

Critical Humanities

Book Review of

River Fiction of India: Intersectional Flows of Narratives, Geographies, and Histories,

edited by Subhadeep Ray

London & New York: Routledge, 2025

306 pp.

ISBN: 978-1-032-66253-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-98346-2 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-003-59818-3 (ebk)

Towards An Indigenous Climate Epistemology: Bringing The Newa Literary Tradition Of The Swasthani Vrata Katha In Conversation With The Festival Tradition Of The Macchindra Nath Jatra, Shangrila Joshi Dr.

Critical Humanities

This paper brings into conversation two Newa cultural traditions to articulate notions of climate adaptation, resilience, and mitigation, to illustrate how ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of governing are inherently linked. These articulations offer a framework for developing what the author calls an Indigenous Climate Epistemology. The two cultural traditions reviewed include: a 17^th century Newa literary tradition that advocates for keeping oil in the ground, and that instructs ordinary people to engage in ritual acts seemingly designed to develop personal and community resilience; and a 1700 year old annual community festival designed to avert catastrophes …

On The Edge Of The Abyss: Cultural Responses To Extractivism In The Andes, Jack Martinez Arias

Critical Humanities

This work examines the contemporary cultural productions of Cerro de Pasco, a city in constant destruction due to an ever-expanding open pit mine that has grown to over a mile wide since the 1950s. Drawing on Latin American environmental humanities and discursive analysis, I conduct a close reading of poems, stories, performances, and audiovisual works by local artists responding to this largely overlooked apocalyptic scenario. By analyzing narrative strategies such as repetition and irony, I identify recurring themes and establish common concerns related to extractivism, urban extinction, illness, and death. This study seeks to understand how these cultural productions envision …

Introduction: Volume 3 Issue 2, Critical Humanities

Critical Humanities

An Introduction to Vol 3, Issue 2

Imagined Communities In The Orient: Mapping New Definitions Of Moroccan Spatiality Through Western Travelogues, Abdelaaziz El Bakkali

Homage to Alexander von Humboldt: Travels to and from Spain Throughout the Centuries / Homenaje a Alexander von Humboldt: Viajes hacia y desde España de todos los siglos

The portrayal of Morocco as an exotic location has often been related to the tradition of European Orientalism. From Daniel Defoe to Edith Wharton, the Western presence in Morocco has long been identified by means of several encounters, which has become a central attempt to identify and analyze the country as Oriental. Many of these encounters have resulted in diverse representations that have primarily framed Western ideas about the Oriental world. Morocco, which was identified as an international itinerary of early travelogues about North Africa, has long been a place of Western cultural anthropology and ethnographic surveys. In addressing new …

Esperanza, De Marina Caba Rall, Y Blutorangen, De Verena Boos: Recuperación De La Memoria Histórica De La Migración Española A Alemania, En Dos Novelas Alemanas Del Siglo Xxi, Adriana Haro-Luviano Ma, Dietrich J.G. Rall Dr.

Homage to Alexander von Humboldt: Travels to and from Spain Throughout the Centuries / Homenaje a Alexander von Humboldt: Viajes hacia y desde España de todos los siglos

Las novelas Blutorangen (2015) y Esperanza (2016) narran dos sagas familiares ficticias que integran en la complejidad de su estructura temas como la memoria y la represión del recuerdo, la post-memoria, la historia y el olvido, los conflictos culturales y la manera de enfrentarse con el pasado. Desde su formación profesional como historiadoras, ambas autoras vertebran sus novelas con la construcción de imágenes históricas que reflejan la migración española a la Alemania de mediados del siglo XX, la integración de las dos protagonistas a la sociedad y cultura alemanas, así como su regreso a España, para esclarecer tanto las causas …

El Encuentro De Alexander Von Humboldt Y Enrique Gil En Berlín, Valentín Carrera

Homage to Alexander von Humboldt: Travels to and from Spain Throughout the Centuries / Homenaje a Alexander von Humboldt: Viajes hacia y desde España de todos los siglos

La celebración del X Congreso Internacional e Interdisciplinario Alexander Von Humboldt en la ciudad de León propició la mejor ocasión para hilvanar ante distinguidos colegas especialistas en la materia uno de los hilos más desconocidos de Humboldt: su relación con el poeta y diplomático Enrique Gil, Padre de las Letras Leonesas. Esta contribución hilvana, pues, sobre el telar del Romanticismo, los cabos sueltos del encuentro en Berlín de dos inteligencias deslumbrantes, dos personalidades de alto voltaje literario y humano, que compartían su homosexualidad y sus vínculos con logias masónicas. La relación, descrita como amistad íntima, se extendió desde septiembre de …

Encuentro Feliz: Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna Y Alexander Von Humboldt, Lilianet Brintrup Hertling

Homage to Alexander von Humboldt: Travels to and from Spain Throughout the Centuries / Homenaje a Alexander von Humboldt: Viajes hacia y desde España de todos los siglos

Benjamín Vicuña MacKenna y Alexander von Humboldt. El intenso deseo del joven chileno de 24 años, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna (1831-1886), escritor, periodista, historiador, político y viajero, de encontrarse con el famoso científico prusiano Alexander von Humboldt en Berlín en 1855, lo lleva a describir con singular detalle este encuentro breve y cruzado. La superioridad del científico europeo es expresada en un tono de sólida admiración. Admiración que no era mutua, porque von Humboldt no podía admirar a quien aún no había ni estudiado ni escrito, y el científico prusiano ya había viajado y realizado su tarea en el Continente Americano. …

Music, Poetry And Identity In Badakshan, Tajikistan: Singing And Sounding Community, Chorshanbe Goibnazarov

Music & Performance in Muslim Contexts

An illuminating account of Ismaili music, spiritual poetry and social change in Badakhshan.

In the riverine valleys of the Pamir Mountains of Tajik Badakhshan, a thriving millennium-old community of Nizari Ismaili Muslims created a unique spiritual culture in which the performance of music and poetry plays a central role. This book focuses on the central musical and poetic tradition of the Pamiri Ismailis, qasīda-khonī (also known as maddo), tracing its origins, evolution, delocalisation and relocation.

This book introduces readers to leading performers of qasīda-khonī and to the Ismaili gnosis that inspires its music and poetry.

• Based on six …

A Historic Context For House Moving: Why Moved Houses Are Eligible For The National Register Of Historic Places, Ian Tomashik

Historic Preservation Final Projects

Structural moving, the process of moving complete buildings to new sites, has shaped American landscapes for over two centuries. Thousands of wood-frame houses were moved with surprising frequency between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Yet, moved buildings are “ordinarily” ineligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. This project explores this exclusion two parts: an analytical essay that argues for their inclusion for nomination and a historic context survey that explains the prevalence of house moving. The essay first explains the National Register’s rationale for questioning the historic significance of moved buildings. It also examines why large-scale house …

Connecting Children With Artists Through A Children's Art History Book, Katie Meyer

Theses

This project is a children’s art history book that is set in an art museum. The goal of the book is to help children connect with Contemporary artists and their art. A museum setting is utilized to introduce children to museums and as an appropriate environment for viewing art. The theme of the exhibit that will be presented in the book is titled the “Innovators Exhibit.” This exhibit features six Contemporary artists from different art styles/mediums. The artists come from diverse backgrounds to expose children to a variety of cultures. Thought provoking questions will also be asked throughout the book …

Volume 11 Issue 10 (July 1912)

The Soul Winner

No abstract provided.

Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos: Hip-Hop And The Carceral State In The East San Francisco Bay Area, William Maclane Hull

Theses and Dissertations

“Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos: Hip-Hop and the Carceral State in the East San Francisco Bay Area” explores the histories of urban redevelopment and deindustrialization, racialized poverty, police and the carceral system, and hip-hop culture in Oakland and other parts of the eastern San Francisco Bay Area. It explores East Bay politics and urban development in the 1900s, which resulted in the flight of industries and wealthy white residents to the suburbs and the erosion of public services. Black community organizations and funk music alike articulated the damages done by these processes in the 1960s. Subsequently, politicians and …

Artificial Intelligence In Education, Sally Brown, Jill Woods, Mohamed Hefeida, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Megan Vendemia, Erin Brock Carlson, Megan Leight, Gangqing Hu, Nicole Fuller

Artificial Intelligence Exhibit

This section explores the intersection of AI and education, including an overview of WVU's AI statement and submissions from WVU faculty, classes, students, and staff on AI related projects.

Cultivating Smiles On The Frontier: The Making Of Brazil’S Soybean Capital And Community Building In Sorriso, 1980-2020, Nathalia Francio Cocenza

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the transformation of Sorriso, a small municipality in Mato Grosso, Brazil, into one of the world's leading soybean producers, placing its local history within the broader context of global agricultural and economic shifts from 1980 to 2020. Sorriso represents the unique convergence of local, regional, and international forces that reshaped Brazil's agricultural landscape. This study critically examines the political, environmental, and social dynamics that positioned Sorriso at the forefront of soybean production, illuminating the town's transition from a remote frontier settlement to a global agribusiness hub.

Through a detailed analysis of previously unstudied archival sources, interviews with …

‘If You Design For The Future To Treat Of Witches:' Diabolic Service Magicians, Astrologers, And Witchcraft In John Dunton's Athenian Mercury, 1690-1697, Lauren Rebecca Rowe

Theses and Dissertations

Originating in the print stands of seventeenth-century London, the Athenian Mercury enjoyed a nearly miraculous seven-year run time as the most well-known and successful anonymous question and answer periodical of its time. Conceptualized and produced by bookseller John Dunton, the Mercury existed as an interface for intellectual discourse readily accessible to men and women. Kept entirely anonymous on the part of the author and reader, the intellectually curious could write questions to the Mercury and receive answers in turn on a vast variety of subjects twice a week. Aside from the more expected queries on science, love, mathematics, and religion, …

Naqbu: Cosmological Undercurrents In Sumer And Akkad, Fiona Eirene Andrews

Theses and Dissertations

The concepts of primordial incomprehensibility, ordered creation, and the liminal chaos between them, form a foundational framework in Mesopotamian intellectual culture. The distinctive ways in which these concepts manifest in Sumero-Akkadian cultures suggest a systematic cosmological substructure — characterized by the paradoxical, cyclical, and co-creative relationships between forces such as Infinity and measure, generation and destruction, and definition and obscurity — that remains insufficiently examined in current scholarship. Drawing from diverse corpus of Mesopotamian creative works, Kabbalistic exegesis, and post-modern scholarship, this thesis seeks to elucidate the essential dynamics within that substructure. By proposing a semiotic hermeneutical strategy attuned to …

Emotional Landscapes: St. Teresa Of Avila And The Spiritual Journey, Jillian Louise Breeden

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines the writings of St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) through the methodological lens of the history of emotions, arguing that her mystical accounts represent a crucial yet understudied contribution to our understanding of early modern emotional frameworks. Through close textual analysis of Teresa's major works, this study demonstrates how her detailed articulations of spiritual ecstasy, divine love, and religious melancholy offer unique insights into both the religious and secular emotional landscapes of Counter-Reformation Spain. Teresa's innovative emotional vocabulary, which combined traditional Catholic devotional language with embodied metaphors and spatial conceptualizations, allowed her to navigate the complex ecclesiastical politics …

The Penn Center’S Impact On Rural Health Through Midwife Programming In 20Th Century South Carolina, Kathryn Addison Greenberg

Theses and Dissertations

The Penn School of the Sea Islands provided an education to thousands of rural, Black South Carolinians over the twentieth century. Northern missionaries including the founders of the Penn School, Laura M. Towne and Ellen Murray, taught and provided healthcare to the residents of the Port Royal Experiment through the Civil War and into Reconstruction. With the arrival of Rossa Cooley and Grace House, the Penn School put emphasis on auxiliary programing including midwifery training institutes held in conjunction with Dr. Hilla Sheriff and the South Carolina Department of Public Health’s Division for Maternal and Child Health. With the goal …

Calibrated Structures Of Feeling: Cultural Citizenship And The Reproduction Of The Military In Singapore, John Lowe, George Wong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This article discusses the nexus between Raymond Williams’ structure of feelings and the reproduction of military masculinity as cultural citizenship. By placing the gaze upon National Service in the Singapore Armed Forces as a rite of passage into manhood, this work uses representations of the military in popular culture and souvenirs/ephemera to elucidate how structures of feeling are calibrated as masculinity the state wants its citizenry to internalize. These render military masculinity emergent for Singaporean male bodies. With the male body functioning as an important edifice of the military, emotions toward military service are the connective tissue between enactments of …

The Miseducation Of Model Minorities: The Gospel Of ‘Schoolvation’ And The Myth Of The Schooled Society, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The ‘model minority’, the phenomenon of some ‘minority’ communities (or some members within them) achieving social and economic advancement despite encountering the difficulties of assimilating into a mainstream society, is often described as a myth, especially as one of the central problematics in Asian American studies. Usually, the modern use of the word myth is pejorative: the model minority in this sense refers to a false empirical description of some minorities and should be quantitatively disaggregated and qualitatively debunked. In this article, I want to explore the model minority as another kind of myth, in the classical sense of mythos, …

Queer Ga(Y)Ze And Desire In Flesh And Pink Narcissus, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

Through their portrayals of gay-for-pay hustlers, the films Flesh and Pink Narcissus, offer an expansive view of queerness and illuminate the queer history of Times Square.