Studio One Volume 50, Studio1 Literary Club

Studio One

No abstract provided.

Enacting Leadership And Transforming The World: Hannah Arendt, The Private, The Public, And Transfigurations In Between, Xochitl Mendez

Educational Studies Dissertations

In this dissertation I propose a framework that emphasizes transitions between Private and Public. I argue that individuals can consciously reshape and reformulate these transitions to assert themselves in the world. How can the individual’s own internal realities, ventures, projects and selfhood assert themselves in a fraught world as an act of self-affirmation, leadership, and transformation? New approaches to this question can all be revealed by using transitions between Private and Public as actionable strategies. I re-interpret Hannah Arendt’s Private and Public as she presented them in The Human Condition (1958). I turn these into multivalent and multilayered spaces of …

The “Fallen Woman” Reconsidered: Inner And Outer Redemption In Victorian Literature, Caroline Kramer

English Honors Theses

This undergraduate thesis critically examines three female protagonists situated within the “fallen woman” character archetype of Victorian literature through a lens of redemption: Ruth Hilton in Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell (1853), Mercy Merrick in The New Magdalen by Wilkie Collins (1873), and Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891). While nineteenth-century readers may have expected that these women needed to undergo a moral transformation based on circumstances of their past, this thesis argues that none of them fundamentally require “redemption” according to any of the word’s typical definitions; rather, the question posed regards the modes through …

Welcome Tilly Norwood: Forecasting Hollywood’S Ai Policy Futures, Samuel P. Rooker

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

In late 2025, weekly trade publication Variety Magazine reported on the announcement of a new acting talent in Hollywood: Tilly Norwood. Norwood is an industry outsider and the pet project of Eline Van der Velden, who unveiled the actress’ existence to the world at the Zurich Film Festival. The announcement quickly gained media coverage while Van der Velden has since faced cyclical backlash from Hollywood trade unions, which does not seem entirely without reason. Tilly Norwood is a digital persona, a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) program, designed by Van der Velden’s novel AI talent studio, Xicoia, to become the next …

Within These Walls, Nicholas J. Roberts

LSU Master's Theses

I was raised to understand home through labor. In the working-class household I grew up in, in rural Southeastern Pennsylvania, value was earned through work, identity took shape through trade, and rest was often an afterthought. That framework was not chosen. It was inherited. And it has not been easy to see it clearly from the inside.

The Exhibition, Within These Walls, examines that inheritance through printmaking and sculpture, using the material and spatial language of domestic construction as both subject and method. Through fragile paper structures that resemble wood but cannot hold weight, a staircase that cannot be climbed, …

Realizing Reality — C.S. Lewis And The Hierarchical Model Of Christian Neo-Platonism, Jordan Spina

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Spina, Jordan, H. “Realizing Reality: C.S. Lewis and the Hierarchical Model of Christian Neo-Platonism.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2025. 253.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in C.S. Lewis’ intellectual relationship to the Medieval cosmological model. Scholars have demonstrated that, for Lewis, the Medieval cosmological model represented more than a scientific picture of earth in relation to other heavenly bodies. Its significance was not dependent upon the number of planets or the order in which they were positioned. Instead, it represented a philosophically robust view of reality

However, what has yet to be demonstrated is the roadmap …

Losing The Body: Tracing Corporeality As A Component Of The Imago Dei Through Early Christian Exegesis, Andrew Kneeland

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Kneeland, Andrew R. “Losing the Body: Tracing Corporeality as a Component of the Imago Dei Through Early Christian Exegesis.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2025. 252pp.

This dissertation examines the interpretation of imago Dei in Gen. 1:26 across early Christian history, revealing both a robust tradition of corporeal emphasis and a shift toward a spiritual consensus that was driven not by immediate, unanimous consensus but a variety of pastoral and polemical factors. Far from a fleeting, anthropomorphic error, a bodily understanding of the image of God spans diverse provenances and contexts. Organized diachronically and topically, the study begins with textual exegesis …

Eat Or Be Eaten: A Posthuman Ecofeminist Reading Of The Vegetarian And Organ Meats, Erin Grace Elizabeth Kostic

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

As two novels that feature the reformation and reconstruction of the female body, both Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and K-Ming Chang’s Organ Meats emphasize the posthuman existence of women seeking to break free from the gender-based shackles that constrain them, leading to a striking rejection of the anthropocentric and patriarchal worldviews that plague contemporary society. My thesis comparatively examines each novel through an ecofeminist lens in an attempt to prove that it is only when a woman is able to reframe her existence outside of a male-centric worldview that she can truly find freedom. The Vegetarian’s Yeong-hye loses her …

Queerscape: Transcending Urban Division, Alex Blake

Hospitality Design Graduate Student Capstones

The project seeks to demonstrate how infrastructure can act as a symbolic anchor, offering a framework for queer urban design that simultaneously addresses safety and cultural visibility. While site-specific, the methodology is intended to inform future interventions in districts for queer and other marginalized communities.

The High School Piccoloist: A Resource Guide, Rebecca Needham

Dissertations, 2020-current

This project aims to curate a piccolo resource guide for high school music educators and their students. Currently, there are limited pedagogical materials available for beginning piccoloists or their music educators, and these materials are primarily scattered across decades of The Instrumentalist and the now-defunct Flute Talk journals. In addition, future band directors are rarely required to study auxiliary instruments like the piccolo in their collegiate coursework. These two factors combine to create a detrimental situation: frequently, neither teacher nor student in a typical high school setting has appropriate resources to understand the instrument and its essential differences from the …

(The) Invisible Threads: Portraiture, Memory, And Relational Endurance, Behnaz Ghasempour

Masters Theses, 2020-current

(The) Invisible Threads is an MFA thesis investigating how invisible interpersonal bonds, collective traces, and communal endurance can be made perceptible through drawing, material, and immersive installation. Drawing from my lived experience as an Iranian woman who has witnessed everyday constraint, collective uprising, and migration, the project asks how the presence of others continues to inhabit the body and shape identity even in conditions of separation and distance. Large-scale self-portraits, layered with other faces on transparent fabrics, copper plates, and stitched threads, position the artist’s own body as a site where personal and collective histories converge, allowing the self to …

Vietnamese American Anti-Imperialism: South Vietnamese History And Analysis Of Publications Pre-1975, Jeannie Nguyen

Master's Theses

During the Vietnam War, citizens contested US imperialism at multiple levels. In South Vietnam, citizens published newspapers and magazines to challenge their government and expose the depth of US aggression in South Vietnamese society and culture. Inside the imperial core, Black, Chicano, and Asian American activists formed solidarities to resist the war and challenge racial inequality. At the intersection of imperialism inside and outside its borders, lies a group of South Vietnamese students and scholars who became American, migrating during the war via state-structured projects. However, in response to the heightening of war and drawing inspiration from their ‘Third World’ …

Constructing Imperial Connectivity: State Infrastructure Projects And The Imperial Gaze In Bengal Presidency, 1849-1856, Richard William Bradley Gaspers Iii

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The construction of roads, canals, and supporting infrastructure in British India connected urban environs of power to interior peripheral spaces. The conclusion of the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849 saw the East India Company stand alone as the paramount power over the Indian subcontinent. A century of conquest gave way to a century of internal management. This shifted the state’s ‘gaze’ inward. Public infrastructure construction skyrocketed after 1849, transforming the role of the colonial state as it built roads, canals, bridges, courthouses, police stations, and jails on an unprecedented scale. This thesis will explore how these physical constructs bolstered connectivity, …

Read The Fine Print, Kayla Lockwood

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

read the fine print is a two-floor art installation that investigates how midcentury domestic ideology structured bodies, behavior, and perception through visual, spatial, and material systems. Rather than recreating a home interior, it examines how domestic order was engineered across the United States through color coding, planning diagrams, model environments, controlled decoration, and institutional messaging. The two-floor arrangement mirrors the operation of these systems across registers, moving from overt structures of order to quieter, often obscured consequences. By rendering policy, hierarchy, and expectation materially, the installation invites viewers to consider domesticity as a designed system: a set of practices, forms, …

Unknowing Sacrifices: Public Health And Radiation Illness In New Mexico And Nevada, 1940s-1960s, Beatriz Avila-Marquez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The detonation of the first atomic bomb in the early morning of July 16, 1945, in New Mexico welcomed the atomic age that forever changed the world. After that day, thousands of lives were lost due to nuclear weapons, and hundreds of thousands more continued to suffer from the effects of atomic testing. The Atomic Energy Commission, fueled by the arms race of the Cold War, chose Nevada to continue the United States’ nuclear weapons testing. Knowledge of the dangers of radiation exposure, the effects of radiation, and techniques to prevent exposure are now available in part due to the …

“A Land No One Would Want”: Environmental Activism And The Rejection Of ‘Wasteland’ Narratives In Southern Nevada, Steven Butler

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This paper traces events within the history of environmental activism in Southern Nevada. The first chapter discusses the proposed high level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain. The second chapter examines the closure of the Reid Gardner Generating Station in Moapa, Nevada. The third chapter details the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s Groundwater Development Project. Each of the three chapters is linked by common themes within the history of Southern Nevada environmental activism, including dedicated coalition-building and the refusal of “wastelanding” of the region.

Hammurabi’S Laws: Ancient Traditions Of Violence, Aaron Secrist

The Confluence

The tradition of enforcing private property through violence is truly ancient, and goes back thousands of years to the first civilizations. There exists a prevailing attitude that contemporary culture is more “civilized” than the first organized societies – and while it’s true in some ways, our laws are still remarkably similar to those practiced in antiquity. In the following essay, I analyze the Law Code of Hammurabi and examine its parallels to the way laws function today. First, I will provide context for the technological advances that made the first city-states possible, then give a cultural and economic overview of …

Identity And Intervention: United States' Foreign Policy Toward The Dominican Republic, Eileen Ledesma

College Honors Program

Constructivist theory provides a framework for understanding United States foreign policy toward the Dominican Republic during the U.S. occupation (1916-1924), the rise and consolidation of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship, and the regime’s eventual political isolation during the Cold War. This thesis argues that U.S. foreign policy was shaped by identity narratives and political culture, also identified through historically constructed understandings and the repeated performance of legitimacy and order. By situating U.S.-Dominican Republic relations within broader debates in international relations theory, this thesis highlights the explanatory value of constructivism in understanding the evolution and contradictions of U.S. policy in Latin America. …

Silent No Longer: Pedro Albizu Campos And The Fbi, Noah D. Dubroff

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis explores the Puerto Rican revolutionary, Pedro Albizu Campos, and how he evolved from a typical independence-minded young man into a radical who actively rebelled against the colonial rule of the U.S. because of the pressures applied by law enforcement agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  The United States annexed Puerto Rico in 1898 at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War. Ever since, many Puerto Ricans have strongly advocated for their independence from the continental U.S., shaping the relationship into the present day. This article argues that the pressure and strain of such an imperial relationship influenced Albizu …

Sanctuary And Disappointment: Jewish German Refugees In The United States Army In World War Ii, Zachary P. Watts

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This paper examines the experiences of German-Jewish refugees who became intelligence soldiers in the United States Army. They are frequently called the Ritchie Boys, for their training in Camp Ritchie, Maryland. The paper focuses mostly on a single Ritchie Boy named Frank Adler, who came to the United States as a teenager from Austria in 1938 and ended up returning to his hometown as a soldier. The Ritchie History museum holds a large collection of Adler’s letters which form the most important source for this project. I have found a duality of experience from German and Austrian Jews in the …

Grounding In Place And Space, Levi Anthony Walker

MFA in Visual Art

The foundation of Levi Walker’s artistic practice relies on the use of natural materials that reference the landscape. The materials within his sculptures, in combination with sculptural processes, create a conceptual language that is in conversation with the land and the ways that we engage with it as a community. As a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, his work addresses the relationship that Indigenous tribes have with the federal government, and the ways the tribe must navigate colonial systems in order to support their communities without erasing their identities or beliefs. Influenced by his upbringing, a strong …

A Kantian Guide To Understanding Agentic Ai And Its Ethical Consequences, Amelia Wang

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

The rapid emergence of Agentic AI, which are systems capable of autonomous, multi-step decision-making with minimal human oversight, has prompted growing discourse and concern regarding whether such systems possess a form of agency comparable to that of human beings, and subsequently, what ethical responsibilities ensue if they do. This thesis argues that many of the ethical risks surrounding Agentic AI stem from a fundamental misconception, which is the tendency to describe these systems using the language of agency ("deciding," "acting," "choosing") without examining whether they satisfy the philosophical conditions for genuine rational agency. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the …

Feminist Solidarities And An Ethos Of Care: Reflecting On Faculty Marshal Experiences At The University Of Denver, Andrea L. Stanton, Dheepa Sundaram

Gatherings

Spring 2024 witnessed student encampment protests around the US and world protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Israeli occupation in Palestine. The University of Denver (DU) became part of this movement in April when students established a Palestine solidarity encampment, permitted by DU's then-current freedom of expression policies. To protect students' free speech rights, we trained as marshals alongside faculty and staff colleagues to ensure student rights, peacefully de-escalate tensions, and keep all community members safe. This essay adopts an autoethnographic approach grounded in our lived experiences and care-based interactions with campus and broader community. Taking an intersectional approach …

Knock To Disrupt, Knock To Make Visible: Writing And Teaching About Architecture And Palestine Amidst The Ongoing Genocide, Nama'a Qudah

Gatherings

In his seminal novel Men in the Sun (1970), Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani poses a haunting question: “Why didn’t they knock on the walls of the water tank?”.  This paper reflects on that question and how it became the compass guiding my writing and teaching about Architecture and Palestine amidst the ongoing genocide. Knocking here is more than an act of refusal; it is a demand to rupture domination, insisting on justice and on noise against the enclosures that prefer quiet compliance. Kanafani’s question echoes beyond fiction, exposing the asymmetry between oppressor and oppressed, and the violence embedded not only …

A Hell Of A Fix: Television And Cultural Transfer During The Iran Hostage Crisis, Grace A. Chapnik

Madison Historical Review

During the Iran Hostage Crisis, television served as a central method of communication between Iran and the United States. Ultimately, saturation of American networks with coverage of the Crisis had a profound impact on the administration of President Jimmy Carter, as a "cultural transfer" of Iranian messaging led the American populace to question their President's abilities to challenge Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Carter was portrayed in the American media as a floundering leader unable to counter the authority of the new Iranian regime, leading the President's popularity to plummet and severely harming his prospects for re-election in the 1980 presidential …

Volume 31

Articulāte

No abstract provided.

The Streamlined Illusion: Addressing Progress And Superficiality In U.S. Industrial Design, Misha Maryan

Articulāte

No abstract provided.

A New Security Framework For Nato’S Eastern Flank, Matthew J. Kukla, Anna Batta

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

This article argues for a NATO-EU–led security strategy to achieve long-term deterrence in Ukraine after the end of the Russia-Ukraine War. Unlike existing analyses, this article straddles the strategic level of deterrence, outlining an operational road map. Its historical example of the Iraq War shows that long-term security requires the development of plans before a conflict ends, long-term commitments, and multilateral—not unilateral—security efforts. The proposed solution provides strategic planners and policymakers with a low-risk, high-reward approach that leverages burden sharing through a multinational framework.

The Applicability Of Artificial Intelligence In Tour Guiding: Perspective Of Sustainable Service Innovation In Tourism With Technology, Chiranjib Kumar Choudhary Phd, Aditi Choudhary

International Journal of Tour Guiding and Visitor Attraction Research

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly transforming various sectors of the tourism, travel, and hospitality industry. Among these, the role of tourist guides remains crucial, as they act as cultural ambassadors representing destinations and nations. The primary objective of this study is to explore the applications of AI in developing intelligent audio-visual tour guides and assistive devices that enhance tourists’ real-time experiences at heritage sites, tourist attractions, and places of archaeological significance. The research adopts a qualitative approach, utilising secondary data gathered from academic literature, printed and electronic resources, online databases, and expert opinions from tourism professionals. The collected data were …

Coins, Libraries, And Quantum Mechanics Bits And Qubits, Sam Hyde

Prologue: A First-Year Writing Journal

No abstract provided.