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"An Hospital For These People": Community Cooperation In The Construction Of America's First Psychiatric Hospital, Kira Quintin

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The Public Hospital in the Colonial Williamsburg Historic Area is a reconstruction of the first psychiatric hospital in America. It is intended to interpret the psychiatric history of colonial Virginia to museum-goers, but with no dedicated staff or interpreters, the site is open for less than two hours a week at most. This project seeks to expand the accessibility of the site and the conversation surrounding the history of mental health among visitors to one of the largest living history museums in the country. This was accomplished by working with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to publish a self-guided tour of …

On Paper, Dallas Spears

MFA in Visual Art

I create sculptural works from discarded copy paper that I combine with found objects, all sourced from my immediate environment. The associations of paper such as writing, tearing, stacking, folding, and scribbling echo through my formal gestures. Found objects mimic these gestures, while adding unexpected textures and colors to the compositions. These machine-made objects are intertwined with the handmade to form displays of exchange. I am interested in the tension between the manufactured and the hand-formed, and how these tensions inform our daily lives. Objects that surpass the human lifespan, products alienated from us via opaque networks of exchange, especially …

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 …

Care As Method: Sound, Duration, Relation In Contemporary Art Practice, Violet L. White

MFA in Visual Art

Abstract Care as Method: Sound, Duration, and Multispecies Relation in Contemporary Art Practice

This thesis proposes care as a method of artmaking, not a subject, theme, or aesthetic position, but the actual structural logic through which a body of work is built, sustained, and understood. Working at the intersection of ecological art practice and relational aesthetics, it asks what happens when the encounter at the center of the work is not between two people but between species, infrastructures, and histories of use and what obligations that encounter generates.

The argument is developed through six interconnected works: installations, sound compositions, sculptures, …

Temporal Ubiquity, Brittni Mosby

MFA in Visual Art

My thesis examines looking as a sacred and relational practice rooted in familial memory, storytelling, and the photographic archive. Drawing from early experiences of engaging family photographs alongside my mother and great-grandmother, I conceptualize these encounters as the formation of “temporal altars”: living vessels that activate space, memory, and multiplicity. These intimate acts of looking and listening position the home as a critical site where Black subjectivity is held with care and complexity.

By casting these modes of perception into domestic spaces, my thesis not only resists reductive external gazes but interrogates the archive as a colonial apparatus structured by …

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 …

Alive In Translation, Shiyao Fu

MFA in Visual Art

Alive in Translation explores in-between cultural conditions through my process of working with materials metaphorically, focusing on how they interact and intersect. By using paradoxical pairings—organic and synthetic, fluid and rigid, liquid and solid, flux and suspension—my sculptures and installations simultaneously hold multiple conditions. My process is grounded in my own negotiations with materials. By embracing both the material limitations and my own frustrations, I allow the materials to act as active agents in my process of making. The resulting forms exist in between the materials’ own tendencies and my own intentions. My thesis project, We twist, extend, and accrete …

From Beirut To Montreal, En-Camp-Ment-S On The Fringes Of Society, But What Society, Soñar Soñar

Gatherings

This text is a prose that retraces my experience as a researcher and activist in three camps, between April 2024 and July 2024 : the Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Bourj El Barajne, and the pro-Palestine encampments in Montreal, Al-Aqsa and Al-Soumoud. The text is a continuation of writings of different genres, particularly creative, which relate facts and lived experiences around liberation struggles. This writing constitutes “a method of inquiry”, “a way of “knowing” – a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it” (Richardson 516).

Watermelon Peels, Watermelon Peels

Gatherings

This piece comprises critical commentary by six students and two faculty who began a collaboration under urgent and difficult circumstances after October 7, 2023, when Israel intensified its genocide in Gaza. Writing from the University of Toronto, Mississauga — a campus situated on treaty lands and with a significant Palestinian student population — the eight contributors reflect on their solidarity work for Palestine between October 2023 and May 2024. The commentaries share this time frame and a commitment to Palestinian liberation, but they are different in voice, focus, and experience. Calling themselves the "Watermelon Peels," the group reflects on how …

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 …

Confronting The Storm: Dispatches From The Night Watch At The People’S University For Palestine, Leslie Quintanilla

Gatherings

As a strategy for transterritorial freedom and dialogic world-building, the People's University for Palestine across campuses became a seedbed for exchanging knowledge, tactics, and strategies, with clear goals to "disclose, divest, defend, and declare" for a free Palestine. At San Francisco State University, the student encampment achieved divestments from four corporations — Lockheed Martin, Leonardo, Palantir, and Caterpillar — all supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza. This article highlights the feminist space, politics, and pedagogies of gathering that created the infrastructure of the People's University for Palestine—the watchtower (EZLN 2015) of analysis that students, faculty, and community members created together. The …

Against Genocide: Feminist Dissent, Palestine Solidarity, And The Neoliberal University, Azza Basarudin, Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, Araceli Esparza

Gatherings

In the context of the increasing nationwide repression of free speech and academic freedom, this article emerges from the collective scholarly and activist commitments of three women of color feminist faculty teaching at a large public university. Amidst our participation in anti-genocide organizing, we have been targeted by our university’s administration for our critiques of settler-colonial and genocidal violence in Palestine. Our intervention foregrounds an anti-war feminist ethic that insists on integrity and justice in confronting the university administration’s power to discipline faculty dissent, as well as our support for students’ political activism. Within this repressive context, we articulate a …

Introductory Remarks On Gendered Anti-Palestinian Racism And Colonial Solidarities, Wafaa Hasan

Gatherings

This piece introduces a critical framework for understanding how feminism — particularly Western and settler-colonial feminisms — operates as both a site of solidarity and a mechanism of domination in relation to Palestinian women. Delivered at the inaugural Palestinian Feminist Conference at the University of Toronto (Oct. 10, 2025), the address examines how Palestinian feminist scholars and activists center epistemic resistance and collective feminist self-determination. Through the notion of Gendered Anti-Palestinian Racism (Gendered APR), the work extends analyses of Orientalist and imperial feminisms to describe a trinity of how Palestinian women are simultaneously hyper-visible — as dangerous mothers and divisive/disruptive …

Introduction Of Palestine And Campus Movements: Sites Of Transnational Feminist Solidarities, Besan Jaber, Asmaa Malik

Gatherings

Amid a genocide, Gaza called on the world to witness and to act for justice in Palestine. The world responded. A historic mobilization of global campus movements has emerged, generating far more than public protests. This issue of Gatherings documents and analyzes this moment of transnational solidarity and aims to center the voices and experiences of those who organized, resisted, and refused.

Gatherings 3.1 (Complete Issue), Besan Jaber, Asmaa Malik

Gatherings

Acknowledgement / Besan Jaber and Asmaa Malik, guest co-editors -- p. i: Table of Contents -- p. ii: Editorial Board -- p. 1: Introduction of Palestine and Campus Movements: Sites of Transnational Feminist Solidarities / Besan Jaber and Asmaa Malik, -- p. 10: Introductory Remarks on Gendered Anti-Palestinian Racism and Colonial Solidarities / Wafaa Hasan -- p. 24: Against Genocide: Feminist Dissent, Palestine Solidarity, and the Neoliberal University / Azza Basarudin, Araceli Esparza, and Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson -- p. 46: Confronting the Storm: Dispatches from the Night Watch at the People’s University for Palestine / Leslie Quintanilla -- p. 61: Knock …

Giving Chicago What It Wants: Reactions To Marshall Field’S Postwar Suburban Expansion, Graham Anderson

Madison Historical Review

Marshall Field's, Chicago's most famous department store, was much more than dark green bags and festively decorated street windows. This pioneering retail behemoth, via its founder and executives from the late nineteenth century until the late twentieth century, embraced innovation and changing consumer landscapes to meet its shoppers' desires. Specifically, this fabled organization led postwar Chicagoland, and much of the United States, on a rapid expansion into the suburbs. Opening dozens of branches and shopping center locations, Marshall Field's paved the way for postwar suburban living and development by offering its familiar brand and experience in the outskirts of urban …

Patterns Of Practice And Power: Urban And Rural Domestic Service In Western Canada, C. 1880–1920, Julia Stanski

Madison Historical Review

This study explores the daily lives and power relations with their employers of urban and rural domestic servants in Canada’s prairie west. It focuses on the lands now known as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba between approximately 1880 and 1920, when expanding settler populations were driving a strong demand for domestic labour and new economic and demographic pressures were transforming the profession. Based on newspaper archives and the autobiographical writings of two servants from early twentieth-century western Canada, the paper argues that throughout this period, the day-to-day lives of rural and urban domestics differed significantly in their types of work and …

“Wonderful Things” Turned Consumable: Egyptomania And Fashion In The Early Twentieth Century, Julia K. Moor

Madison Historical Review

Examining world fashion history, this article analyzes extant Western women’s evening wear from the early twentieth century that was inspired by contemporary fervor for—and even obsession with—Ancient Egyptian culture, colloquially referred to as ‘Egyptomania.’ It compares dresses from the 1910s and 1920s made by American and French designers in order to trace the evolution of how Egyptomania was manifested in fashion, showing that there was a marked increase in the use of Egyptian motifs and art. This supports the common assertion that Howard Carter (1874-1939), a British archeologist, and his discovery of King Tutankhamen’s (c. 1341 BCE-c. 1323 BCE) tomb …

Menstrual Monster Or Criminal Lady?: Ella Castle, Biopower, And The Plight Of The Female Kleptomaniac In Late 19th Century America., Grace S. Teske

Madison Historical Review

On October 5, 1896, Ella Castle, a San Franciscan socialite, was arrested in London for shoplifting. In the proceeding months, Castle's trial became a transatlantic sensation, as her initial veneer as a respectable upper-class woman was replaced by the image of an ill and unstable woman suffering from kleptomania. The case of Ella Castle is representative of the larger social and economic processes that developed in the late 19th century that converged together in the diagnosis of kleptomania. One of the main transformations was the development of consumer capitalism which manifested into the new urban institution of the department store. …

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 …

Oracles Of Dixie: Southern Divines And The Classicisms Of The Lost Cause, Jack Corp

Madison Historical Review

This paper explores how the Southern Protestant clergy used classical antiquity to sustain the myth of the Lost Cause after the Civil War. By drawing on symbols, heroes, and moral lessons from ancient Greece and Rome, ministers re-framed the South's defeat and reinforced white supremacy. Faced with societal transformation and the collapse of the Confederacy, they employed these classical references to legitimize racial and political identities. Using Slavoj Žižek's critique of ideology, the paper argues that Southern ministers created a social reality through "imaginary identification," fostering a mythical, idealized vision of the past to sustain regional hegemony.

Free In The Forest: Montagnards And U.S. Special Forces In Vietnam’S Central Highlands, Jake L. Brooks

Madison Historical Review

When America began to send U.S Army Special Forces to South Vietnam as advisors in the late 1950s, they needed allies that were familiar with the lush jungles of Indochina. In the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the Montagnard people partnered with the U.S. Army Special Forces in an attempt to keep their homelands safe from the Communists. As an ethnic minority, the Montagnards had been through years of abuse and cultural suppression by their ruling government; kept down by a Vietnamese dominated regime which viewed them as backwards and rebellious tribesmen. For the Green Berets that worked alongside them, the …

"The One Neglect": Lysol Feminine Hygiene Products And The Gendered Body, Katherine Blandford

Madison Historical Review

This paper investigates the gendered history of cleanliness and advertising through Lysol feminine hygiene advertisements in the United States from 1936-1950. Lysol, the disinfectant, was once sold as a feminine hygiene douche up until the 1960s. Lysol douches were promoted to women, specifically married women, through advertisements that focused on portraying the female body as dirty and unclean. Moreover, the advertisements promoted the idea that women who did not use Lysol to douche were solely responsible for any marital problem that arose, like cheating or divorce. These Lysol advertisements showcase a dark history of the pervasive nature of sexist rhetoric …

‘The Byzantine Bishop’: Makarios Iii, Us Foreign Policy And The Cyprus Problem, 1960–1977, Yianni G. Contis

Madison Historical Review

On July 15th, 1974, a Greek-sponsored coup overthrew the Cypriot government of Archbishop Makarios III, first president and founder of Cyprus. Five days later, Turkish armed forces invaded and ultimately partitioned the Mediterranean island, displacing roughly 180,000 Greek Cypriots. The United States, prioritizing Turkey's value to NATO and greater geopolitical interests, decided to leave Cyprus to its fate. However, a significant element of this crisis has remained largely unexamined: the longstanding animosity between Makarios and US officials. This tumultuous relationship proved just as strong a factor to the larger diplomatic failure of the period. Figures like John F. Kennedy and …

Letter From The Editor, Chloe Baker

Madison Historical Review

No abstract provided.

Mhr Volume Xxiii Full Issue

Madison Historical Review

No abstract provided.

The Shadow Of The Serpent: A Translation And A Critical Reading, Ghada Abdulrazzaq Alkilani

Thesis/ Dissertation Defenses

This thesis presents a literary translation of Youssef Ziedan's novel The Shadow of the Serpent. Framed through the lenses of the cultural turn in translation studies, Bassnett & Lefevere, and Venuti, with Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, alongside the feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic perspectives. This work presents translation as an act of cultural negotiation and philosophical inquiry. It also contributes a critical reading of the novel's rich historical, cultural, and linguistic dimensions. The author uses dialectical language variation, shifting between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Colloquial Egyptian Arabic (CEA), which becomes a core position of analysis and challenge. These language choices are …

Front Matter

Articulāte

No abstract provided.

Volume 31

Articulāte

No abstract provided.