Digital Commons Network^™

Region, Nation And Gastronomy: Regionalism In Gastronomic Texts Of The Early 20th Century (1900-1939), Lauren Reches

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

France is far from being a uniform culture and yet the food of French provinces is often subsumed into one universally known “French cuisine.” While 19^th-century haute cuisine ignored regional differences, gastronomes of the early 20^th-century, such as Curnonsky, Marcel Rouff, Austin de Croze, and Pampille, defined a new French culinary identity based on appropriating and incorporating the diversity of the regional cuisines. Regional cuisine at the time was, however, quite diverse. Some of the regions of France were newly added to the country, such as Savoie and Nice, while others had been in contention for …

The Expansion Of The Mandarin Mind, Tyler Okney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study will examine and contrast two periods of xenophobia and stagnation, late Qing dynasty China, and the PRC under Mao, with a genuine market place of ideas, Shanghai and the other foreign treaty ports in the period 1849 to 1949, and explain how this period of cosmopolitan ferment has had beneficial effects on China today. Countries that have shut themselves off from the outside world have frequently suffered first stagnation, and then decay. While this might appear a commonplace in the abstract, the application of this insight in the development of particular nations has been neither as thorough or …

The Willfulness Of A Missing Frame: Ahmed Zaki And The Politics Of Visual Resistance, Miriam M. Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ahmed Zaki (1949-2005) is one of Egyptian cinema’s most prominent leading actors, with work spanning three decades of critical films that informed a generation’s visual register of masculinity. However, the beginnings of his career were marked by public skepticism around his place as a leading actor due to him being “too dark” and “too poor”; as his career continued to flourish, those very markings of racing and classing Zaki because a foundation for increasingly stamping his public image with the “authenticity” of an Egyptian citizen. At a particularly neoliberal moment in the Egyptian economy, that of the early 80s, new …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Land Of Women: Basilicata, Emigration, And The Women Who Remained Behind, 1880-1914, Victoria Calabrese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1880 and 1914, millions of Italians emigrated to all corners of the globe in hopes of earning better wages and forging a better life for themselves and for their families. This dissertation examines the role of the women left behind in the Italian region of Basilicata when their husbands emigrated, and the political, social, economic, and legal changes they experienced in their absence. During the Liberal Period, women had few political rights, and married women were dependent on their husbands, but being left on their own put them in a unique position. I argue that the Southern Italian women …

"Cracks In The Melting Pot": Native Americans, Military Service And Citizenship, Brittany A. Kelley

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This paper focuses on Native American military service in Euro-American Wars. It analyzes their reasons for fighting and compares those reasons to the reasons of other racial and ethnic groups. This paper explores how certain racial and ethnic groups are marginalized and “otherized” and how they occasionally attempt to assimilate into mainstream society through military service. Irish Americans and African Americans viewed the Civil War in this way, while Native Americans hoped they would be able to improve their individual situations. Native Americans fought for purposes of assimilation and citizenship in World War I, and while they were technically granted …

From The Swiss Protestant Reformation To The Golden Age Of Political Theory In The Geneva Of Voltaire: The Birth Of Modern Democracy, Dwight Page

Swiss American Historical Society Review

On October 31 st , 1517 Martin Luther posted 95 theses on the door of the Palast Church in Wittenberg, Germany, thereby igniting the Protestant Reformation . In 1518, Huldrych Zwingli became the pastor of the Grossmtinster in Zurich where he began to preach ideas on reforming the Catholic Church, rejecting the veneration of saints and questioning the power of excommunication.

Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …

Chinese Wines And Foreign Urns: Making Objects Of Lyric, Ryan Matthew Hintzman

Student Work

A 2016-2017 William Prize for best essay in East Asian Studies was awarded to Ryan Matthew Hintzman (Silliman College '17) for his essay submitted to the Department of Comparative Literature, "Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric.” (Edward Kamens, Sumitomo Professor of Japanese Studies, advisor.)

Ryan Hintzman’s essay, Chinese Wines and Foreign Urns: Making Objects of Lyric is a work of awe-inspiring erudition, vision, and ambition. Ranging far and wide among traditional and more recent theories of the lyric and moving boldly from 8th century poems in Japanese to 19th and 20th century poems in English, Hintzman …

Theory For A Starving Obese, Ishai Shapira Kalter

Theses and Dissertations

Theory for a Starving Obese (2017) is both a book and an installation. During the years 2015-2017 I began writing Theory for a Starving Obese; a collection of essays and art criticism about exhibitions that took place in white cubes in New York. I was following my dissatisfaction, and hoped to delve deeper into the question “What is Contemporary Art?” At the end of a process, I sent seventeen envelopes to artists who exhibited solo shows in New York and whose works I have criticized. Each envelope consists of one digital drawing (שרבוט, pronounced Shirbut), DVD with the …

Mestiza, Métis, American: How Intermixture On United States Borders Shaped Local, Regional, And National Identities, Carla L. Mendiola

History Theses and Dissertations

This project compares mestizaje in Mexican American communities of the Texas-Mexico border and métissage in Franco American communities of the Maine-Canada border, from the pre-contact period to the 20th-century. Exploring the central themes of intermixing, borders, and identity, the paper shows the long-standing presence of mixed-ancestry groups in the U.S. and investigates how social and geopolitical borders have been used to racialize and exclude these groups from U.S. history, and, ultimately from acceptance as part of U.S. identity. The comparison of Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley and Maine’s St. John River Valley follows the development of these communities and recognizes …

Becoming Indian: The Origins Of Indigeneity Among Chicana/Os In Texas, Ruben A. Arellano

History Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the idea of Mexican-American indigenous identity, or indigeneity. I argue that modern Mexican-American indigeneity progressed from the Chicana/o movement’s notion of belonging as a primordial people of Aztlan to the full-fledged embrace of Native American identity. This idea of being indigenous is traced to the colonial writers and thinkers, criollo patriots, mestizo nationalists, and the indigenists intellectuals of twentieth-century Mexico. The evolution of ethnic Mexican indigeneity culminated with cultural extremists in the first half of the last century who assumed a neo-Aztec identity. They in turn gave way to the neo-Mexika identity that emerged in the second …

'In This Dark Hour': Stefan Zweig And Historical Displacement In Brazil, 1941-1942, Edward Lawrence

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian-Jewish author and intellectual who fled Austro-fascism and Nazi Germany, and took his own life in Brazil in early 1942. The resurgence of interest in Zweig’s life in the last few decades has introduced new methods of interpretation of his life as a refugee. But many scholars have not acknowledged Zweig’s relationships he formed with South American intellectuals while in exile there. Instead, the primary focus has been on his identity as a European, and his subsequent suicide. This paper will argue that Zweig’s identity as a refugee included a radical re-interpretation of history and …

Korean Soil, Japanese Faces, American Empire: Repatriation And The Korean War Experiences Of Japanese Laborers And Japanese American Soldiers, Jaclyn S. Knitter

Master's Projects and Capstones

This paper compares the Korean War experiences of two ethnically Japanese groups that served the US military on the Korean Peninsula – second-generation Japanese American (Nisei) soldiers in the US Military Intelligence Service (MIS) and Japanese laborers – to demonstrate the salience of citizenship in the post-1945 Asia Pacific. In particular, this research addresses the question, “how did the politics of repatriation differentiate the experiences of Japanese Americans from those of Japanese nationals, both serving the US military during the Korean War?” This service ranged from (Nisei) American repatriation interrogators of Korean and Chinese civilians, to prisoners of war (POWs), …

Codofil's Ally: Local French Teachers In Louisiana, Natalie Ducote

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In 1968, in the midst of the Civil Rights Era, the Louisiana government created the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL). During this period of heightened ethnic awareness, CODOFIL aimed to rectify the damage done by prior Louisiana legislation, which prohibited French language on public school grounds. In an effort to revitalize the French language in Louisiana, the organization hired teachers from foreign francophone countries and advocated for a curriculum rooted in Standard French. According to historians, many locals felt Louisiana-specific French dialects were once again rejected. Alongside these foreign teachers were teachers local to Louisiana. Utilizing …

Reimagining Ability, Reimagining America: Teaching Disability In United States History Classes, Maya L. Steinborn

Master's Projects and Capstones

In service to the FAIR Education Act (2012) and the awareness-raising mission of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2008), this project reviews historical and educational literature about disability in the United States and provides a curriculum guide for teaching Human Rights Education (HRE) and disability studies (DS) at the high school level in California. This project traces the historical development of deficit attitudes toward disability back to the colonial era, uncovering the dichotomy between the vast resources in DS and the ableist omission of disability from K-12 curricula. Survey data and interviews further show how teachers …

Cameras As Weapons Of Resistance: Refugees Disrupting The Colonial Narrative Through Photography, Shannon Elder

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project analyzes the photography project “#RefugeeCameras”, where German photojournalist Kevin McElvaney gave disposable cameras to refugees to document their own experiences. The project includes close examination of the photography collection and considers the photographic depiction of landless people by other landless people in juxtaposition to the concept of the refugee as a ‘terrorist’. The examination of these images will reveal how photographs become a tool that can disrupt ideological stances that harm innocent people such as Islamophobia and fear mongering towards refugees that are deemed a threat by the Trump administration’s Executive Order, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist …

“The Cracked Pots Of Humanity”: Post-World War Ii American Literary Perspectives On Psychiatric Treatment/Containment Of Mental Disorders, Jennifer Chichester

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways in which characters in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and The Bird’s Nest, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces grapple with the concept of “madness” on individual and societal levels. Each of these Post-World War II novels question whether “madness” is a social construct. Is the person mad, or is society? These three novels, written in an era when inpatient psychiatric care was losing its prominence as a method for treating those deemed insane, reflect the growing trend of deinstitutionalization in the 1950s …

Paradoxes Of Violence: A Post-Colonial 'Gaze' On Chicago's Segregation, Zackary Rupp

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Although post-colonial theory was developed to examine the legacy of colonial powers, this project proposes that post-colonial theory can nonetheless fruitfully be used for a literary analysis of the Fair Housing Act to account for the typically non-colonial legacy of US segregation. Even though Chicago is not a city in the colonial context, the post-colonial discourse of violence, territorialization, and citizenship are useful tools for understanding the language in legislation that shaped American systemic segregation. Through a post-colonial lens, the research shifts the individual attention away from the marginalized offender and focuses on systemic othering that has shaped spaces suffering …

Girls Just Wanna Be President: How The History Of Female Presidential Candidates Affects Political Ambition And Engagement, Kaycee Babb

History Graduate Projects and Theses

Female political ambition drops around high school, none of the 45 presidents of the United States have been female, and the history of female presidential candidates is largely absent from public memory. This project examines the connection between social perceptions of political involvement and the history of female politicians by creating a resource website of female presidential candidates in the United States. The website is meant to encourage youth political engagement, specifically the engagement of middle school to college-aged female students to lower the gender gap of political ambition. Without representation within American politics, many young women are not inspired …

The Effects Of Historical Trauma And Gender On National Identity Within The Hmong Diaspora, Kalia Vang

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

Since 1975 the Hmong have settled in the West as a diasporic group. Their involvement in the Vietnam and Secret Wars with the United States in Southeast Asia had forced the group to flee their homes in the mountain tops of Laos. This political migration has since forced Hmong leaders to reframe Hmong national identity in the diaspora, specifically in the United States. With this, certain aspects and perspective from Hmong women on the Secret War were marginalized. Thus, this research asks the following question: why is national identity interpreted differently within the Hmong diaspora? This research project is broken …

"La Patria Es Nuestra Madre": Family Metaphor And Race In The La Guaira Conspiracy, Thomas Genova

Spanish Publications

This paper explores the intersection of race and the metaphor of the national family in the texts generated during the Conspiración de La Guaira, a failed 1797 republican independentista revolt in colonial Venezuela led by Mallorcan enlightened intellectual Juan Mariano Picornell. Turning away from traditional representations of the dynastic state in terms of paternity, the La Guaira conspirators figure the nation as a mother and creoles and Afro-Venezuelans as brother citizens. Yet, at the same time that it indicates a transition from dynastic to republican paradigms, the conspirators’ emphasis on revolutionary brotherhood serves to contain the radical notions of equality …

The Spatial Ordering Of Nabataea: An Integrated Analysis Of The Geography, Architecture, And Morphology Of Nabataean Petra, Christopher Clifton Angel

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Nabataean city of Petra is well known for its sandstone architecture and rock-hewn funerary landscape. Over the last few decades, numerous studies examined their history, culture, art, and architecture. The few studies that assessed the urban space of Petra focused on the functional properties of individual architectural forms and their nominal placement within the overall landscape. This study focused on the spatial configurations of architecture as relational to the dynamics of Nabataean politics and ritual where shifts in social order manifested similar shifts in spatial order which in turn produced and reproduced forms of social order. The production of …

University Of Southern Maine Commencement Program 2017, University Of Southern Maine

Commencement Programs

University of Southern Maine Commencement Program 2017

Adam Smith, Settler Colonialism, And Cosmopolitan Overstretch, Onur Ulas Ince

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Adam Smith has recently been celebrated as a precocious theorist of commercialcosmopolitanism who decried the injustice of imperial conquest and extraction. This paperfocuses on Smith’s endorsement of settler colonialism in North America and argues thatSmith’s newfound cosmopolitanism is overstretched. Smith welcomed settler colonies as theembodiment of the “natural progress of opulence” and spared them from his invective againstother imperial practices like chattel slavery and trade monopolies. Smith’s embrace of settlercolonies, however, involved him in an ideological conundrum insofar as the prosperity ofoverseas settlements rested on imperial expansion and seizure of land from Native Americans.I contend that Smith muffled this disturbing …

Scottish Emigration To British North America 1770-1783: The First Phase Of Scottish Highland Diaspora, Beth Pryor

History Theses

As a result of the Hanoverian victory at the Battle of Culloden, the Scottish Highlands changed forever. Parliament passed new legislation outlawing key elements of traditional Highland culture. Highland landlords would implement new economic schemes to convert subsistence farming into commercial agriculture. With the economic changes in leases, land management and rent, the Highland social structure would be reorganized. One particular strata of the class structure, the tacksmen, would find their traditional cultural role as a military leader and economic role as an estate manager stripped from them, resulting in a reduced role in Highland society. This thesis will explain …

No Foreign Despots On Southern Soil: The American Party In Alabama And South Carolina, 1850-1857, Robert N. Farrell

Master's Theses

During the 1850s in the South, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothing Party, rallied southerners culturally and politically around nativism, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic ideology. This thesis studies nativism in the Deep South and challenges existing scholarship by Tyler Anbinder and William Darrell Overdyke. Anbinder claims that southern Know Nothings held little in common with their northern counterparts and exhibited only regional characteristics. Overdyke maintains that the American Party in the Deep South participated in the national organization, but he argues that nativism appeared only as an incidental component.

An analysis of private papers, speeches, and newspapers …

Thomas Jefferson, Slavery, And The Language Of The Textbook: Addressing Problematic Representations Of Race And Power, Sarah L. Thomson

Language Arts Journal of Michigan

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to demonstrate how two written texts about Thomas Jefferson and slavery construct very different representations of the past. The paper suggests methods that teachers can use to help students critique representations of marginalized groups in written texts, and develop a more authentic understanding of the experiences of enslaved African American men and women.

The Hampton-Preston Tourist Home: A Furnishing And Interpretive Plan, Amy Mckinney

Senior Theses

My work in this thesis is only a small part of a larger, ongoing initiative at Historic Columbia to provide capital improvements to the Hampton-Preston Mansion. In 2018, the entire site will be updated to include new interpretations, HVAC improvements, and garden renovations. John Sherrer and Katharine Allen, Research Associate at Historic Columbia, led the curatorial initiative and served as my on-site mentors for this project.

Aura Of Authenticity: The Impact Of Original Objects In The Museum Guest Experience, Alyssa Frijey

Museum Studies Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to defend the maintenance of original object-based collections in museums with the argument that they provide profound, unique, and irreplaceable experiences for museum guests. Authenticity of an artifact carries with it an aura of importance which is a highly valuable means of connection within museums. Such meaning is the direct result of the manner in which human beings interpret material culture. Keeping in mind that this value can only be fully experienced through that which is original, it is crucial that original objects should be maintained in these institutions.