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Processing Warfare And Navigating Defeat: The Mexican Narrative Constructed During The Mexican American War Of 1846-1848, Hailee Brandt

Undergraduate Research Awards

It is undeniable that the citizens of Mexico and the United States of America processed the Mexican American War as it occurred in exceedingly different ways, and wished to remember it differently. This thesis will delve deeper into the Mexican narrative that was constructed during and in the immediate aftermath of the war, about the war, and will highlight some of the most salient differences.

Writing Back To Empire: Anticolonial Petitioning And Decolonisation In Postwar British West Africa, 1945–1960, Bright Alozie

Black Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article reexamines petition writing as a strategic form of anticolonial resistance and negotiation in British West Africa between 1945 and 1960. Focusing on Nigeria and the Gold Coast (now Ghana), it argues that petitions – often regarded as apolitical or ineffective – were in fact deeply political texts through which colonised individuals asserted rights, challenged imperial authority, and participated in shaping decolonisation discourse. Drawing on new archival petitions, colonial correspondence, and administrative records, the study analyzes how a wide range of African actors – including trade unions, veterans, women’s organisations, and youth groups – appropriated colonial bureaucratic norms to …

Graduate Portfolio, Amber Ellen Hoodjer

Graduate Research Papers

No abstract provided.

Athens, Jerusalem, And Places In Between: Secular Learning And Christian Faith In Historical Perspective, Arlin C. Migliazzo

History Faculty Scholarship

Author's preface:

This novella-length essay began life as an introductory chapter in the draft version of a text on pedagogical practices in church-related higher education. The project was made possible by a $25,000 grant received by the author in 1996 from what was then known as the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts (now the Lilly Network of Church-Related Colleges and Universities). Fordham University Press expressed interest in publishing the book but required that the opening chapter be shortened considerably. Consequently, what eventually became Teaching as an Act of Faith: Theory and Practice in Church-Related Higher Education (New …

Searching For The "Tender Places": Shoddy, Knowledge, And Material Culture In The Civil War Era, Robert William Novak

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In the American Civil War era, shoddy was difficult to understand. It was simultaneously seen as evidence of advancing western civilization as well as a disgusting amalgamation of refuse and disease that threatened those who touched it. Made from shredding woolen rags and tailors’ clippings, the recycled woolen fibers could by applied in myriad woolen blends that came to dominate the ready-made clothing industry that developed through the first half of the nineteenth century. Its application could soften coarse blends and refine the appearance of cheap cloth. When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, however, shoddy came to define …

Music, Terror, Disaster, Healing, Zuzana Jurková, Oldrich Podebradský, Zuzana Gulová

Journal of Urban Culture Research

On December 21, 2023, a student of Charles University in Prague, one of the safest places in the world, shot dead 14 academics and students. Amidst omnipresent grief and mourning, the process of coping and “healing” started immediately, manifested in particular through a series of events called the “Month for the Faculty.” This text is based on participation in and research of these activities. The theoretical part uses the Durkheim's concept of piacular rites, the aim of which is to “reconfirm [a] community's solidarity.” Following the recommendations of Bin Xu (2016), we investigated who the main agents were in the …

Abstraction In Traditional Kazakh Art, Tatigul Samuratova

Journal of Urban Culture Research

The objective of this study is to conduct an analysis of the main tendencies of abstract art in traditional Kazakh art, identify key characteristics and stages of abstraction evolution, and elucidate their impact on artists' creativity. The research employed online surveys, questionnaires, data analysis, and organization. Statistical methods were applied to process and analyze the obtained data, including comparative analysis of mean values and calculation of t-indicators. The results of the statistical analysis indicate a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups at a significance level of 0.05. The t-statistic value (4.971) exceeds the critical t-value (1.98), allowing …

The Impact Of War-Induced Trauma On Young Israelis : A Qualitative Examination Of The David’S Circle Project At Koh Phangan, Rachel Lev-Wiesel, Ofra Walter, Yael Rom-Shoshani, Nisara Jaroenkajornkij, Bussakorn Binson

Journal of Urban Culture Research

This qualitative study explores the psychological impact of war-induced trauma on young Israelis who sought refuge and healing in Koh Phangan, Thailand, through participation in the David’s Circle Project. The project provides a supportive, non-clinical space for the October 7th trauma Nova survivors and young reserve soldiers. In-depth, semi-structured interviews and group storytelling revealed common themes of emotional dislocation, mistrust, and existential uncertainty. The findings underscore the importance of alternative, culturally sensitive healing environments for trauma recovery and point to the therapeutic value of grouping in a safe physical and emotional space. Implications for trauma-informed care and post-conflict rehabilitation for …

Interpreting Literary Heritage : “Lilit Phra Law” Through Dance As Part Of Heritage Interpretation For The 21st Century, Naraphong Charassri

Journal of Urban Culture Research

This article explores how literary heritage can be reinterpreted through creative dance to sustain its relevance in the 21st century. It derives from a dissertation-length study entitled “Interpreting Literary Heritage: Lilit Phra Law through Dance as Part of Heritage Interpretation for the 21st Century.” The research employed six methods: literature review, personal experiential analysis, field studies, media exploration, symposium discussions, and structured interviews. Data collection was conducted in Thailand from March 2004 to April 2024, involving performing arts professionals, music and drama academics, senior practitioners from the Office of Performing Arts, the Fine Arts Department, Ministry of Culture, and both …

The Mythic Seeds Of Human Rights, Joshua Mackenzie Luna

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

In this thesis, I propose a causal relationship between ancient societies’ mythic corpuses and their law codes. I begin by presenting the histories and historiographies of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia to highlight important themes in their development. Then, I place their creation and flood myths side-by-side for comparison, yielding key differences in the way each group conceptualizes human form, value, and purpose. Once these key differences have been established, I compare each group’s set of slave laws to demonstrate how each law code remains philosophically consistent with its respective set of myths and diametrically opposed to the set from the …

Consumptive Femininity: (De)Constructions Of Gender And Colonization In Korean Diaspora Literature, Jack Kelly

Honors Program Theses

This paper explores how two authors with Korean heritage use similar metaphors to write about the same historical traumas. I engage close readings of two novels—Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Yu Miri’s The End of August—to interrogate how each author uses images of food/food preparation as well as images of sexual encounters to draw links between exploited bodies and exploited land. Ultimately, I find that the differences in these two authors’ approaches reflect their distance from modern centers of empire. This reminds us of the importance of having a diverse literary and historical canon that centers on authors who have …

Cascadian Independence: A Rising Movement For An Independent Northwest Amid Growing Regionalism In The United States And Canada, Elias V. Savitt

Capstone Showcase

Because of the Civil War, secession is a sore topic to many Americans. However, the idea of secession has not been confined to this notorious example. My essay focuses on the idea that Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia could be the basis for a unified autonomous or even independent entity called Cascadia. First, I discuss the history of secession as such, and the arguments that have been made pro and con as to its legality and under what situations. I then situate this within the histories of the United States and Canada and the phenomena of regionalism and independent movements. …

Unveiling Legacies: Exploring And Analyzing Cultural Artifacts In The Higbee Collection, Samantha Staller

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Anthropology and the Cummings Center to find ways to properly analyze an archaeological collection's artifacts to understand the overall significance of everything better. Before starting my research, I came up with the following questions: Can any artifacts be considered culturally affiliated? Is everything in the collection authentic? What is the overall background of the collection? Does this collection have any connection to Ohio history? Can anything in the collection be dated? Throughout the research, I will create an Excel inventory list to include qualitative and quantitative data from the artifacts to give insight into what is included in the Higbee …

Historicity And Axiology: Temporal Implications For Axiology, Bennett Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

To develop the axiology of moral (or ethical) values, phenomenological analysis must look at temporality in a way that is unfamiliar to it. This way is through knowledge and experience of the actual historical past, from which it has been separated by the Heideggerian conception of historicity and its classical Husserlian analysis of time consciousness. The development of historical studies helps to make this possible. A simple sample model of the diachronesis of the awareness of ethical significance, value, and obligation is presented. It moves the analysis from a presentist focus to the field of experience in which subjects develop …

History’S Movement: The Historical Ontology In Social Ontology, Bennett B. Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

Social ontology and the philosophy of history both concern themselves with human collectives. Social ontology is supposed to be theoretical, although the social sciences are supposed to be empirical. Philosophy of history is supposed to be theoretical, although historiography is supposed to be empirical. In fact, the a priori and the a posteriori mix in both theoretical and empirical endeavors in similar ways. Since the two endeavors hold part of their objects of inquiry in common, they should be able to speak to another. In what follows I aim to expose some of the ways their dialogue stresses and can …

Interdependence And Identity: Moral Relation In An Historical World, Bennett B. Gilbert

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

The twin concepts in the title will be introduced in the contexts of the philosophy of history and of philosophical personalism, as distinct from (though related to) their uses as logical and metaphysical categories. Overviews of varieties of philosophy of history and of basic principles I employ are foundations of the argument. Concepts, or ideas, in general have, I argue, real existence through the way that personal agents use them in creating the histories of human relations. I introduce a Personalist account, which has a more thoroughly diachronic character. Further remarks on the power of ideas to create relations expands …

“Some Small Kiss From Your Sweet Lips”: Navigating Hierarchy In Eastern Roman Letters, Nicholas Elijah Raffington

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The presence of homoeroticism in the letters of elite Byzantine men was both the product of long-term literary developments and was employed for many purposes. As a medieval society which saw a unique level of social mobility, an individual’s connections and how they managed and negotiated them within the competitive elite milieu was of utmost importance to their relevance. Letters naturally emerge as a suitable literary genre to affirm and recognize relationships, to ask for favors, or introduce a new member to the group. As the evidence suggests, homoeroticism was employed within the male-centered world of business and politics as …

Floating Signifiers: Ai, Semiotics, And The Crisis Of Meaning In Music, Kehinde Aruwajoye

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis examines how AI-generated music disrupts traditional meaning-making processes in musical expression. Through semiotic analysis (Saussure, Peirce) and cultural theory (Hall), I demonstrate how AI produces technically proficient but culturally hollow compositions, what I term "floating signifiers." Case studies reveal AI's inability to replicate the lived experiences that give music its depth, despite accurate stylistic reproductions. The work identifies three fundamental losses: contextual grounding, authentic hybridity, and historical consciousness. I propose ethical frameworks for human-AI collaboration that preserve music's essential humanity while leveraging algorithmic capabilities. Ultimately, this research shifts the debate from technical possibility "Can AI compose?" to cultural …

Action This Day: The Mathematics And Machinations That Bested The German Enigma, Jonah Weinbaum

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis presents a comprehensive and chronological overview of cryptographic techniques designed to break Enigma, beginning in 1932 and culminating in the creation of the Turing-Welchman Bombe. We discuss the mathematical theory and electromechanical implements used to decode one of history's greatest ciphers.

Reexamining the Bombe through the lens of modern group theory, we critique Alan Turing's estimation of the number of "stops" that the Bombe produces for various plaintext-ciphertext pairing structures. To address its limitations, we introduce a new framework for estimating the number of stops by extending John Dixon's theorem concerning the probability that uniformly distributed elements of …

Review: Out Of The Mouths Of Babes: Infant Voices In Medieval French Literature, Alani Hicks-Bartlett

Quidditas

Voicing a stirring call for readers to reconsider the silence and lacunae that are traditionally attributed to infancy, in her latest monograph, Julie Singer situates infancy as both an essential critical framework and an instructive, illuminative methodology through which a gaping archival silence can be rectified-that silence being literary representations of the medieval child, and specifically, the spoken life of the medieval child. As Singer argues, infancy and childhood entwine rather indiscernibly with each other in accordance with the medieval attribution of a longue dureé to infancy (Isidore of Seville, for instance, posited infancy as a stage lasting for about …

One Thing Leads To Another: A New Approach To Teaching Medieval Literature In The Twenty-First Century, Nicholas Markellos

Quidditas

Part of the problem with defining the "Middle Ages" stems from nineteenth-century historians' attempts to distinguish the Renaissance as a unique period that brought about modernity. In examining the literature of this period, however, it is clear that there was a certain element of queerness that surrounded this bewildering age. As a literature teacher, I found that my students do not always see these strange and important elements in the antiquated translations of the texts. To that end, I designed a new curriculum unit that approaches the reading of several medieval stories through a queer perspective, as well as a …

A Grammatical Analysis Of Code-Switching In K-Pop Lyrics, Sydney Christley

BYU Asian Studies Student Journal

Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, has been a rapidly growing area of study for scholars over the past few decades. However, previous research focuses on topics such as the globalization and diffusion of Korean culture instead of examining that diffusion from a linguistic standpoint. As such, there is still a gap in the literature that deals with Korean-English code-switching and, specifically, K-pop song lyrics. This paper attempts to address this gap by analyzing the grammar of English-Korean codeswitching in K-pop song lyrics according to Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame Model. This model argues that one language involved in code-switching is more …

40 Years Passing By In (A) “Heartbeat”, Christopher Janney

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This article outlines the forty-year history go Christopher Janney’s iconic performance work “HeartBeat.” Trained as an architect and jazz musician, Janney combines these two disciplines to create large interactive light/sound installations and performances. On the one hand, he attempts to make architecture more like music, more “alive” using real-time sensing devices as on his “Harmonic Convergence” installation on the Miami International Airport. On the other hand, he attempts to make music more like architecture, more physical more visual. In his “HeartBeat” performance, a dancer wears a heartbeat device that amplifies his/her heartbeat in “real time.” Over this pulse, live musicians …

Yoga Sūtra Book Four And The Yogabindu, Christopher Key Chapple

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Four themes from the fourth pāda of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra are examined here: karma (IV:2-13), individuality (IV:16), humility (IV:20-22), and freedom (IV:29-34). Affirmations and variant interpretations of these four are provided from Haribhadra Virahāṅka’s Yogabindu, most likely composed a century or two later.

Collective Karma: From The Yogasūtra To Taylor Swift, Zoë Slatoff

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The Indian knowledge traditions speak at length about karma, which is divided into three categories—accumulated (saṃcita), ripe (prārabdha), and future (kriyamāṇa). While much is said about our individual karma and how it affects our repeated reincarnation in cyclic existence, how does this affect others and how do others affect us? In other words, as this paper explores, what is our reciprocal and collective karma?

Painting Liberation: A Visual Ontology Of The Interplay Of Mind And Consciousness In Book Four Of The Yoga Sūtras, Melissa Townsend

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This presentation explores how artistic practice can illuminate philosophical questions about the nature of mind, consciousness, and liberation as articulated in Book Four of the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. Through a series of paintings that visually translate these sūtras, I propose that art offers a unique, experiential means of engaging with the complex relationship between citta (mind) and puruṣa (consciousness).

The paintings function as a form of “visual ontology,” inviting viewers to engage with abstract philosophical concepts in a sensory, tangible way. By depicting the interplay between the mutable processes of the mind and the unchanging awareness of consciousness, these …

Transformation Of Buddhist Musical Practices From The 7th-13th Centuries As A Response To Political And Social Disorder In Medieval India, Stephan I. Duran

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This article gives an account of the development of Buddhist musical practices on the Indian subcontinent from their earliest, datable instances, to the disappearance of Buddhist institutions from India proper, demonstrating the persistence of descendant traditions of Sanskrit Buddhist chant and song in contemporary Japanese, Tibetan, and Newar esoteric Buddhist communities. It is argued that the Buddhist musical theory and praxis of these three cultural spheres both preserve features of ancient and medieval Indian Buddhist music and sonically illustrate the transition from political and social order to de-centralized social organization, a shift that took place between the 7^th and …

Loving-Learning-Leading-Living: A Scholarly Personal Narrative Of A Black Gay Father, Russell E. Thornhill

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation examines the roles, challenges, and contributions of a Black Gay father, a demographic largely absent from academic discourse. While literature explores themes of the church, LGBTQ+ identities, and social justice, there remains a critical gap addressing the lived experiences of a Black Gay father. This study fills that void by elevating narratives as community activists, family leaders, and clergy members, acknowledging their transformative impact within familial and societal structures. The methodology used is the Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN). It allows for in-depth, reflective engagement with personal experiences in conversation with scholars while situating them within broader sociocultural, theological, …

Author Biographical Notes

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Disability In Exile: The "Union Of Russian Invalids" In Interwar Bulgaria And Yugoslavia, Evguenia Davidova

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the post-war experience of a specific group of war veterans: the Russian refugees after the October Revolution in 1917. What happened when disabled veterans were stateless and dispersed among several foreign states? The focus is on comparing interwar Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, two countries on opposite sides of the Great War. There the refugees established various societies, mostly dominated by the military. Drawing on unpublished archival sources, this article investigates how the Russian societies for disabled persons functioned at four levels: amid the other Russian associations in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia; among the greater diaspora known as “Russia Abroad”; …