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Reflection On Liah Greenfeld’S Influence On My Work: National Consciousness And The Sociological Imagination, Oliver Benoit

Comparative Civilizations Review

Few scholars have influenced my intellectual development as much as Liah Greenfeld. While my academic interests emerged from an attempt to understand the Grenada Revolution and its collapse in 1983, it was Greenfeld's work that provided clarity to the questions I asked and the conceptual tools I employed to answer the question: What caused the collapse of the Grenada Revolution? Her scholarship redirected my attention away from conventional explanations rooted exclusively in economics, ideology, or political institutions and toward the cultural foundations of modernity itself. More specifically, Greenfeld's theory of nationalism provided a framework through which I came to embrace …

Unconventionality In Liah Greenfeld's Thought, Francesco Duina

Comparative Civilizations Review

As certainly all of her readers recognize and many of the contributions to this special issue will point out, Liah Greenfeld’s writings covered an almost unparalleled breadth of themes and empirical levels ⎯ from the very macro to the very micro. Hence, she produced seminal contributions to the study of empires, globalization, states in history, nationalism, economic systems, the arts, religions, groups and organizations, terrorism, animals and humans, the social sciences, science in general, mental illnesses, and the mind. Most recently, she had turned her attention to civilizations (Greenfeld, 2016, 2025). The rigor of her writing was equally impressive: it …

Serenade In C, Chloë M. Robinson

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

It was an abrupt event, and it deserves an abrupt introduction: I was seventeen years old when I survived a lightning strike. We were on a church camping trip with a large group that included my dad and younger sister. The first night at camp, over fifty teenagers played lawn games on a grassy field after dinner. It was drizzling on and off that day, and we were excited to take advantage of the momentarily clear skies. At about 7:45 p.m., I was under a tree with my dad, trying to set up a croquet set for everyone to use. …

Woven Into One, Elise Marie Hatch

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

A recent late-night walk to the library was joyfully interrupted by a young child. Her unique perspective framed by the diminished height and wholesome innocence of a seven-year-old, this child was eager to share what she, from her vantage point, saw, discovered, and valued. “Mom!” she yelled with brilliant curiosity, “Look at the lights!” Guided by her pointing hand, I too turned around. I saw my home city—where I wake and work and study every day—transformed, through the curiosity of a child, into a symbolic landscape of dappled lights and abstracted forms.

Christ As A Maternal Figure: Motherly Depictions Of The Son In The Met Cloisters, Cheynie Wray

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, Queen of France is a miniature book of hours—an illuminated, or illustrated, prayer book—made for its namesake, a queen of France. Crafted by the hand of French artist Jean Pucelle between 1324 and 1328, it is now held in the Treasury of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cloisters Collection), one of the most renowned repositories of medieval art in the United States. The book pairs scenes of the Passion of Christ with scenes of the life of the Virgin. One such pairing shows the Betrayal of Christ and the Annunciation. On the Betrayal of Christ …

The Horror Of Female Autonomy: The Transformation Of Women In Vietnam War-Era Fiction And Film, Regan Roberts

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

During the Vietnam War era, cultural fears intersected with evolving gender roles, particularly as women gained greater autonomy and visibility in public and private spheres. Fears such as these are realized and explored in the horror genre. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried explores this societal tension in its short story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” through Mary Anne Bell, a young girl whose transformation from innocent girlfriend to the monstrous Other subverts traditional femininity. I will explore this short story and its significance by contextualizing it alongside other media from the horror genre of the Vietnam War era, …

Listening, Stepping, Screaming: Feminist Interpretations Of Yoko Ono’S Art, Cordelia Lavender Mcphie

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Long before she spent her time promoting peace through music and her infamous bed-in honeymoon, Yoko Ono was breaking traditional conventions of art by creating and performing her pieces of instruction: art that requires a participating audience in order for it to be made. At the beginning of the 1960s, early in Ono’s art career and before her association with the Beatles, she was participating in new kinds of conceptual and communal art processes within (and without) the Fluxus art movement.1 She is not a solo artist in the traditional sense, because her artwork is unable to be fully realized …

Climbing Mother By Brian Kershisnik: Representing Mothers As Sacred Spaces, Elijah Clark

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Brian Kershisnik’s collection The Difficult Part is a series of artworks that includes paintings from throughout the artist’s career. A repeated theme in this collection is motherhood. One particularly striking painting, Climbing Mother, is an oil on canvas piece painted in 2013 (wall text for Climbing Mother). Brian Kershisnik is a Latter-day Saint artist known for depicting mundane things as holy and for making holy things more approachable to modern audiences. For example, Kershisnik has many paintings of the Madonna and Christ child where they are shown as real people in everyday scenarios. The normalcy of his paintings …

Persuasions And Proposals: Female Agency In Pride And Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, And Persuasion, Hannah Swenson

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

In all six of her completed novels, one of Jane Austen’s primary interests is the theme of persuasion—particularly as it relates to the lives and decisions of young women. Her final book Persuasion, published six months after her death, can therefore be read as a final culmination of the topic of accepting and exerting influence. As scholar Ann Molan has observed, Austen “penetrates the intrinsic doubleness of persuasion, its ability to destroy and fashion, its ineradicable presence in all human dealings, and the riskiness of deciding one’s lot by something uncertifiable” (108). Although the theme of persuasion and persuadability …

Patterned After Poppies, Elise Marie Hatch

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

A Self-Portrait: Staring The Male Gaze Right In The Eye, Brynne Petty

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a time of constant change. Artists were constantly finding newer and more creative, often more bizarre, ways of expressing themselves through their art. Social norms were being broken down, with the subjects of many artworks becoming increasingly unconventional, bold, and, in many cases, provocative. Women swiftly became the subject of many paintings, often portrayed in the nude. Of course, a painting of a nude woman was not a new concept, but the way in which women were depicted was increasingly more sexual and erotic. Thus, the term male gaze—defined as “a …

God’S Reflection, Shannon Lindsay

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Red Awe, Ella Marie Paligo

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Insecurity, Ana Gabriela

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

On And Off, Madison Sacriste

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Shake Hands: A Challenge And A Statement On The Woman’S Role In American Society, Brynne Petty

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Nineteenth-century America was a time ripe with change. New inventions were created every day; many felt the call of Manifest Destiny and pushed for Westward Expansion; and the country endured a brutal civil war, all while enduring the growing pains of a young nation. Every decade delivered more opportunities for artists to create paintings that told of epic battles and the courage of men as they faced the wild frontier. Yet, somewhere in the midst of all this, the American ideal shifted. Many artists turned their efforts toward creating genre paintings that depicted the everyday lives of the middle and …

Following Through Dialogues: A Chinese Scholar’S Reminiscence Of Professor Liah Greenfeld, Xinqi Jia

Comparative Civilizations Review

Ordinarily, a Chinese teacher of ethics who had never set foot in a Western country before the age of forty and a Jewish-American sociologist born in the former Soviet Union would have no reason to cross paths. Yet, throughout 2010, they spent an entire year in Boston in close contact. Should anyone someday write a biography of the late Professor Liah Greenfeld, this story alone would be excellent material for exploring how her theory has influenced the world, and how, as an outstanding theorist, she continually expanded the boundaries of our understanding of it.

Liah Greenfeld On Antisemitism As A Defining Characteristic Of The Monotheistic Civilization, Efraim Karsh

Comparative Civilizations Review

One cannot overstate the scholarly and intellectual loss occasioned by the untimely death of Boston University Professor Liah Greenfeld. Through her prodigious interdisciplinary research, Professor Greenfeld has established herself as one of the foremost social science theorists of our time and a worthy heir to the great firstgeneration nationalism scholars, in particular Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, and Anthony Smith.

Was Love Invented In Sixteenth-Century England? A Few Comments On Liah Greenfeld’S Theory Of Emotions, Dmitri Panchenko

Comparative Civilizations Review

According to Liah Greenfeld, there are three kinds of emotions. Primary emotions (such as pain, pleasure, fear, positive and negative excitement, hunger, and satiation) and secondary emotions (such as affection, sorrow, and anger) can be observed in both animals and humans. However, most human emotions ⎯ tertiary emotions ⎯ are more complex. “These, though not unusual among our pets, do not exist in the wild. Tertiary emotions are emotions such as love, ambition, pride, self-respect, shame, guilt, inspiration, enthusiasm, sadness, awe, admiration, humility and humiliation, sense of justice and injustice, envy, malice, resentment, cruelty, hatred; one can go on almost …

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Gamifying The Classroom: An Interactive Literature Curriculum, Ella Mikulecky

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis highlights an interactive literature curriculum that I have created to help youth engage more deeply with classical literary works. It takes inspiration from many existing collegiate-level curricula that fuse historical simulations with literary studies and adapts those teaching methods for high-school-age students. It also utilizes a variety of different teaching philosophies, game mechanics, and literary practices to create an ideal course for fostering engagement. This thesis provides a small sample of the curriculum along with a teacher’s handbook and reports the results of a pilot program conducted in the summer of 2025.

Mamma Mia: A Study Of Catholicism, Secularization, And Their Influences On Modern Italian, Lara Zanotti

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This study explores the relationship between religion and language by examining how Catholicism and secularization have shaped modern Italian. While the historical influence of the Catholic Church on Italian is well established, less attention has been given to how recent secularizing trends have transformed the language at lexical, discursive, and sociolinguistic levels. Addressing this gap, the study asks: how have Italy’s deep-rooted Catholic traditions and its more recent shift toward secularization influenced the meanings, frequency, and use of religiously rooted expressions in modern Italian?

Using a mixed-methods approach, this project combines corpus-based linguistic analysis with qualitative analysis. Diachronic data from …

End Matter

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

It Is Literally Impossible To Be A Monologue: The Misplaced Generalizations Of Barbie, Mabel Court

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The summer of 2023 was a hot pink pressure cooker that transformed the Barbie brand from a dusty relic into an omnipresent cultural phenomenon. The Barbie movie’s savvy marketing team colored billboards bright fuschia, with the film’s mystery-shrouded plot fueling a thunderous roar of speculative chatter that crescendoed until its long-anticipated release. A star-studded cast and auteur director Greta Gerwig were the cherries on top, rocketing the film to critical and economic success. The film was heralded as thematically ambitious, one of the best comedies in recent memory, and a “feminist self-aware masterpiece” (Barbie Movie Reviews). Although Barbie marked a …

Jael The Kenite, Madison Sacriste

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

The First Thirteen Years, Crystal Gonzalez Callison

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

No abstract provided.

The Creation Coat, Jane Wilson Boyle

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

MINERVA TEICHERT AWARD 2025

As a woman, I often wonder what my role will be in the next life, and I am struck by how much we still do not know about the earth’s creation. This coat grew out of my struggle with the idea of cocreation—how women and men work together in ways both known and unknown.