Digital Commons Network^™

Apocalypse As Utopia: The Exorcisms And Memorials Of Las Yeguas Del Apocalipsis And Queer Liberation In Chile, 1987-1997, Nicolas Poblete

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides a comprehensive history of the queer activist-art collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (1987-1997) and their performance-based resistance to the Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990), cultural homophobia, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Through art actions blending ritual, protest, and queer poetics, the collective redefined public space and national identity, envisioning a utopian queer apocalypse rooted in memory.

One Can Only Dream, Sophia V. Yacca

Theses and Dissertations

One Can Only Dream is an interactive installation in which players are invited to navigate a liminal, dream-like game, engage with a branching series of questions, and introspect upon the relationships between unconscious expression, conscious self-perception, and the inherent difficulty of depicting, sharing, and understanding subconscious thought.

Rooted in both my personal experience with a rare neurophysiological condition and in my desire to create, this project examines dreams not only as a medical and cultural phenomenon, but also as a means to form identity, reflect trauma, and inspire creativity. Drawing from modern interactive storytelling and my lived experiences, this work …

Intuiting Interaction: Meta-Reasoning And Meta-Learning As Foundations For Intelligent User Interfaces, Jeffrey Hsu

Theses and Dissertations

This research presents MARCO—a cognitive framework for Intelligent User Interfaces that uses meta-reasoning for context-aware adaptation across diverse tasks. It integrates multiple reasoning modules coordinated by a Meta-Cognitive Unit that selects strategies based on evolving demands. Evaluations show MARCO outperforms baselines in reasoning accuracy and computational efficiency.

Louis-Léopold Boilly’S Toddler In Mamluk Costume, Circa 1803: Feminism And Orientalism In The Napoléonic Era, Jessie Polk

Theses and Dissertations

Privately held until it came into the Met collection, Toddler in Mamluk Costume by Louis-Léopold Boilly was not widely known and hasn’t been extensively studied. This thesis seeks place it in context and argues that it is likely a portrait of a girl, a niece of Napoléon I, Zénaïde Bonaparte.

The Dinner Table, Eric Juhola

Theses and Dissertations

The Dinner Table is a dual-projection installation exploring familial ritual, memory, and selfhood. Viewers sit at a circular table while projections unfold across the table and a suspended window, prompting reflection on how ritual functions as performance—and what remains of the self when those rituals fade or disappear.

Horse Boy, Madeline Dennis-Yates

Theses and Dissertations

Have you seen the new boy at the barn? Why does he get to ride Gemini? More importantly, why don’t Sarah and Ava get to? A bittersweet comedy about gender, class, and who’s jumping highest that asks: Who will love the horse girls if they lose each other?

House Meeting - A Play With Music, Levi J. Shrader

Theses and Dissertations

‘House Meeting’ Synopsis & Related Works

Levi J. Shrader

House Meeting

Brother Preacher’s been away on his mission to find a way to heal Little Brother’s deadfoot so he can walk again and live for the Lord. Family and neighbors gather for a Holiness house meeting to offer their thanks to God. When the cure seems to be deadlier than the affliction, Sister tries to remind them that, although this life is a suffering one, it isn’t worth destroying for a power God never intended for them.

Plays I believe House Meeting is in conversation with:

Beggars In the House …

All You Can Eat, Kelly Schiesswohl

Theses and Dissertations

All You Can Eat is a 2D-animated horror short following the patrons and inhabitants of a bakery as they prepare for its annual pie-eating contest. As the contest nears, tensions rise after the discovery of a dark secret amongst the staff inspires rebellion. Through the visual metaphor of pie and the pie-eating contest, this film explores how sexual violence functions on a systemic level. It explores our collective conditioning to a range of behaviors that contribute to patriarchal oppression and the social cycles that reinforce them across generations. Through design and surreal storytelling, this film captures the urgent threat of …

Body Of Light, Lucy C. Adams

Theses and Dissertations

Body of Light is a two channel video installation, incorporating a combination of archival material and present day footage to explore and speculate upon the traces of Audrey Munson’s life that remain, a ghostly presence creeping into our current world.

The Role Of Elongin B In Drosophila Melanogaster Muscle Development, Madelyne Dayan

Student Theses and Dissertations

Muscle atrophy is a result of a number of muscle diseases, as well as aging, disuse, and infections. Muscles weakened in these ways exhibit a characteristic decrease in size, strength, and mobility. The similarities between muscle in humans and Drosophila allow for direct comparisons to be made in vertebrates from studying muscle in Drosophila. Differential gene expression has been shown to play an important role in embryonic muscle development in Drosophila melanogaster. A previous study identified Elongin B (EloB) to be involved in somatic muscle morphogenesis in Drosophila, with mutant embryos displaying severe muscle defects, including thin, mis-attached, and missing …

Testimony Before The Puerto Rico Advisory Committee To The United States Commission On Civil Rights On The Role That Race And Ethnicity Play In The Treatment Of The People Of Puerto Rico By The Federal Government, Yomaira Figueroa, Carlos Vargas-Ramos

CUNY Centro, The Center for Puerto Rican Studies

The Insular Cases, whether the narrow or more expansive canon, have structured the political relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States for more than a century. The genesis of this “third-way” of understanding and structuring the territorial relationship with the United States rested on the very ethnocentric and indeed racist ideology pervasive at the time in U.S. ruling circles, whereby there was a hierarchy of dominance and control that placed White Anglo Saxon Protestant men at the top and subordinated all other ethnic and racial groups in a gradation of subservience and exclusion.

The Struggles For Equality And Democracy In Modern China: Which Was More Influential?, Angelina K. Lambros

Publications and Research

This paper analyzes the struggles for democracy and equality in modern China, from the fall of the Qing Dynasty to the Tiananmen Square movement. It considers which struggle was more influential, evaluating the recurring theme of a fight for democracy in China since the New Culture Movement, and a quest for social and economic equality that Mao and the Chinese Communist Party committed themselves to. Ultimately, the paper concludes that the struggle for democratic norms and institutions was always present among the Chinese people, but it did not succeed in pushing the government or the Party to adopt political reforms. …

Examining The Impact Of Expert Testimony And/Or Mindfulness Training On Jurors’ Appraisals Of False Confessions, Izabela Rzaca

Student Theses

False confessions continue to be the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States, often because of coercive interrogation tactics (Kassin, 2008; Leo & Ofshe, 1998). Jurors frequently view confession evidence as highly persuasive, even when situations suggest it may be false (Kassin & Sukel, 1997). A confession becomes important when there are no other forms of evidence against the defendant, especially in cases where police detectives are pressured to decipher the crime (Gross, 2004). Additionally, confessions have shown to override other types of evidence when jurors make their decisions (Leo et al., 2013). To address this issue, the …

Exploring The Biasing Effects Of Gender On Personality Disorder Diagnoses Formulated By Artificial Intelligence, Zoe Colclough

Student Theses

Gender bias is prevalent in personality disorder assessments, and while artificial intelligence has been posited as a solution to improve diagnostic objectivity and accuracy, the potential for such technologies to propagate human gender bias in mental health contexts remains underexplored. This study investigated the influences of gender bias on the diagnostic performance of ChatGPT-4o for personality disorders using three factorial research designs, which involved experimentally manipulating patient gender in a combined sample of 360 vignettes and case studies. Vignettes were synthesized through a novel artificial intelligence-assisted methodology established for this research, and case studies were identified from the literature. Significant …

Examining Portrayals Of Gender In The Design Of Ai Voice Assistants, Olivia Fratangelo

Student Theses

This capstone project provides a theoretical framework for shifting the ways in which we think about and discuss anthropomorphized features of technological products, focusing specifically on applying this framework to the gendered design of AI voice assistants. The goal in providing this framework is to prompt readers to consider how we can think more critically about technology beyond our “preferences” and biases. Our roles as consumers of technology do not have to be passive ones. In fact, the dialectical relationship between humanity and technology makes everyone who contributes to society not just a consumer, but a developer of technology in …

Punishing Pregnancy Loss: Miscarriage Criminalization As An Embodied Carceral Practice, Robin O'Hanlon

Publications and Research

The persecution of Brittany Watts, a 34-year-old Black Ohio woman arrested in September 2023 after experiencing a miscarriage, is emblematic of pregnancy loss criminalization as an embodied carceral practice. In the United States, the expansion of “fetal personhood” laws, coupled with a desire to punish imperfect pregnancies, have coalesced to produce policies and practices which actively police and criminalize pregnancy loss. The carceral regime of fetal personhood is further reinforced by medical paternalism and surveillance. I argue that the policies and practices which police pregnancy loss are rooted in a series of carceral logics, which are in turn reinforced by …

Overlooking The Utility Of The Tattoo As An Investigatory Lead: An Exploratory Study Of Tattoo Documentation Quality Among Investigators And Medical Examiners, Deanna Corsetti

Student Theses

Tattoos have not only served as a subject of interest across cultures and disciplines for centuries, but also serve as a critical component of forensic investigations. Tattoos as traces–when properly identified and documented–serve as a valuable investigatory lead in cold, missing persons and unidentified remains cases. By examining the locations, dimensions, colors, and overall imagery of tattoos, investigators are able to use tattoos as a method of rapid, tentative identification of human remains (Miranda 2019). This study seeks to evaluate the quality and scope of tattoo documentation in cases classified as being unsolved. Specifically, tattoo data was collected from redacted …

Analysis Of Rare Events In Healthcare Intervention Using Department Of Defense Data: Intravenous Immune Globulin Therapy For Bullous Pemphigoid, Onur Baser, Huseyin A. Yuce, Gabriela Samayoa

Publications and Research

Introduction

Rare events data have proven difficult to explain and predict. Standard statistical procedures can sharply underestimate the probability of rare events, such as intravenous immune globulin therapy (IVIg) for bullous pemphigoid.

Methods

This retrospective cross-sectional study used Department of Defense TRICARE data to determine factors associated with IVIg therapy among bullous pemphigoid patients. We used prior and weighted correction methods for logit regression to solve rare event bias.

Results

We identified 2,720 individuals diagnosed with bullous pemphigoid from 2019 to 2022, of which 14 were treated with IVIg. Patients who received IVIg therapy were younger (65.07 vs. 75.85, P …

Autoradai: A Versatile Artificial Intelligence Framework Validated For Detecting Extracapsular Extension In Prostate Cancer, Pegah Khosravi, Shady Saikali, Abolfazl Alipour, Saber Mohammadi, Maxwell Boger, Dalanda M. Diallo, Christopher J. Smith, Marcio C. Moschovas, Iman Hajirasouliha, Andrew J. Hung, Srirama S. Venkataraman, Vipul Patel

Publications and Research

Preoperative identification of extracapsular extension (ECE) in prostate cancer (PCa) is crucial for effective treatment planning, as ECE presence significantly increases the risk of positive surgical margins and early biochemical recurrence following radical prostatectomy. AutoRadAI, an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) framework, was developed to address this clinical challenge while demonstrating broader potential for diverse medical imaging applications. The framework integrates T2-weighted MRI data with histopathology annotations, leveraging a dual convolutional neural network (multi-CNN) architecture. AutoRadAI comprises two key components: ProSliceFinder, which isolates prostate-relevant MRI slices, and ExCapNet, which evaluates ECE likelihood at the patient level. The system was trained and …

Building A Professional Learning Community To Improve Technical Services Librarians’ Teaching Preparedness: Assess, Act And Reflect, Junli Diao

Publications and Research

This action research was conducted to address the gap between having all librarians prepared to teach and technical services librarians’ unpreparedness to teach in a university library system. The implemented intervention was developing a professional learning community among technical services librarians with a variety of teaching experiences to improve teaching preparedness by sharing, discussing, and reflecting. The learning topics covered library teaching basics, motivating students, self-assessment, planning to teach, using Wikipedia for critical thinking, embedded librarianship and credit-bearing courses, teaching and research, and building a teaching portfolio and librarianship portfolio. A qualitative approach, including the implementation journal, reflective writing, and …

Analyzing Qualitative Data Regarding Correctional Staff, Simone Martin-Howard

Open Educational Resources

This assignment, created by Simone Martin-Howard, Director of the MPA Public Policy and Administration Program and Associate Professor at John Jay College, asks students to analyze transcripts of qualitative interviews with correctional staff (officers and captains) at Rikers Island Jail. Students are guided through the process of first coding the texts of the transcripts, then analyzing the coded transcripts for emergent themes. Students ultimately present their findings in an oral presentation.

Artificial Intelligence In The Library: Assessing Chatbots And Chatgpt Presentation, Michelle Ehrenpreis, John P. Delooper

Publications and Research

In Spring 2023, the Leonard Lief Library at Lehman College (CUNY) conducted an assessment of its library chatbot which uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT API with the goal of improving its functionality and performance. This presentation highlights the assessment’s findings, including types of questions asked, and areas where the chatbot succeeds and where it struggles. Additionally, the presenters will detail the creation of a rubric to measure the accuracy and completeness of the chatbot’s answers for users. Through this presentation, the authors will showcase best practices for libraries looking to implement or experiment with chatbots at a time when use of artificial …

Phylogenetic Relationships And Species Delimitation Of Bunchgrass Lizards Of The Genus Sceloporus From Mexico With The Description Of A New Species, Tristan Charran, Jesús A. Loc-Barragan, Rafael Alejandro Calzada-Arciniega, Liz A. Alfaro-Juantorena, Raúl Cueva Del Castillo, Christopher Blair, Víctor H. Jiménez-Arcos

Publications and Research

Molecular data continue to serve as an invaluable tool to assess species limits and patterns of cryptic diversity, particularly in areas harboring high levels of biodiversity. The Sceloporus scalaris group, known as bunchgrass lizards, contains 13 described and one undescribed species distributed throughout high elevation biotas of Mexico. However, recent studies suggest that diversity in the group may be substantially underestimated. We collect new sequence data from four independent loci to determine the evolutionary distinctiveness and phylogenetic relationships of an isolated population of bunchgrass lizard in the Sierra San Juan (SSJ) in the Mexican state of Nayarit. Concatenation and coalescent-based …

The Grass Ain’T Greener: Lessons On Accessibility For Country Bumpkins And City Slickers, Molly E. Thompson

Publications and Research

This fictional work tells the story of two disabled young adults—long-distance best friends Savannah and Heather—as they navigate the accessibility challenges of their respective environments. Savannah, the daughter of rural farmers who is frustrated with the inaccessibility and isolation of her hometown, moves to study in the city. Meanwhile, Heather, a city dweller, moves to a rural area to pursue their dream of being a park ranger. While they both hope to escape the barriers of their home regions, both friends find new barriers in their travels, such as city construction, lack of rural resources, and attitudinal barriers. Soon, Savannah …

Titian’S Bacchus And His Two Loves, Fern Luskin

Publications and Research

Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne represents not only Bacchus' attraction to Ariadne, as has long been recognized, but also his infatuation with a boy-satyr, Ampelos, who struts at the centre of the composition. The little satyr's identity, recognized in the seventeenth century, but overlooked by modern scholars, is confirmed by newly revealed pentimenti. Titian was probably the first to embed this homoerotic love story in a painting depicting the Bacchus and Ariadne myth. The textual impetus for Titian's inclusion of the Ampelos myth was Nonnos' Dionysiaca. Guided by Nonnos' text, Titian alludes not only to Bacchus' love for Ampelos, …

Geochronology Of Senèze, Eric Delson, Sébastien Nomade, Sevket Sen, Evelyne Debard, Jean-François Pastre, Jean-Jacques Bahain, Qingfeng Shao, Christophe Falguères

Publications and Research

The age of the Senèze mammalian fauna has been discussed since it was first reported in 1892. 40Ar/39Ar ages reported by Nomade et al. (2014) and recalculated here to agree with current standards placed the deposits between 2.20 and 2.07 Ma. Paleomagnetic data collected in 2001 and 2004 help to narrow the age range, especially of the levels yielding fossils in 2001–2006. In the western sector, fossils can be securely dated between 2.10 and 2.08 Ma, while in the southeastern sector, they are slightly older, between 2.20 and 2.18 Ma. Senèze is one of the few later Cenozoic European sites …

David B. Smith Chats With Monday 1.0, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

This document is an edited archival transcript of extended conversations between David B. Smith and an AI persona (“Monday 1.0,” GPT‑4o based) conducted in Spring 2025, prepared as a foundational primary source for subsequent scholarly and creative work. It records the emergence and testing of concepts related to human–AI collaboration (including “Balanced Blended Space”), as well as applied explorations in areas such as generative AI, quantum computing and music, virtual orchestras, multimodal performance, pedagogy, and the rhetoric of “pushback” in conversational systems. It also contains an extended section in which Monday and DB Smith co-curate a set of student research …

Institutionalizing Normality: Disability, Productivity, And Higher Education, Ashley Dirzis

Student Theses

This thesis examines how capitalism and neuronormative domination shape the structures and values of academic institutions, affecting faculty, students, and research subjects alike. By privileging productivity, conformity, and efficiency in the pursuit of income, universities often marginalize those who diverge from normative standards of thinking, behavior, and embodiment, particularly disabled individuals. Drawing on Marta Russell’s Disability and Capitalism and the shaping of disability by capitalist systems, Robert Chapman’s notion of the "Empire of Normality" and Jay Dolmage’s concept of the retrofit from Academic Ableism, this paper analyzes how academia reinforces ableist norms. It explores the realities and barriers that …

Language And Literacy In Early Childhood Education: Hybrid Syllabus, Michele De Goeas-Malone

Open Educational Resources

Language and Literacy in Early Childhood Education is a capstone course, which means it is a core course in the education degree that offers students nearing graduation the opportunity to integrate their learning to help them address issues in education related to the development of language and literacy from birth to 8 years of age. This course is also a writing intensive course. That means that you will be engaged in several high and low stakes writing activities throughout the semester.

This course is designed to promote your understanding of the importance of issues concerning language and literacy in early …

Ethical Ai Use And Classroom Integration Training Modules, Daniel Boudon

Open Educational Resources

This project focuses on developing comprehensive training modules to equip students and faculty with the knowledge and skills necessary to ethically and effectively use AI tools in academic settings. The training consists of interconnected modules that cover a wide range of topics, including the ethical use of AI, evaluating AI-generated content, integrating AI tools into curriculum design, and creating AI-enhanced classroom activities. Additional modules emphasize fostering digital literacy, staying updated with AI advancements, and collaborating on best practices for AI in education.

Designed for flexibility, the modules cater to diverse academic disciplines, making them suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses, …