Digital Commons Network^™

Constructions Of New England Identity And Place In American Music, 1885-1935, Jacob A. Cohen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines constructions of New England identity and changing perceptions of urban and rural by investigating the history and reception of four American composers between 1885 and 1935: George Chadwick, Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Edward MacDowell. Using the concept of place as a critical lens, I examine how each composer engages, consciously or not, with regional identity myths and narratives, often present in other New England literature, poetry, art, and music.

In the Chadwick, Ives, and Ruggles chapters, I examine how one representative work both reflects and constructs the composer’s sense of place drawn from their experience of …

Funding Science With Science: Cryptocurrency And Independent Academic Research Funding, Edward Lehner, Dylan Hunzeker, John R. Ziegler

Publications and Research

Scientific funding within the academy is an often complicated affair involving disparate and competing interests. Private universities, for instance, are vastly outpacing public institutions in garnering large, prestigious grants. Inequities also extend to the kinds of research funded, with government, corporate, and even military interests privileging certain types of inquiry. This work proposes an innovative type of research fund using cryptocurrencies, a fast-growing asset class. Although not a total funding solution, staking coins, specifically, can be strategically invested in to yield compound interest. These coins use masternode technologies to collateralize the network and speed transaction pace. Additionally, these staking coins …

My Name Is Jing, Jing Wang

Theses and Dissertations

My Name is Jing is an essay film about my family and a commentary on the rapid changes that have taken place in Chinese society over the past five decades. The film explores personal and national memories. It shows the impact of large-scale economic and social changes on an ordinary Chinese family.

A Cross-Cultural Examination Of The Conformity Effect When Co-Witnesses Discuss A Crime, Sungil Bang

Student Theses

Prior research has shown that discussions with a co-witness can lead to the spread of false information, better known as the memory conformity effect. Specifically the effects of independence and interdependence on memory conformity have been examined. People who perceived their selves as a distinctive and unique were related to less memory conformity whereas those who identified themselves within their social relationships were not related to memory conformity. One of the limitations of the previous study is that they only focused on Western populations even though there is a cultural difference between Western European culture and Eastern Asian culture in …

Dress And Sex: A Review Of Empirical Research Involving Human Participants And Published In Refereed Journals, Sharron J. Lennon, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Jayoung Koo, Kim K. P. Johnson

Publications and Research

Our research purpose was to assess research addressing relationships between dress and sex. Our review was focused on a 25 years span (i.e., 1990–2015) and on empirical research utilizing human participants published in refereed journals. Three main areas of research emerged: (1) dress used as cue to sexual information, (2) dress and sexual violence, and (3) dress, sex, and objectification. Our analyses revealed parents do invest their young children with sex-typed dress however sometimes children demand to wear such dress. Some women intentionally use dress to communicate sexual information but inferences about women who wear sexy dress can be misinterpreted …

Making Pictures, Writing About Pictures, Discussing Pictures And Lecture-Discussion As Teaching Methods In Art History, Jari M. Martikainen

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This article discusses making pictures, writing about pictures, discussing pictures, and lecture-discussion as methods of teaching art history in Finnish Upper Secondary Vocational Education and Training (Qualification in Visual Expression, Study Programmes in Visual and Media Art Photography). A total of 25 students majoring in Visual Expression participated in the research by studying art history using picture-based–visual and verbal–methods and reflecting on their learning experiences. This article introduces the concept of ‘contextual subject-related didactics,’ by which conceptions of contemporary art history, together with the objectives and aims of the curriculum, guide the choice of teaching methods. The article argues that …

Measuring The Effectiveness Of Critical Literacy As An Instructional Method, Edward Lehner, Kaemanje Thomas, Jean Shaddai, Toni Hernen

Publications and Research

This paper reports the results of a quasi-experiment investigating the efficacy of using critical literacy as an instructional method. Using a quantitative comparison method, critical literacy is the study’s treatment. The treatment measures the final exam scores of linguistically diverse urban community college students enrolled in college developmental reading courses against 13 other statistically similar classes. The primary data are the results of a standardized final exam. This quasi-experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of a critical literacy model when employed in a community college setting. Further, this study introduces a quantitative rationale for using critical literacy and establishes the practice …

Playing God: The Bible On The Broadway Stage By Henry Bial (Review), Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Duck, Donald: A Trump Exorcism, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is a satirical short story about Trump.

Performing Human Rights In Neoliberal Asia: Artistic And Activist Engagements In Hong Kong, Malaysia, And Singapore, Melissa Wansin Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines artistic and activist performances that address issues of rights abuses in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. I demonstrate how the centralized ruling parties encourage the neoliberalization of their economies while maintaining autocratic rule, thus intensifying structural inequalities while also clamping down on dissent. This condition then exacerbates the lack of labor, sexuality, and democratic rights. Concurrently, the states’ aspirations to be part of the global capitalist market have paradoxically provided conditional spaces of political and artistic expression. I contend that existing critiques of human rights from sociological and legalistic perspectives are inadequate for contemplating this state of …

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 …

Not My Queer: Queer Representation In Contemporary Italian Serial Television, Julia Heim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary Italian television, like many national televisions, has entered a period in which the relationships the producers and consumers of televisual content are increasingly indistinguishable. In this age of media convergence the new participants of this medium work across platforms to actively engage, consume, create, and recreate both televisual content and our understanding of the medium. These new relationships require a new understanding of the semiotic and discursive changes taking place in television so that we may reconceptualize the contemporary interplay between media and society.

This dissertation maps out a new understanding of the televisual economy through an elaboration of …

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice Of Black Uplift, 1890–1905, Timothy M. Griffiths

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bricolage Propriety: The Queer Practice of Black Uplift, 1890-1905 situates the queer-of-color cultural imaginary in a relatively small nodal point: the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Through literary analysis and archival research on leading and marginal figures of Post-Reconstruction African American culture, this dissertation considers the progenitorial relationship of late-nineteenth century black uplift novels to modern-day queer theory. Bricolage Propriety builds on work about the sexual politics of early African American literature begun by women-of-color feminists of the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Hazel V. Carby, Ann duCille, and Claudia Tate. A new wave of …

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …

Encountering Place, Pedagogy, And Culture: Study Abroad And Experiential Learning In Morocco And Indonesia, Jennifer M. Pipitone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Efforts to globalize higher education have resulted in study abroad climbing to an all-time high in the United States. Amidst this growth, emergent bodies of literature have uncovered problematic trends in study abroad that reproduce hierarchies of power and colonialism, perpetuate views of an exotic cultural “other,” and privilege tourism over education. In my dissertation, I respond to these problems by exploring ways of teaching and learning in study abroad that embrace the pedagogical power of place to foster awareness of the self in relation to other, cultivate relationality, and deconstruct the exotic. Rather than focusing on the individual as …

Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how …

Black Models Matter: Challenging The Racism Of Aesthetics And The Facade Of Inclusion In The Fashion Industry, Scarlett L. Newman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The global fashion market is expanding every day, but often, the global fashion runways do not reflect that reality. On average, black models make up for six percent of models used on the runway during the fashion month calendar. This small percentage is also mirrored in advertisements and editorials featured in popular fashion magazines. In the 1970s, black models were met with great opportunities, and that success trickled down into the 1980s and the 1990s. As the 90s came to a close, top designers opted for an aesthetic that ultimately excluded models of color, but black models beared the brunt …

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …

The Art Of Cognition: British Empiricism And Victorian Aesthetics, Rachel Kravetz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The British are credited—or charged—with establishing empiricism, the view that all knowledge is embedded in sense experience. My project argues for and describes an undercurrent of idealism within British empiricism: the writers of my study investigated modes of thinking that transform sensory experience. To see their idealism at work, it is necessary to look closely at how they conceived of ideas in the mind as pictures. Given that the term “picture” was used to refer to both inner ideas and actual paintings, it is not surprising (though rarely noticed) that when empiricists wanted to consider how the mind shapes ideas, …

Communicationists And Un-Artists: Pedagogical Experiments In California, 1966-1974, Hallie Rose Scott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A network of experimental workshops, classes, and schools foregrounding interdisciplinary, non-hierarchical, and process-based approaches to teaching and learning emerged in coastal California between 1966 and 1974. These initiatives embodied a new pedagogical approach that I call “communication pedagogy,” in which students were taught to exchange ideas and collaborate, rather than to produce objects. Analyzing three central case studies, Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s Experiments in Environment workshops, Ant Farm’s proposals for learning networks, and Allan Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’ course, I argue that communication pedagogy helped to foster a new paradigm for artistic practice: the artist as facilitator and network-creator. By the mid-1970s …

Learning To Disclose: A Post Colonial Autoethnography Of Transracial Adoption, Joni Schwartz, Rebecca Schwartz

Publications and Research

This autoethnographic research project examines the transformational learning of a transracial adoptive adult mother and daughter through the lens of postcolonialism. As collaborative researchers, adult adoptee and adoptive mother, examine this lifelong learning experience through critical self-reflection, qualitative meta-analysis, and autoethnographic research methods within the overarching historical and sociopolitical context of Haiti. The findings address the lived complexities of increasingly hybrid families, particularly around the contentious boundaries of race, nationality, and colonial history, as they impact transformational learning. Color blindness and racial identity development for both mother and daughter within their relationship are explored. Implications for adult educators around the …

"The Engine Of Free Expression": The Political Economy Of Copyright In The Colonial British Atlantic And Early National United States, Nora Slonimsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1985, the Supreme Court of the United States concluded that copyright was included in the Constitution in order to serve as the “engine of free expression.” By providing economic incentive to drive artistic and scientific innovation, the nation received essential information and other tools of learning necessary to make sound political decisions. However, transnational copyright disputes, then and now, frequently resulted in complex and often contradictory understandings of free expression. The formation of copyright in America was thus a far more complex story, and it is that story that forms the basis of this project.

Amidst the many moving …

Dark Stars Of The Evening: Performing African American Citizenship And Identity In Germany, 1890-1920, Kristin L. Moriah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1920 demonstrates that black performers in Germany developed wide networks in the performance world as they sought artistic opportunities beyond the racist circumscription of the American popular stage. Their performances became emblematic of modernity, globalization, and imperial might for German audiences at the turn of the century. African American-styled blackness contributed to the formation of the city of Berlin while allowing African American performers to assert themselves on the global stage. Groups like the Four Black Diamonds had a lengthy engagement with the popular stage in Berlin, …

Dalgish Studies, Teaches The Complexities Of Languages., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“I tell my students that if they want to see the world, they might consider studying linguistics, because that is how I got my start,” says Dr. Gerard Dalgish, a professor of English at Baruch College. “I went to many different countries, and if you have that sort of background, you can live for a while working part-time or something like that if you like the particular place you’re visiting.”

These compelling words come from someone who has specialized in teaching English as a second language or ESL, as it is also known.

The Force Of Seduction: The Use Of Rape Narratives In The Plays Of Aphra Behn, Caitlyn Piccirillo

Theses and Dissertations

The English Restoration’s heightened interest in sexuality promoted the use of rape narratives on the stage. Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn her living as a playwright, used these narratives in her work (specifically in The Rover and The City Heiress) as a means of social critique.

Horizon Of Possibilities: Artists And The City In Postwar Beirut, Tatiana Mouarbes

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis narrates a history of postwar cultural production framed by urban redevelopment in Beirut, Lebanon (1989-Present). Focusing on artists engagements with the city, this thesis demonstrates how artists thought through the legacies of war inflicted upon the beleaguered city of Beirut in order to construct livable futures.

Knowledge Systems And The Colonial Legacies In African Science Education, Edward Lehner, John R. Ziegler

Publications and Research

This review surveys Femi Otulaja and Meshach Ogunniyi’s (2015) Handbook of Research in Science Education in Sub-Saharan Africa, noting the significance of the theoretically rich content and how this book contributes to the field of education as well as to the humanities more broadly. The volume usefully outlines the ways in which science education and scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa continue to be impacted by the region’s colonial history. Several of the chapters also enumerate proposals for teaching and learning science and strengthening academic exchange. Concerns that recur across many of the chapters include inadequate implementation of reforms; a lack …

First 100 Days: Two Trump Heads Are Better Than One?, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is a satirical short story about Trump.

The Possibilities Of The Video Game Exhibition, Elizabeth Legere 2762328

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an examination of video games as an artistic medium, and of their current presentation in art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as an attempt to come up with better modes of presentation for them within a museum space. Using a general understanding of video game theory and aesthetics, it might be possible to begin to look at solutions to the issues posed by current methods of presentation and interpretation, and to examine whether video games’ complicated aesthetic and artistic importance can be better highlighted by a new mode of display …

Dominican Migrants, Plural Identities, And Popular Music, Angelina Tallaj

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.