Digital Commons Network^™

Judaism, Conversion, And The Limits Of Christian Orthodoxy: The Jewish Identities Of Joseph Wolff And Michael Solomon Alexander As Detailed In Their Memoirs And Missions To Palestine, Michael Iodice

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Jewish identities of the Anglican missionaries Joseph Wolff and Michael Solomon Alexander by examining their conversion memoirs and evangelical missions to Palestine. It argues that they used Protestant biblical exegesis to emphasize their Jewish heritage and its importance in Christian prophecy.

A Taste For The Distasteful: The Aesthetics Of Gore In The Giallo And Horror Films Of Mario Bava, Thais Casado Bignardi-Engstrom

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Italian experience with horror in cinema in both psychoanalytic feminist and cognitive Marxist critical film theories through a study of visual renderings of excessive violence and sex in gothic and thrillers known as giallo films created by the film director Mario Bava. This is an art historical study that looks at Bava’s work against the Italian cultural landscape in the post war period.

A Spatial Decision Support System For Rent Estimation Of Retail Spaces In Manhattan Using Geographically Weighted Regression And Spatial Regression, Andie M. Migden Miller

Theses and Dissertations

This report outlines an automated, three-phase Spatial Decision Support System that creates models to estimate rent of retail spaces across Manhattan. First, enrich data with predictors. Second, optimize spatially aware neighborhood-level models by combining GWR, spatial regression, and non-spatial regression. Finally, visualize results in an Esri-based WebApp.

“Here’S My Brown Soul!”: Identity And Transformation In Tejano Music, Joseph Guzman

Theses and Dissertations

The music genre of música tejana, known later as Tejano music, is the musical celebration of Texas-Mexican, or tejano, identity and transformation. This paper explores and reflects on the topics of transformation, identity, and current state of Tejano music, including first-hand experiences and recent conversations with Tejano musicians.

Papering Over Colonial Legacies: Chinoiserie, Chinese Wallpaper, And Exotic Obfuscation At Harewood House, Carolyn J. Bishop

Theses and Dissertations

Harewood House is an estate emblematic of eighteenth-century evolutions in aesthetic philosophy, capital flows and social dynamics in the British empire. Built by the Lascelles family, it embraces an eclectic neoclassical decorative style that includes chinoiserie. This thesis argues that this exoticizing decorative strategy, and particularly its Chinese wallpaper – as both fine art and consumer good – translated the Lascelles' fortune, amassed through colonial exploits in the Caribbean, into advancement through domestic British hierarchies.

Land Surface Temperature Change In New York City, 1985-2023: A Historical Analysis, Andrew Kittredge

Theses and Dissertations

Intra-urban land surface temperature change is not well studied outside of a land use land cover change perspective. To address this research gap, this thesis studied the effect of biophysical change and recent development on land surface temperature (LST) change in New York City from 1985 to 2023. Mean summer values of land surface temperature, transformed difference vegetation index (TDVI), and albedo were computed for New York City census tracts during 1985 – 1994 and 2015 – 2023, along with measures of development activity since 2015. A spatial Durbin error model (R²: 0.939, RMSE: 0.538°C) significantly related TDVI …

Melancholic Maestrae: Gender, Genius, And Self-Fashioning In Baroque Female Archetypes, Rebecca Digiovanna

Theses and Dissertations

Highlighting the fissures that run through Early Modern ideas of manliness and femininity, this paper seeks to describe how, alongside pervasive imagery of pensive gentlemen, female artists of the seventeenth century developed their own deeply symbolic form of melancholic posturing, offering a groundbreaking redefinition of gender and genius in the Seicento.

Chemical Meadows, Nate Dorr

Theses and Dissertations

Chemical Meadows correlates water chemistry and photochemistry in New Jersey’s Meadowlands. A vast marshland transformed by industry and environmental contamination, the Meadowlands today are home to seven Superfund sites. By bathing 16mm film in contaminated waterways, sensitive photochemistry reveals hidden histories.

Lost In The Times Of Yesterday And Other Stories, Anes Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Lost in the Times of Yesterday is an ongoing collection of fiction that features short stories who, while varying differently from one another, are all intertwined by the themes of immigration, post-colonialism, and Arabic and Arab-American identity, aiming to capture the diverse orchestra of Egyptian and Egyptian-American voices through the lens of magical realism. Some examples: the grief of a village girl and her attempt to understand her father’s ghost; an Egyptian-American actor whose slow physical disappearance leads to an examination of identity within contemporary performance; and the life of boy born with chestnut wings in a Brooklyn apartment.

Collateral Consequences: The Effects Of Justice Processing For Violations Of Drug Laws In New York City, John K. Roman, Gregory Haugan, Benjamin Schapiro, Sofia Rodriguez

Publications and Research

As part of the NYC Police Reform and Reinvention Collaborative, the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice partnered with the Research and Evaluation Center at John Jay College and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago to examine economic factors related to drug-related crimes and arrests. Focusing on Task 84 of the Reform Initiative Tracker, NORC researchers analyzed public data to explore how neighborhood-level economic indicators, such as property values and tax assessments, correlate with drug-related criminal justice contacts. The study supports ongoing efforts to implement and monitor reforms across New York City.

Gender-Responsive Classification Of Women In Prison: A Typology Based On Mental Health Symptoms And Coping Strategies, Irina Fanarraga, Katarzyna Celinska

Publications and Research

Despite the increase in the incarceration rates of women, most correctional practices are still normed on male samples, including prison classification. Moreover, those classifications do not take into account women’s particular experiences, needs, and unique pathways to criminality. The current research proposes a typology based on female prisoners’ mental health symptoms and coping strategies. The data was derived from a survey conducted with 194 women housed in a Northeastern prison. A two-step clustering analysis was used to obtain three classification types—each with different symptomatology, coping mechanisms, demographic, and background characteristics. The results suggest that identifying and relying on needs-based typologies …

Notes From The Field - Conference Proceedings, Summer Fellows 2023, Center For Latin American, Caribbean, And Latino Studies (Clacls)

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

CLACLS features proceedings papers from the CLACLS Fellows Showcase, held on November 2nd. This day-long event showcased the research and fieldwork results of Summer Fellows, who offered presentations on their projects funded by the CLACLS Summer Fellowship. The showcase was curated into four panels: 'Bodies in Resistance,' 'Ecocritical Approaches to Latin America,' 'Migration & Diasporic Experiences,' and 'Inequality: An Intersectional Approach.'

Library Publishing In The Global South: Research In Progress, Monica Berger

Publications and Research

Little is known about library publishing in the Global South which is varied in scale, format, and longevity. Library publishing is critical to the expansion of quality diamond open access that is robustly discoverable and properly preserved. The preliminary phase of a research project identified and analyzed Global South library publishers, and gathered data for publisher scale, geography, platform, format, and ethical best practices or other indications of external vetting.

Library Faith, Self-Care, And Academic Librarianship, John P. Delooper

Publications and Research

Librarianship has long been regarded as a service-oriented profession, compared with fields such as social work, teaching, nursing, and others with a high degree of emotional labor. The roots of this run deep, perhaps as far as Dewey, who spoke of a “library spirit,” which represented an extreme commitment to patron service. Dewey, who was obsessed with efficiency, both in his personal and professional life, created and popularized the American Library Association’s motto of “the best reading, for the largest number, at the least cost.” This motto, passed on as professional wisdom and taught in library schools for decades, was …

Informal Family Archives & Oral History, Nichole M. Shippen

Open Educational Resources

Informal Family Archives & Oral History was modeled on and meant to complement the Oral History in Interdisciplinary Community College Pedagogy Funded by NEH for 2023-2025. Therefore, the description is taken from the NEH description except I modified my class to be focused on informal family archives. Students picked a family member they wished to interview for this project. They started with a cultural object exercise and built from that starting point. The class was inspired by Nairy Abdelshafy’s Informal Archives: Capturing Family Memories.

“Oral history is an interactive method and inquiry process on a topic, as well as …

Standard & Poor's Capital Iq Netadvantage Revised, Michele Costello

Publications and Research

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Capital IQ NetAdvantage is an integrat- ed Web-based market intelligence platform. NetAdvantage offers global news, market analytics, counterparty analytics, fund analyt- ics, industry research, powerful screening tools, and people search capabilities, offered separately in many competitor products, un- der one platform using transparent and trusted industry-standard sources. Users can analyze the global business operating environ- ment with information on public markets and indices, basic in- formation on foreign exchange rates and interest rates, sovereign profiles, peer groups generated with S&P Capital IQ’s proprietary relevancy score, and detailed CFRA Industry Research Reports. The streamlined interface with mostly …

Distortion And Subversion: Punk Rock Music And The Protests For Free Public Transportation In Brazil [Book Review], Mariel Acosta

Publications and Research

Around the year 2003 some friends and I from “el way,” the self-referential youth slang the alternative music scene and subculture members used in the Dominican Republic, started attending meetings for the youth political group Juventud Rebelde at the borrowed backyard of the left-wing political party Fuerza de la Revolución. The yard had a gazebo-like structure with a cemented floor and a zinc roof under which foldable chairs were arranged in a circle. There we participated in multigenerational study groups to discuss radical communist and anarchist texts in relation to current political issues, we heard talks and report backs …

Fashion, Freedom, And Feminism: The Transcendent Work Of Rosa Genoni And Her "Tanagra Dress" Reimagined, Christina Trupiano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The fashion industry itself is broad in scope and dependent upon numerous sub-industries to produce its garments. It is heavily dependent upon machinery of all kinds, yet unlike many industries today, it is still also largely reliant on manual labor, specifically minority women labor. This dependance upon manual labor correlates with its long history of worker exploitation and sweated labor. The concentration of exploitative labor practices in the fashion industry have made it a focal point in the ongoing struggle between workers and the downward pressure capitalism and industrialization placed on worker compensation, quality of life and job security.

This …

Learning From Their Flocks: Analyses Of Power On Hudson River Valley Livestock Farms, Mark D. D'Alessandro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Livestock farming in the Hudson River Valley, and selling meat in New York City farmers’ markets, are activities bounded by a region, and heavily influenced by place. Farming is represented in this project as a material linkage between urban and rural, both shaped by power relations, and the respective places of production and consumption. Interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, this study investigates placemaking and power dynamics on farms, their marketplaces, and spaces in between, during normal market conditions, and those which are anything but normal. The findings expose the reader to the representations of place in a local, niche market, …

Cinema And Ritual: Decolonial Feminist Approaches To Image-Making In The Americas And The Caribbean, Natalie M. Erazo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis project is composed of an open-access syllabus hosted on a CUNY commons site, as well as a paper that examines various films and texts responding to the theme of cinema and ritual. Referenced films will focus on ritual as a decolonial feminist methodological framework, rooted primarily in Afro-descended and Indigenous cosmovisions within Latin America and the Caribbean. From a dance ritual spell warding off U.S. imperialism in present-day Puerto Rico, to a poetic visual eulogy for murdered women in rural Mexico, to a community prayer to Yemaya bringing relief for water scarcity in Cuba to a cautionary tale …

Racial-Sexual Normativity In/As Narratives Of “The Human”, Jeri Brand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis synthesizes Sylvia Wynter’s and Judith Butler’s models of identity-formation to analyze discourses of racialization and sex/gender difference in normative scientific theories of “the human.” I argue that eugenicist white supremacism and sex/gender normativity form a single conceptual framework – what I call “the racial-sexual matrix” – throughout these scientific narratives. I then trace an epistemological consistency across 18^th- through 21^st-century scientific literature as evidence for the ongoing legacies of coloniality, white supremacy, and eugenics in current hegemonic sex/gender ontologies. Finally, I contend that the racial-sexual matrix functions as an index of proper humanness not …

Interviews And Perspectives Among Community Members Working With Undocumented Female Border Crossers In The States Along The United States-Mexico Border, Melissa M. Frasco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order to discuss immigration in the context of the United States, we must dispel the myth that immigration is monolithic. Therefore, when we discuss national identity, gender equality, policy, employment rates, and countless other ordinary topics, we are discussing immigration, as it is embedded in our history and our future. The goal of my research is to delineate the experiences of violence that female border crossers undergo in the process of crossing into the United States via the southernmost border. The data collection process involved four semi-structured interviews to collect oral histories from workers at community-based organizations. These organizations …

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …

Staying Power: The Struggle For Space And Place In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Erin E. Lilli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at how gentrification touches down, at the neighborhood and individual scale, in Crown Heights and reproduces experiences of racial inequality in home and place. Taking an historical materialist approach and drawing on residential oral histories, this study frames these reproductions of racial inequality as always-in-tension with ongoing acts of resistance from Black homeowners, renters, and long-term residents. Specifically, the research explores the conditions under which Black residents of a predominantly Afro-Caribbean neighborhood acquire and maintain—and in some cases lose—their housing and sense of place and belonging. These residents resist the varied tactics of anti-Blackness such as landlord …

Effects Of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation On Metamemory Vary By Task Difficulty, Tiffanie T. Li

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Metamemory is broadly defined as the awareness of one’s memory and consists, in part, of a process referred to as monitoring, where one is assessing the contents of their memory. Feeling of knowing (FOK) is one metamemory monitoring judgment where one rates how strongly they believe they will remember a currently unrecalled item. Prior work has shown that HighDefinition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (HD-tDCS) over the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) led to greater metamemory accuracy and that HD-tDCS over the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) led to better recall for medium difficulty questions. Other work has also shown that effects …

Border Confinement And Assistance Markets In Tijuana: Mexican Deportees’ Experiences Of Labor And Violence Between Mexico And The United States, Christian Pacheco-Gómez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnography of deportation and describes how Tijuana’s (Baja California, Mexico) border redevelopment and spatial redesign has impacted in Mexican job seekers’ mobilities, incorporation, and stigmatization after experiencing forced removals from the United States. The dissertation explores three processes interwoven in the deportees’ class experiences of migration and deportation.

First, I trace Mexican job seekers’ trajectories of labor and migratory movement before, during, and after deportation as well as their incorporation stories in Tijuana. Second, I reconstruct the political economy of reception immigrant subjects encounter after being deported from the United States and subjected by Tijuana’s border …

Essays On Real Estate, Flood Risk, And Political Sentiment, John P. Orellana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that investigate how climate change, flood risk, and political sentiment influence outcomes in housing markets.

Chapter 1: This chapter offers a brief review and discussion of several recent and seminal papers at the intersection of flood risk, climate change, and real estate, as well as a critique on some of the literature on the effects of sea-level rise on housing outcomes.

Chapter 2: FEMA flood maps serve two functions: they signal risk to homeowners and mandate insurance take-up. How these information and risk transfer mechanisms affect homeowner relocation decisions remains unknown. Combining real estate …

Culturally And Socially Responsive Teacher Professional Learning At The American Museum Of Natural History, Jessica Correa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project consists of a series of professional learning sessions to support teachers in their implementation of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-SE) using the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a resource and case study. Through the lens of Historically Responsive Literacy, the series also seeks to reestablish social science as a critical element of natural history for teachers. This series can help teachers see the museum as not only a place to explore life and physical science, but also a place to explore identity, social/emotional development, cultural studies and American History. The project includes resources and directions for …

Examining The Health Risks Of Particulate Matter 2.5 In New York City: How It Affects Marginalized Groups And The Steps Needed To Reduce Air Pollution, Freddy Castro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following examines the impact of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) on public health, focusing on its sources and effects on vulnerable populations in New York City. PM2.5 is a particle that is 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter and, because of its size, can enter the bloodstream affecting the respiratory and cardiovascular systems and further complicating the health of the immunocompromised. Recent studies have shown that PM2.5 can come from various sources, including transportation and industrial emissions, as well as indoor sources like cigarettes and gas-operated stoves. Despite reduced levels of PM2.5 due to recent policy changes and initiatives taken …

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …