Digital Commons Network^™

Hellenikotita — Greekness: Constructing Greek Genre Painting, Visualizing National Identity, 1850–1900, Olga Zaferatos Karras

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1828, following a seven–year war waged against the Ottoman Empire and its nearly 400 years of subjugation, the newly–formed nation–state of Greece, “Hellas”, faced the daunting challenge of uniting a population that was as diverse as its multiple dialects. By mid–century, genre painting began to take shape. Eventually it was known in Greek as “ηθογραφία (“ethographia”) or “ethography,” from the word ήθος (ethos) or morals, referring to the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, nation, or ideology. Inspired by a literary vogue of the same name that predated genre painting, the anecdotal vignettes of …

A House Of One’S Own: Challenges And Re-Definitions Of Female Subjectivity And Domestic Space In Italian Women Writers From The 1950s To The Early 2000s, Nicole Paronzini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With an in-depth analysis of selected Italian novels written by female writers from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this dissertation addresses and discusses the challenging relationship between female identity and the home, perceived both as constraining space and metaphor of human interiority. The projects aim to show that these characters, as representative of the female individual, are capable to use the domestic space as a privilege universe in which re-defining themselves, modifying their own and other perception as passive objects of patriarchal society to the one of subjects in fieri.

If, on one hand, the house has been …

Incomplete Neutralization In Articulatory Phonology, Sejin Oh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous studies have found small but significant phonetic traces of underlying distinctions for phonologically “neutralized” contrasts. This phenomenon, often called incomplete neutralization, has been found for final devoicing in many languages, (e.g., German; Port, Robert F. & O’Dell, 1985), but has also been reported for other neutralizing phenomena, including flapping in American English (Herd et al., 2010), monomoraic lengthening in Japanese (Braver & Kawahara, 2016), vowel deletion in French (Fougeron & Steriade, 1997), vowel epenthesis in Levantine Arabic (Gouskova & Hall, 2009), among others.

In my dissertation, I explore the (in)completeness of Russian palatalization in the Articulatory Phonology framework, implementing …

The World Is Your Pulpit: A Research-Based Performance On The Broder Singers, Amanda Seigel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My capstone project is a research-based performance about the Broder Singers, the first Yiddish actors. They performed primitive musical and theatrical pieces in Yiddish beginning in the mid-19th century in non-theatrical spaces such as taverns and gardens, in Eastern Europe. They were part of a larger movement creating secular Yiddish culture beyond the religiously proscribed expressions of traditional Jewish life. Largely born and raised in traditional communities themselves, they mocked wealthy religious community leaders, utilized gender drag, and compassionately portrayed impoverished people. This white paper explores the context of their work and draws on primary sources such as memoirs, published …

Maurice Scève Avant La Délie (1535–1544). Une Étude Des Genres Mineurs À L’Origine D’Une Nouvelle Esthétique Poétique, Elizaveta Lyulekina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cette thèse propose d’étudier l’influence du poète lyonnais Maurice Scève, actif entre 1535 et 1562, sur la formation de genres littéraires et le développement de la poésie française de la Renaissance. Elle explore également la contribution considérable du poète à la création de l’identité linguistique et culturelle française.

This dissertation studies the influence of the Lyonnais poet Maurice Scève, active between 1535 and 1562, on the formation of literary genres and the development of French Renaissance poetry. It also explores the poet’s considerable contribution to the creation of French linguistic and cultural identity.

Cùng Với Nhau Chung Tay: A Collaborative Project With Vietnamese American Youth, Khanh Le

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of my research is to document, remember and reflect on the experiences of Vietnamese Americans. To create a space in which Vietnamese American youth can co-labor (García, 2020) and co-produce knowledge to disrupt the silence surrounding their lived experience in the U.S., I drew across methodological traditions for this collaborative project. In doing so, I seek to answer the following questions:

1. How do Vietnamese American youth view/narrate their lives and relationships to the past and the present in the U.S. and Vietnam?
2. What do youths’ narratives communicate about their transtrauma?

This collaborative project drew from translanguaging and …

Computational Representation Of Russian Aspectual Morphology With A Focus On Perfective Prefixation, Natalia Tyulina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work performs an empirical analysis of Russian aspectual morphology focusing on perfective derivation via prefixation. We present a number of computational experiments measuring productivity of morphological processes of prefixation that form perfective verbs from simple imperfective verbs. Several hypotheses related to the argument structure of perfective verbs vs. their prefixed derivatives are tested statistically. Furthermore, we investigate semantic relatedness by computing cosine similarities of unprefixed verbs vs. their prefixed versions. Finally, we analyze the correlation between productivity, frequency, argument structure and semantic similarity across both simple imperfective – prefixed perfective verb forms, and various perfectivizing verbal prefixes.

Towards A Decolonial Feminist Aesthetics: Gender, Race, And Empire In Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’S Dictee, Juwon Jun

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Defining revolutionary struggle as a struggle between fictions, Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts that art in revolution is a spiritual presence which widens the conception of freedom. Political struggle is constituted by clashes in differently written and conceived realities—hinged on the creation and realization of multiple liberatory fictions. Liberation then requires us to attend to creating new myths and conceptions of freedom which can free us from the current structures of domination that produce current subjects and realities. If culture is indeed an “essential element in the history of a people,” mapping decoloniality in cultural and aesthetic fields may be essential …

Lexical Stress Realization In Mandarin Second Language Learners Of English: An Acoustic And Articulatory Study, Boram Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of lexical stress in Mandarin second language (L2) learners of English, as well as in first language (L1) speakers. The present study used a minimal pair respective to stress location (e.g., OBject versus obJECT) obtained from a publicly available Mandarin Accented English Electromagnetic articulography corpus dataset. In the acoustic domain, the use of acoustic parameters (duration, intensity, F0, and vowel quality) was measured in stressed and unstressed vowels. In the articulatory domain, the positional information from tongue tip (TT), tongue dorsum (TD), upper lip (UL), lower lip (LL), and jaw (JAW) were …

The Tale Of Two Countrysides: The Shaping Of Landscapes In Hispania And Spanish Latin America, Andrew R. Abrams

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The way that culture expands and transforms in a colonial context has often been viewed in a top-down approach. This thesis focuses on the spread of culture in the Roman conquest of Spain and the Spanish conquest of Latin America. By framing the argument with a discussion on Romanization, this paper shows the presence of the ideas surrounding Romanization in a new context. By investigating what material culture shows, this thesis looks to the countryside to find examples of cultural change. It argues that the villa landscape should be seen as the indicator of the Romanization of Hispania. The structure …

The Impact Of Information Presentation Format On User Purchase Decision-Making, Muhammad Jawad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Online reviews have garnered considerable attention, especially in recent years, from scholars in various domains (such as information systems and marketing) seeking to understand their role in purchase decision-making. With the growing popularity of online review videos, however, understanding the role of information presentation format in online decision-making becomes crucial. While prior research has explored how presentation formats affect users’ perceptions differently, the extent of these differences and their implications in purchase decision-making stages are not yet fully understood. Specifically, this dissertation work examines the role of presentation format of online reviews in two decision-making stages: 1) choice-reduction stage, which …

Working Memory Task Performance In Children With Sli: A Behavioral And Erp Study, Megan V. Mcveety

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In addition to language deficits, children with Specific Language Impairment often show deficits in tests of various aspects of working memory, including capacity, updating, and selective attention. The purpose of the present study is to examine the specific drivers of differences in working memory processing in 8–11 year-old children with and without SLI using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. Participants completed an n-back task with three working memory load conditions (0-back, 1-back, 2-back), with the addition of distractor trials at the 1-back and 2-back levels. The SLI group performed significantly less accurately across all task conditions. The children with SLI also …

Label Imputation For Homograph Disambiguation: Theoretical And Practical Approaches, Jennifer M. Seale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents the first implementation of label imputation for the task of homograph disambiguation using 1) transcribed audio, and 2) parallel, or translated, corpora. For label imputation from parallel corpora, a hypothesis of interlingual alignment between homograph pronunciations and text word forms is developed and formalized. Both audio and parallel corpora label imputation techniques are tested empirically in experiments that compare homograph disambiguation model performance using: 1) hand-labeled training data, and 2) hand-labeled training data augmented with label-imputed data. Regularized, multinomial logistic regression and pre-trained ALBERT, BERT, and XLNet language models fine-tuned as token classifiers are developed for homograph …

Discursos Institucionales Y Manuales De Texto De La American Association Of Teachers Of Spanish (1912–1944): Un Estudio De La Historia Política De La Enseñanza Del Español En Estados Unidos, Inés Vañó García

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on the political history of the teaching of Spanish in the United States during the first half of 20th century. Drawing from the history of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish – AATS (1926) as a normative agent, along with key linguistic instruments created by its well-known members, this research examines its role in the creation and shaping of a new academic field in which two ideological processes were key in the configuration of this disciplinary space: hispanism and panamericanism. By identifying a collection of teaching materials, this project explores the normative model and methodologies that …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

Quod Inane Vocamus: Lucretius’ Void In Seventeenth-Century Italy, Carlo Bottone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the seventeenth century, the revival of atomic theories and the beginning of barometric experiments sparked a philosophical debate on the existence and the nature of void, which in turn generated new attention to the ancient disputes on void and prompted new interpretations of Lucretius’ examination of inane (De Rerum Natura, I.329-397). Commentators began to discuss the passage beyond the ancient philosophical tradition and in relation to modern ideas and recent discoveries, while Vacuists appealed to Lucretian arguments to prove or deny the existence of an absolute void interspersed among corpuscles.

My research contributes to the scholarship on …

Evaluating The Role Of Gender In Dementia-Related Language Deficiencies, Kelsey Bourque

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Typically, about 60% of dementia patients are women. Researchers have historically dismissed this imbalance as a result of the life expectancy for women being longer, and since age is the primary risk factor associated with dementia, and women’s longer lifespan equates to a higher percentage of the dementia patient population (Mielke, 2018). While the exact cause of dementia is unknown, researchers and clinicians have historically treated male and female populations the same, asserting that there is no significant difference between the two sexes in regards to detecting dementia. The present study aims to address this potential gap in dementia research, …

Navigating Ocha: Lgbt Practitioners' Participation And Navigation Of Lucumí, Carlos M. Camacho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Lucumí/Santería in New York City, with a focus on transgender people. This work uses qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations to look at how LGBT people navigate ritual space and people politics in Lucumí. As part of contemporary social shifts, many are seeking alternative spaces of spiritual practice and that includes LGBT people. LGBT people and trans people in particular are seeking Lucumi and being drawn in, this dissertation looks at some of these mechanisms. In addition, this dissertation looks at how home is created or …

The Effect Of Speaking Rate On Vowel Variability Based On The Uncontrolled Manifold Approach And Flow-Based Invertible Neural Network Modeling, Jaekoo Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant (“good”) and task-relevant (“bad”) parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token variability in articulation and acoustics can be decomposed into “good” and “bad” parts and how speaking rate changes the pattern of these two from the Haskins IEEE rate comparison database. Furthermore, it is examined whether the “good” part of variability, or flexibility, can be modeled directly from speech data using the flow-based invertible neural networks framework. The …

When Saeed Betrays Fuad: Laughing At The Mechanized Occupation, Ezgi Demirors

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis comparatively explores the emergence of the comic in the novel The Secret Life of Saeed The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi and the film The Time That Remains directed by Elia Suleiman, by building on Bergson’s theory of mechanization. By tracing Bergson’s idea that comic effect is created through the creeping up of the mechanical on the living, the establishment of the “mechanical occupation” as a source of the comic will be elucidated. The comic will be explored in terms of the ways in which both texts offer a new historicizing operation, being works that focus on the narration …

Semantic Network Activation Contributes To The Relationship Between Mood And Inhibition, James S. Maniscalco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prior research has identified several relationships between mood and executive functions. Very broadly, these findings generally suggest that positive moods are associated with enhanced cognitive performance, particularly in working memory and learning. However, recent studies note that there are some instances in which negative moods may benefit select executive skills, such as those involved in divided attention and inhibition. In sum, these findings indicate that positive moods favor top-down, heuristic, or relational processing, whereas negative trait moods favor bottom-up, detail-oriented processing. However, a clear mechanism by which these effects occur has yet to be identified.

The most compelling theories that …

A Schema-Theoretic Approach To Hierarchy In Eighteenth-Century Tonality, Simon K. S. Prosser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prevalent modern-day theories of tonal hierarchy for eighteenth-century music, especially those influenced by the ideas of Heinrich Schenker, have been called into question by schema theorists such as Robert Gjerdingen and Vasili Byros, who argue from both cognitive and historical evidence that eighteenth-century tonal cognition was sequential or “windowed” rather than hierarchical. This dissertation seeks to recuperate the concept of tonal hierarchy in eighteenth-century music, drawing on research that reconstructs the implicit tonal theories of the partimento and thoroughbass traditions, as well as concepts of hierarchy from schema theory itself, to formulate a historically and cognitively grounded theory of tonal …

Further Toward Minor Literatures, Aaron Hammes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Minor literature is literatures of the minoritarian, not simply that produced by (cultural, ethnic, racial, gender-expressive, sexual, ability, age) minorities. Further Toward Minor Literatures operates from this decisive distinction to trace the contours and potentialities of one minoritarian literature, the contemporary transgender novel in the US and Canada. This study is premised in part on putting the fiction itself on a plane with theoretical and critical sources, creating a dialogue that does not privilege one discourse over the other. Minor literature is self-theorizing, perhaps even authotheoretical, in its expressing and fulfilling the mobile orientations of its minoritarian communities. This study …

Cross-Linguistic Morphosyntactic Influence In Bilingual Speakers Of Jamaican Creole And Jamaican English, Taryn R. Malcolm

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingualism in Jamaica is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Jamaican Creole (JC) from birth and having standardized English (sE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from Jamaica to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence (CLI) impacts morphosyntax as JC and sE differ in morphosyntactic constructions, including verb tense- marking, subject-verb agreement, and copula use. While much of the work in the field of CLI has examined spoken language pairs with varying degrees of similarity (or difference) between the languages, examining CLI in a …

Between Occitania And Al-Andalus: Reconsidering The Emergence Of Troubadour Melody Through Algorithmic Analysis, Veronica Maria Da Rosa Guimaraes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How the musical and poetic traditions of the troubadours arose remains unknown, despite a century of scholarship that has attempted to account for their seemingly ex nihilo appearance in late twelfth-century Europe. Scholarly debate was particularly intense during the first half of the twentieth century and revolved around two competing theories: the Andalusi theory, which linked the troubadours to the poetic-musical traditions of medieval Muslim Iberia (also known by its Arabic name al-Andalus), and the Aquitanian theory, which argued that the troubadours were rooted in the folk and sacred traditions of the Aquitanian region. Since the 1980s, interest in the …

From An Art To A Science: Features And Methodology In Computational Authorship Identification, Jonathan I. Manczur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nearly thirty years ago, the United States Supreme Court revaluated the criteria for accepting forensic science and expert testimony, challenging Forensic Linguistics to assert itself as a reputable science. Much work has been produced in the interim to that end, but much still needs to be accomplished to satisfy the judicial standards. Computational linguistics has the potential to provide that necessary analytical framework. This paper’s intent is two-fold. First, there are two competing theories on the proper features necessary to identify an unknown author. Four features were drawn from the syntactic computational linguistics tradition and four from computational stylometry to …

Phonetic Contrast In New York Hasidic Yiddish Vowels: Language Contact, Variation, And Change, Chaya R. Nove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in New York Hasidic Yiddish (HY) peripheral vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/, and compares them across four generations of native speakers for evidence of change over time. HY vowel tokens are also compared to English vowels produced by the New York-born speakers to investigate the influence of language contact on observed changes. Additionally, the degree to which individual speakers orient towards or away from the Hasidic community is quantified via an ethnographically informed survey to examine its correlation with /u/-fronting, a sound change that is widespread in the non-Hasidic English-speaking …

Deserving To Belong: Complex Narratives Of Working And Learning In Self-Contained Spaces, Emily B. Clark

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using the tools of narrative, discourse, and visual analysis, this study examines the sensemaking of educators and former students who work(ed) and learn(ed) in self-contained special education settings. In three individual interview sessions (and one final sensemaking session), I interviewed fourteen educators and nine former students who work(ed) and learn(ed)in different kinds of self-contained settings within the New York City public school system.This project is not about a specific school, as self-contained classrooms exist in different configurations and locations throughout the city and the country. To protect the participants, all names and references to specific schools and programs have been …

Put Yourself First (In A Sexy Way): Postfeminist Beauty Messaging And Resistant Media Texts, Margarita Artoglou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The makeover montage trope is one of the most recognizable in media content aimed at young women, sending the message that social status and acceptance are only a new outfit and face of makeup away. While this trope and its message have been heavily critiqued by scholars, the message that beauty—and all its social benefits—can be achieved through consumerism has not disappeared, though the means by which this message is conveyed has changed. As a result of companies co-opting feminist rhetoric, conforming to standards of beauty has been recast as a “choice” one makes for herself, often wrapped in the …

Baccio Del Bianco At The Court Of Spain: Early Modern Scenic Design In Context, Pamela Thielman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the life and work of seventeenth-century artist and architect, Baccio del Bianco, to imagine alternative research strategies for histories of theatre. Traditional scholarship of theatre design is rooted in art historical practices, which has limited the consideration of influences beyond visual culture. It has also posited Italian theatre culture as the driver of innovations in Early Modern theatre design. In this project, I argue for and engage in a practice of scenic design historiography that replaces Italy as the dominant actor in the theatrical scene of this period with a more nuanced approach that places emphasis on …