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The Children Of The Cuban Revolution In The Diaspora: From Internationalism To Transnational And Cosmopolitan Imaginaries, Marelys Valencia

Open Access Dissertations

My dissertation investigates the intermingling of discourses of migration and aesthetics within global market dynamics in the cultural production of late Cuban émigrés in the U.S. and Europe, to whom I refer as “the children of the revolution” —following Mette Louise Berg. I argue that this understudied migratory generation has replaced the diasporic teleology of return of the exile community with other imaginaries. As such, my dissertation sheds light not only on the varying ways of being Cuban in today’s world, but also on the different routes of the children of the revolution in the diaspora. By engaging in a …

Éticas Y Estéticas De La Profanación: Redes Y Tensiones En La Literatura Peruana Y Venezolana Del Entre Siglos (1880-1910), Luz Ainai Morales Pino

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes a selection of literary productions from Peru and Venezuela´s entre siglos (1880-1910) from a relational perspective that combines some of the tenets of literary studies, visual culture studies, and gender studies. This dialogical approach is groundbreaking in as much as it puts in relation a set of texts that have never been studied together, given their apparent aesthetic and ideological divergences. With this method, I aim to problematize the taxonomies set by the critical tradition, as well as to articulate a wider and more complex perception of Perú and Venezuela´s entre siglos literary production. In that sense, …

Bicultural Beauty: How Latina And Asian American Women Interpret American Beauty Advertising, Katy Snell

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how bicultural-identified Latina and Asian American women interpret, negotiate, and utilize American beauty advertising in their identities as well as provides analysis concerning the broader marketplace ideologies embedded in the texts. This work is two-fold, utilizing critical textual analysis to examine advertisements featuring Latina and Asian women to then inform the questions for in-depth interviews between myself and 60 self-identified bicultural Asian and Latina American women. Under the paradigm of cultural studies, I utilized critical cultural theory, rhetorical agency, distinctiveness theory, and visual representation theory. In the in-depth interview section, I found that this burgeoning group of …

Over The Edge Of The World: Irish Convict Writing And Contemporary Australian Literature, Barbara M. Hoffmann

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that Irish convicts transported to Australia in the nineteenth century influenced Australian nationalism and national culture. Using the principle of oceanic studies that the material conditions of sea travel are shaping influences, I look in the first chapter at journals as well as a manuscript newspaper written by Irish Fenian political prisoners on board the convict ship Hougoumont. The restrictions and conditions of the ship encouraged these Fenians to practice a subtle, personal, and metaphoric form of nationalism, carried out through telling stories of themselves and the Irish experience. The second and third chapters turn …

Cartographies Of Social Death: Abjection And The American Dispossessed, Allison N. Harris

Open Access Dissertations

Cartographies of Social Death: Abjection and the American Dispossessed argues that property violence acts as a nexus for social death and abjection in the United States. The project considers how nineteenth- and early-twentieth century dispossessory U.S. legislation haunts late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels. Attending to the particularity of space and borders, Cartographies maps the legal, socio-cultural, and psycho-linguistic constructions of personhood in novels framed by these legislations. I propose an intersectional collective “American dispossessed” concatenated by their experience of property vulnerability as subjects formed in relation to death. I develop a theory of intersubjective abjection to posit an optimistic but not …

Agency In Eating Disorders: American Literary And Visual Memoirs Of Anorexia And Bulimia, Jenny Platz

Open Access Dissertations

In my dissertation I examine the representation of self-creation through anorexia and bulimia in memoiristic narratives, blogs, and YouTube videos in contemporary American culture. I argue that the highly crafted characterizations and structures of the anorexic and bulimic memoirs and blogs implement the disorders into temporary tools of self-care that grant the subjects agency through their pursuits of maturation and identity creation and cannot be simplified into mere warnings and retellings of the dangers of the eating disorders. I am locating my research in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century to encompass the emergence of eating disorder memoirs, Ana …

Organellar Genome Evolution In Red Algal Parasites: Differences In Adelpho- And Alloparasites, Eric Salomaki

Open Access Dissertations

Parasitism is a common life strategy throughout the eukaryotic tree of life. Many devastating human pathogens, including the causative agents of malaria and toxoplasmosis, have evolved from a photosynthetic ancestor. However, how an organism transitions from a photosynthetic to a parasitic life history strategy remains mostly unknown. Parasites have independently evolved dozens of times throughout the Florideophyceae (Rhodophyta), and often infect close relatives. This framework enables direct comparisons between autotrophs and parasites to investigate the early stages of parasite evolution. Parasitic red algae have traditionally been defined as either ‘adelphoparasites’, which infect hosts within their same family or tribe, or …

Complex Glycan Utilization Preferences Of Human Gut Bacteria, Yunus Emre Tuncil

Open Access Dissertations

Complex glycans, making up dietary fiber, have gained significance in recent years as they are the main energy source for the colonic microbiota which are physiologically important for the host health. Understanding glycan utilization strategies of the members of this community is essential to maximize beneficial health outcomes obtained from them. In order to investigate how the members of our gut microbiota utilize glycans and activate their respective polysaccharide utilization loci (PULs), we performed a series of time-course assays in which two model organisms, Bacteroides thetaiotamicron (Bt) and B. ovatus (Bo), were individually grown in a medium containing carbohydrates utilized …

Bad Girls In Corsets: Women And The Transgressive Body In The Nineteenth Century, Colleen Warwick Green

Open Access Dissertations

Women, and their bodies, posed an increasing anxiety for Victorian society. Culturally and outwardly, the Victorian era strove to maintain a level of decorum that, increasingly, the nineteenth-century woman were, rebelling against. The urge for women to break through social barriers and constraints binding them to the century created a divergence in thought from the traditional mores of the past, in turn affecting the ways in which womens’ bodies were portrayed, displayed and manipulated by the authors and artists of the century.

As women entered actively entered into spaces once closed to them, they furthered the rift of uncertainty and …

Device Design Factors For Enhancing The Functionality Of Chronic Intracortical Microelectrodes, Heui Chang Lee

Open Access Dissertations

Intracortical microelectrodes are devices used in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) to help regain lost motor, sensory, and cognitive functions of individuals with neurological disorders. However, the long-term performance of microelectrode arrays is hampered by a series of inflammatory tissue responses. The consequence of the inflammatory response is the formation of a dense astroglial sheath around the vicinity of the electrode, impeding the electrical conduction between the electrode and neurons. Furthermore, due to the cascade of neuroinflammatory events, the number of neurons is significantly reduced near the electrode, manifested by decrease in signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the yield of electrodes. Over time, …

Poetry Matters: Radical Politics In Postmodern American Poetry, Christopher J. Padgett

Open Access Dissertations

Directly or indirectly, poetry produced in the postmodern era is implicated in the politics of the time. Postmodern American poetry, then, is not reducible to a single poetic mode or to a specific set of stylistic features. In other words, a more comprehensive understanding of postmodern American poetry can be made by employing a flexible version of Raymond Williams’ notion of uneven development, a theory that insists on the synchronic existence of dominant, residual, and emergent cultural elements. As the stylistically and politically diverse work of the six poets—Susan Howe, Robert Grenier, Gary Snyder, A.R. Ammons, Sherman Alexie, and Kenneth …

Help-Seeking Intention Among College Students: Cross-Cultural Study Between East Asian International Students And Domestic Students In The Unites States, Ji Yun Kang

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to understand East Asian international student’s underutilization of counseling services (versus U.S. domestic students) by applying Theory of Reasoned Action/Planned Behavior (TRA/PB) and Ludwikowski, Vogel, and Armstrong (2009)’s stigma model to help-seeking. Participants were 146 East Asian international students and 210 domestic college students at Purdue University. AMOS 23.0 for Structural Equation Modeling was used to conduct a Latent Mean Analysis (LMA) and a multigroup analysis. The multigroup analysis results found that help-seeking intention was explained by the same hypothesized model in both groups, which was based on the TRA/PB (Ajzen, 2012) and the …

Pedagogy And Profit: Multiethnic Literature, Gender And Young Adult Publishing, Allison S. Layfield

Open Access Dissertations

This project argues that the adult/young adult division has the effect of maintaining social difference—especially along the lines of race and gender—while simultaneously ignoring the process of maintaining social hierarchies that occurs during the publication, reviewing and educational selection processes. Chapter One brings together the history of YAL as a pedagogical tool with its publishing history in order to show that both forces have redefined the genre in response to changing notions of social responsibility tied to American citizenship. There were five major eras within the history of young adult literature, each of which responded to changing notions of citizenship. …

Knitting Rebellion: Elizabeth Zimmermann, Identity, And Craftsmanship In Post War America, Maureen Lilly Marsh

Open Access Dissertations

At mid 20th century, hand knitting in the United States was practiced as a minor and fading chore of the domestic economy, with decreasing pattern publications in national women’s magazines, and the demise of Vogue Knitting Book by the late nineteen-sixties. By 1990, it had rebounded into major new publications in periodicals and books, new and revived artisanship practices, gallery exhibitions and major international conferences and gatherings. A driving figure in this resurgence was the knitter, writer, teacher, designer, and publisher Elizabeth Zimmermann. With her initial publication in 1955 up to her retirement in 1989, Elizabeth’s philosophy of knitting stressed …

Using Reality Television And Media Narratives As Political Commodities To Sell Audiences On The 2016 United States Electoral Campaign, Ramon Febus

Open Access Dissertations

Reality television cultural and media narratives were used and marketed in the 2016 United States Electoral Campaign to reach and incite audiences and media consumers. Film analysis, television analysis, culture studies, rhetorical analysis, multi cultural discourse analysis, and social factor analysis were used as methods to contextualize, explain and juxtapose reality television media discourse as political marketing for audiences. Factual entertainment and reality television are historized to explain the current political environment and how it relates to the media atmosphere of television, social media and analyzing audiences. It is concluded that neoliberal narratives have led to the current media landscape. …

Fibroblast Growth Factor 23 Directly Targets Hepatocytes To Promote Inflammation In Chronic Kidney Disease, Saurav Singh

Open Access Dissertations

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a global health problem that affects 10-15% of the adult population worldwide and significantly increases the risk of death. Patients with CKD develop marked elevations in circulating levels of the phosphaturic hormone, fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23), which correlate with the stage of disease, and are associated with higher risk of mortality. Chronic inflammation is a hallmark of CKD. Circulating levels of inflammatory cytokines, such as C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) are significantly elevated in CKD patients and increase with disease progression. This inflammatory burden has been suggested to be …

Reimagining Cubanidad: Transnational And Alternative Spaces In Contemporary Cuban Cultural Production, Eva Silot Bravo

Open Access Dissertations

The dissertation surveys the impact of the 1990s crisis in the de-construction of the revolutionary and exile imaginary in Cuban literature and music respectively, by less politically visible agents and cultural spaces within and outside the island. By conducting close readings of novels written during and about the crisis, a series of thematic coordinates that delineate a post-Soviet literary moment are identified. The analysis of the negotiation of narratives of identity and practices of music production documents a relatively unexplored transnational network of music collaborations among singers, songwriters and academically trained musicians that massively migrated at the time. The study …

Applying World Music Pedagogy Techniques In The Intermediate String Orchestra: A Curriculum For The Study And Performance Of Latin American Folk Music, Sarah Josephine Gongaware

Open Access Dissertations

The purpose of this project was to create an intermediate string orchestra curriculum which develops string techniques through the study and performance of music from Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Puerto Rico. This year-long curriculum encompasses five, country-specific units which can be interspersed throughout the academic year. Each unit includes musical arrangements which vary in style, genre, or originating region. These arrangements are accompanied by lesson plans which include cultural and historical background information, listening suggestions, learning objectives, learning sequence, and assessment strategies. The musical arrangements seek to develop intonation, left-hand positions, bow distribution, string crossings, bowing styles, and reinforce …

Towards A Cultural Approach Of Transatlantic Integration, Jorge Arturo Smith Carbajal

Open Access Dissertations

The increasingly complex challenges faced by the Western world since the beginning of the twenty-first century have fostered scholarship on culture and values as important explanatory factors of international relations. Such theoretical shift offers the opportunity to develop new avenues of research. Transatlantic relations are one of them. On the one hand, great emphasis has been placed on security issues in the wake of World War II through NATO and on economic issues in the wake of the world financial crisis through TTIP. On the other hand, although the Euro-American relationship has been characterized by strong differences, it nevertheless shares …

Technical Communication In Place-Making Professions: Exploring The Network Pictures Of Urban Designers, Fernando Sanchez

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation addresses how professional writing as a field can pay attention to broader definitions of design in order to help further conversations of spatial justice (the act of helping to promote equity in matters of development in urban spaces). I begin by noting the conversations that have circulated regarding the relationship between urban design and rhetoric, noting that professional writing can help add a unique lens to the conversation. The second chapter provides an overview of how design is discussed in technical communication scholarship. Here, I showcase how most of these discussions regarding research in design have centered on …

Influence Of The 3d Microenvironment On Glioblastoma Migration And Drug Response, Ruth Marisol Herrera Perez

Open Access Dissertations

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly invasive brain cancer characterized by poor prognosis. Despite significant efforts by the basic and clinical research community our understanding of GBM progression and recurrence has been incremental. Improvements in therapeutic response have been dismal, and GBM continues to be the deadliest tumor of the central nervous system, with patient average survival rate of 12 months. Synergistic relationships that the tumor cells establish with the brain microenvironment have been proven fundamental for successful tumor progression and maintenance. Yet, many in vitro GBM studies are performed in formats that fail to recapitulate the most essential component of …

Memories That Won't Desert. Transnational Legacies Of Francoism And The Spanish Civil War In 21st Century Novel, Comic And Film., Julie Samit

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation examines contemporary representations of Francoism and the Spanish Civil War and emphasizes the Republican legacy in three different media: novel, comics, and film. Its main focus is Spain, but my corpus also includes the experience of French and Mexican exiles. These works, produced for the most part by descendants of Republicans in diverse sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, establish a memorial network that goes beyond national boundaries, and that travels from generation to generation. I define the production of second and third generations who recuperate individual stories that have been repressed politically as “legacy narratives.” I argue that because …

The Potential Of Indonesian Microalgal Strains To Support Eastern White Shrimp (Litopenaeus Vannamei) Aquaculture, Wa Iba

Open Access Dissertations

Indonesia is well known for abundant aquatic resources, both marine and freshwater, including fishes, zooplankton and phytoplanktonic microalgae. However, relatively little information is available about microalgal resources despite their potential to be used as live feed in the hatchery phase of aquaculture of a number of marine species. The use of local microalgae is desirable in local hatcheries because they tend to grow better with high yield under local conditions, thus reducing the risk of culture crash and production cost while preventing disease vectors that may introduced by foreign microalgae strains. In this dissertation, the potential of Indonesian microalgae to …

An Ecology Of Place In Composition Studies, Jonathan Scott Wallin

Open Access Dissertations

Wallin, Jonathan Scott, Ph.D, Purdue University, December 2016. An Ecology of Place in Composition Studies. Major Professor: Patricia Sullivan.

The Role Of Nadph Oxidase In Neurite Outgrowth And Zebrafish Neurodevelopment, Cory J. Weaver

Open Access Dissertations

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate oxidases (NOX) are a family of enzymes that produce reactive oxygen species (ROS). The first NOX enzyme was discovered in leukocytes and associated with host defense in the immune system. Subsequent findings of ROS production in non-immune cells led to the identification of six additional NOX isoforms, and opened new avenues for research into NOX-mediated cellular functions. Since then, NOX-derived ROS have been found to be involved in a tremendous number of cell signaling pathways. Of particular interest is the well-established function of NOX-derived ROS in signaling pathways that drive cytoskeletal rearrangements and motility in several …

Legal Fictions: The Trope Of Criminality In Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Brian D. Breed

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation investigates some of the ways in which nineteenth-century American literatures interrogate liberal subjectivity through the trope of the criminal. Specifically I argue that the texts treated hereafter employ the trope of criminality to imagine and model transformations of liberal subjectivity. One can divide my argument into two sections, each composed of two chapters. In my first section I discuss how Uncle Tom's Cabin and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl challenge the legislation enfranchising slavery through narrated dialectics. The second section, which takes as its foci The Blithedale Romance and some of Bret Harte's short fiction …

A Journey Through Reality. Towards An Anthropo-Semiotics Of Travel Representation: Literature, Photography, Cinema. 1861-1961, Benoît Mauchamp

Open Access Dissertations

This study inquires about the aesthetics of reality at the edge of modernity, through different media and from a traveling perspective. Based on a definition of the journey as an experience of reality and a "decentering" of the mind, it examines the works of three subjective and Parisian realities and proposes a comparative media analysis, ranging from the preface to the Spleen de Paris, written in 1861, to the release of Chronique d’un été in 1961. Through a close analysis of Baudelaire’s poetry, Atget’s photography and Rouch’s cinematography, I approach these narratives as textual and visual productions that foreground the …

The Implementation And Revision Of A Middle School Music Curriculum And Workbook Developed For Vocalists Within The Guitars Over Guns Organization (Gogo) Music Outreach Program, Sherrine Mostin

Open Access Dissertations

A musical curriculum with an accompanying vocal workbook was created for the specialized needs of the Guitars Over Guns Organization (GOGO). The GOGO program is a non-profit outreach program that provides mentoring and musical instruction to at-risk middle school students through the use of popular music. Partnered with CIS (Communities In Schools) of Miami and the University of Miami, the Guitars Over Guns Organization represents an effort to keep students engaged in positive activities and provide an alternative to negative influence. GOGO offers ensemble experience as well as individual musical instruction for voice, guitar, piano, drums, rap, and trumpet. To …

Being Out Of The Loop On Pop Culture, Nicole Elizabeth Iannone

Open Access Dissertations

Being out of the loop is a form of partial ostracism that leads to lower need satisfaction (Jones, Carter-Sowell, Kelly, & Williams, 2009). Research has shown that people experience lower need satisfaction when they are out of the loop on pop culture (Iannone, Kelly, & Williams, in preparation). Five studies expanded on previous research by exploring theoretical issues and potential boundary conditions. Study 1 developed a new method and explored theoretical foundations of being out of the loop on pop culture - whether being unfamiliar makes people feel worse or whether being familiar makes people feel better. This study also …

Canvas Politics: Norman Lewis And The Art Of Abstract Resistance, Mindy H.M Tan

Open Access Dissertations

Norman Lewis (1909-1979) is best remembered, perhaps erroneously, as the first African American Abstract Expressionist. In this dissertation, I argue that he is better suited as a Social Abstractionist and an Abstract Allusionist based on the life he lived, the work he produced, and his involvement in both black art and the Abstract Expressionist movement. ^ I begin by presenting a comprehensive overview of Lewis' biography and oeuvre. Painting from the 1930s to the late 1970s, his aesthetic sensibilities can be categorized into three distinct phases: 1) in the 1930s, answering to the call for a new presentation of the …