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From Prairie To Practice: Forensic Taphonomy, Ethics, And Regional Ecology In Southeastern Nebraska, Jessica F. L. Gammage

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

Forensic taphonomy examines the postmortem processes that affect human remains within specific environmental contexts and plays a critical role in medicolegal death investigation. Despite significant advances in decomposition research, experimental studies remain geographically and environmentally uneven, limiting the transferability of postmortem interval (PMI) estimation methods across regions. The Central Great Plains are underrepresented in forensic taphonomic research despite its distinct ecological and geomorphological characteristics.

This thesis evaluates southeastern Nebraska as a specific regional setting for forensic taphonomic research by integrating ecological, pedological, and geomorphological data with current forensic literature. Tallgrass prairie vegetation, loess-derived soils, seasonal moisture variability, and dynamic fluvial …

Understanding Roma Oppression In Europe Through Humantarian Forensic Analysis, Christal L. Quinn

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

This thesis examines the marginalization of Roma people in Europe, and how humanitarian forensic practices may help Roma communities in their quest for justice and recognition. The study draws exclusively on secondary information to examine the social, political, and legal issues affecting the Roma communities, who have endured centuries of institutional discrimination, marginalization, and violence. This thesis identifies ways in which systematic oppression continues to limit Roma communities’ access to education, housing, healthcare, and legal protection through a review of relevant literature and applicable theoretical frameworks. The study also examines the relevance of forensic science, particularly its humanitarian applications, in …

Rehumanizing Anatomized Individuals: Using Osteobiographies As A Step Towards Reparative Justice, Lillie C. Turpin

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

In 1985, India banned the export of human remains. This ended the major trade route for primarily US and European anatomical supply companies. Until this point, companies like Carolina Biological Supply exploited and erased vulnerable people's identities, molding them into anonymous anatomical specimens. This study investigates the life and postmortem history of twenty-five individuals, previously used as anatomical specimens, housed at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Using an osteobiographical approach, this research reconstructs aspects of these individuals' lived experiences and examines how anatomical preparation practices reflect structural violence and apathy.

Skeletal analysis of twenty-five individuals revealed a range of biological profiles, …

“Before Your Honour?”: Divine Morality And Women Reclaiming Power In Ben Jonson’S Volpone And William Shakespeare’S Measure For Measure, Delilah G. Fleming

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how the female protagonists in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Jonson’s Volpone navigate and combat corrupting patriarchal forces through moral religious speech. In both plays, the male characters have allowed false gods and hypocrisy to dictate and justify their corrupt behavior. By engaging with the historical significance of early modern female rhetoric this thesis examines Jonson’s Celia and Shakespeare’s Isabella, and how they operate in the interest of godly virtue rather than blind obedience to patriarchal figure heads.  Volpone’s Celia is a character largely neglected in the canon, and whose speech emphasizes the relationship between female agency …

Catalyst, David Steck

Theses and Dissertations

Catalyst is a short documentary that explores why Hip Hop happened much later in Chicago than in other cities. It focuses on the story of Duro Wicks, a young Black music lover who overcame the city’s segregation to launch the first weekly Hip Hop open mic night. At the weekly $3 Sunday Hip Hop Show held at the Lower Links, young people came together from across the divided city to create a community. Though more successful than anyone could have imagined, Wicks’ dream proved unsustainable. However, it forever transformed the lives of the people it touched and launched a sustainable …

Living Doll: Puppetry, Performance, And The Art Of Greer Lankton, Madison Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that puppetry is the animating logic of Greer Lankton's practice. Drawing on archival evidence—including letters, planners, and drawings—it recovers an engagement with puppetry spanning childhood through her final years, and applies puppet theory to argue that Lankton understood selfhood as something made, not given.

Nhạc Vàng And Historical Consciousness: Affect, Memory, And The Vietnamese Diaspora, Bryan L. Le

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines nhạc vàng as a cultural form shaped by war, displacement, and diaspora. It analyzes how the music carries historical experience through lyrics and performance, and how its meanings shift across contexts. The study shows how music shapes memory, identity, and historical understanding beyond fixed political or archival frameworks.

Running Around, Kian T. Mckeown

Theses and Dissertations

Running around reflects on how living in a large city can shape one’s art practice. Daydreaming, impulse, and the frustration of daily life are explored through drawing and sculpture. Divided into 10 sections, the artist creates an index of thoughts relating to his work and the world around him.

Wind In A Dry Glass, Khia Hong

Theses and Dissertations

Khia Hong’s paper unfolds in five sections, tracing the ontological and epistemological inquiries behind her sculptures. When the sculptures stepped down from the pedestal and entered the plane of lived reality, the question “What is sculpture?” expanded into “What is sculpture, the self, and the world?” Through reflections on the self, Hong details how these questions emerge and are addressed in her material encounters.

The Knock That Never Leaves, Alvin Seenauth

Theses and Dissertations

Peter Asan, a father and small business owner in New York, faces uncertainty after immigration agents arrived at his home in 2021. A decades-old conviction resurfaced, threatening his family life. The Knock That Never Leaves follows his daily routine as he lives between stability and the ongoing fear of deportation.

“One Object Yields Both Grief And Joy”: Death In Elizabeth Cary’S The Tragedy Of Mariam (1613), Valeria Suprunova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the dialog between early ancient Roman and early modern English traditions of death and dying helps illuminate the complex relationship between tyranny and death in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) and that death is an inextricable and dynamic element of the text.

How To Talk To Zionists, Samuel Bischof

Theses and Dissertations

This paper offers rhetorical tools for weakening Liberal Zionists' commitment to the Israeli State, including a call to action, a typology of American Zionists, reflections on the author's Zionist upbringing, and an analysis of the pseudo-leftist phenomenon of Decolonial Zionism.

A Meta-Analysis Of The Impact Of Narrative Perspective On Trauma Recall Outcomes, Samantha R. Lefton

Theses and Dissertations

This study is a meta-analysis of trauma, linguistics, and emotional reactivity, examining how narrative perspective relates to emotional experiences of trauma recall. Synthesizing narrative, affective forecasting, and memory research, it finds narrative distancing to be associated with a decrease in emotional reactivity, bridging clinical psychology and applied linguistics.

Beauty Over Perfection: The Idealization Of Drapery In Classical Greek Sculpture And The Stylistic Reinvention Of Roman “Copies”, Lauren M. Grover

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Margarete Bieber’s claim that the drapery of Greek sculpture accurately reflects ancient garments. I introduce a method of tracing drapery to capture the garment pattern of sculpted drapery and argue that the drapery of Greek originals and Roman “copies” is an idealized representation of ancient dress.

Optional Freedom: The Idea Of Voluntary Slavery In Antebellum Law And Literature, Vinh T. Pham

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis elaborates “voluntary slavery” as a problem for thought for both proslavery legalists and literary writers in the antebellum period. It takes as its point of departure the passage of Southern laws throughout the 1850s that provided free Black persons the option to petition for self-enslavement to a master/mistress of their choice, and the safeguards within them that led a significant number of such petitions to be rejected. Given the political tensions of the 1850s, why would legal practitioners actively impede the option of self-enslavement? Implicit in these rejections is the possibility that self-enslavement was in some way a …

Bugs, Birds, Blue: Queer Ecologies Of Embodiment, Kinship, And Survival, Celeste B. Newcomb

Theses and Dissertations

bugs, birds, blue is a multi-channel audiovisual installation that examines queer ecology as a framework for understanding transgender embodiment, kinship, and survival amid environmental crisis and ongoing political attacks on trans life (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson). Through sculpture, projection, sound, reflective surfaces, and biological imagery, the installation places human bodily matter alongside microbial and aquatic life forms to challenge narratives that frame trans existence as unnatural, recent, or isolated. Instead, the work proposes transness as relational, adaptive, and deeply entangled with broader ecological systems. The installation is composed of two interconnected environments. On one side of the space, three aquariums rest …

Synthetic Explorations Towards Phenyl Benzazepine-Inspired Scaffolds And Synthesis Of Minor Cannabinoid Derivatives, Vishwashiv Kumar Emogaje

Theses and Dissertations

D1R is a compelling therapeutic target for correcting dopaminergic imbalances. However, existing ligands exhibit suboptimal pharmacokinetic properties. As such, we synthetically explored untouched structural modifications to the phenyl benzazepine scaffold. Cannabinoid-based molecules also display potential to treat neurological maladies and cancer. We synthesized Cannabichromene derivatives and uncovered enhanced anticancer activities.

The Storyteller: Concealment, Memory, And The Architecture Of Exile, Dylan Hirsh

Theses and Dissertations

The Storyteller is an expressive documentary investigating the life of Francis Kalnay (1899–1992). A Jewish-Hungarian intellectual, Kalnay lived as a socialist, an X-2 Counter-espionage chief for the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, an architect in Mexico, and a celebrated children's book author. The film's central conflict lies in his hidden identities and exploring how, despite his position as a high-level spy, he failed to save his sister and mother from death at the hands of the Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross government. As a filmmaker investigating a lost part of my own Jewish-Hungarian heritage, I believe Kalnay …

Why Don’T They Leave? : An Exploration Of Barriers That Prevent Women From Leaving Relationships Where They Experience Intimate Partner Violence, Jaelene Beltre

Theses and Dissertations

Relationships involving intimate partner violence (IPV) can often entail physical or verbal abuse from one individual to another in a romantic relationship. In a heterosexual relationship, the abuse most often occurs from the man to the woman. From an outside perspective, when considering the victims of abuse, one might ask simply, “Why don’t they leave?” However, the answer to this question, much like the abuse experienced in these dynamics, is nuanced. The present study is a literature review of studies meant to answer this very question. Abuse can often be some combination of physical, verbal, emotional, sexual, or financial. We …

Controlling Death: Analyzing Formal Structures In The Music Of Chuck Schuldiner, Cory Cogley

Theses and Dissertations

From 1987 to 1999, the metal bands Death and Control Denied released eight total albums, with music primarily composed by guitarist and vocalist Chuck Schuldiner. This corpus study analyzes the form of these records to demonstrate Schuldiner's compositional idiolect adhering to recognizable formal structures, specifically AABA and ABA.

They Returned Fighting: World War I, Disillusionment, And The Remaking Of African-American Political Life In New York City, Michael Frank

Theses and Dissertations

They Returned Fighting examines how Black New Yorkers used World War I service, wartime activism, and postwar protest to press claims to citizenship and democracy, even as racial violence, discrimination, and contested public memory exposed the limits of that belonging in New York City and the United States.

Embodied Archives: Cultural Memory And Material Rhetoric In Dindga Mccannon’S Fiber Arts Practice, Mary Lisette Morris

Theses and Dissertations

“Embodied Archives: Cultural Memory and Material Rhetoric in Dindga McCannon’s Fiber Arts Practice” examines mixed-media artist Dindga McCannon’s interdisciplinary career and practice. It argues that her research-driven homages to Black women’s lives and achievements challenge divisions of fine art and craft through cultural memory, material rhetoric, and textile-based archival strategies.

Humanist Abstractions: Zilia Sánchez’S Forms Of Symbolism And The Reframing Of The Picture Plane, Sydney Srnka

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the culturally specific visual language within the work of Zilia Sánchez through an analysis of her biography and semiotic strategies, arguing that meaning in her work emerges through the materiality of form, rather than through conventional stylistic categorization. It reconsiders how art-historical movements are used to organize artists, proposing a framework better suited to Sánchez’s practice. The issues of reception and legibility have shaped Sánchez’s career as an exile whose experience of displacement informed her shaped canvases. These works articulated a simultaneously unique and universal sense of experience. In researching Sánchez’s history, an alternative story for the …

Surface Gestures: Contemporary Sculpture, Material, And The Possibilities Of Finish, June Kitahara

Theses and Dissertations

Through the work of Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Patty Chang, and Jes Fan, alongside performance, cinema, cultural figures, and twentieth-century sculpture, the thesis argues that the surface of contemporary works reveals the inextricability of aesthetics from technologies of gendered racialization, sexuality, and sensation.

The I Need More Time Machine, Suzanne L. Schulz

Theses and Dissertations

The I Need More Time Machine imagines alternatives to gendered overwork and exhaustion. Incorporating animation and the interviews of twelve NYC-based female and nonbinary artists who are caretakers and full-time workers, the film dwells in spaces of fatigue and repetition — from the vantage point of commuting — then draws on forgotten feminist and utopian housing blueprints to create science fiction-inspired, fantasy-imbued sites for gendered flourishing. The animated fantasy segments imagine elastic time, deep rest, experiments in collaboration, and liberating feminist spatial possibilities

Do Clothes Make The Man? Ftm Crossdressing In The 18th-19th C. Anglo-American World, Aidrian Graber

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to analyze the legacy of "Female Husbands" and other female-to-male crossdressers in the 18/19th c. Anglo-American world and how such people can illuminate the field of transgender history.

The Effectiveness Of Utilizing An Arts-Integrated Approach With Students With Ieps In Grades K–5 Self-Contained Classrooms And Why An Arts-Integrated Approach Is Not Widely Implemented In The United States, Alexandra Leff

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines arts integration as an approach for K–5 students with IEPs. Drawing on research from Western and non-Western and data from two programs, it shows gains in academic achievement and social-emotional learning. Despite cultural and systemic barriers, findings support expanding arts integration through teacher training and policy reform.

Cannibalizing The American Dream: Memory, Materials, And Manifesting, Juan Hinojosa

Theses and Dissertations

Juan Hinojosa’s thesis explores collage and assemblage through discarded materials, pop culture, and personal history. He transforms found objects into layered works that reflect consumption, memory, and American identity. Moving between sculpture, painting, and installation, his practice examines excess, nostalgia, and the tension between what is consumed and what consumes him.

Grass As Green As Money, Andrew Dominguez

Theses and Dissertations

Grass as Green as Money looks at golf and painting, making comparisons based on class privilege and barriers to entry to examine the audience’s role in determining meaning in an artwork. It establishes historical research into the artist’s paintings’ aims to produce self-awareness within a contemporary art context.

One Long Yawn, Dylan Musler

Theses and Dissertations

Dylan Musler contextualizes her painting and ceramic work. She explores themes around time, the grotesque, transference, holes, and dirty snow piles.