Digital Commons Network^™

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, …

Non-Destructive Automated Classification Of Human And Large Mammal Long Bone Fragments: A Deep Learning Approach Using Micro-Ct Histomorphology And Grad-Cam Interpretation, Kathleen Marie Kelley

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

This study explores the development and validation of an automated, deep learning system designed to differentiate human from large mammal long bone fragments using micro-CT imagery. A comprehensive dataset of cross-sectional µCT images was assembled from human and animal skeletal material processed at the DPAA, Nebraska. A convolutional neural network (CNN) based on a ResNet-18 architecture, utilizing transfer learning from ImageNet weights, was trained to classify µCT images as human or animal. The model achieved a mean classification accuracy of 89.85% (± 8.27%) across five sample-level cross-validation folds, with a sensitivity of 96.21% and a 95% bootstrap confidence interval of …

City, Janina Butz

Theses and Dissertations

Janina Butz observes the improvised support structures holding New York City together at its edges. Looking at the found, cheap materials, spray painted, rusty, drilled, sawed, and haphazardly welded together on the sidewalk. The hard clashes of cheap material and expensive real estate lead Butz to draw a bigger picture of the fraud seams our society is tied together with.

In Spite Of And Because, Katherine Raudenbush

Theses and Dissertations

Photography collects in the home, in frames, photo albums, lockets, held up by magnets on the fridge, propped up on the desk. This thesis and accompanying photography and textile work addresses this accumulation of story and family connection, specifically multigenerational relationships between mothers and daughters.

Ephemeral System, Shibo Chan

Theses and Dissertations

Ephemeral System examines systems, feedback, repetition, and material fragility through a kinetic wax sculpture repeatedly dragged across a wooden ramp. Drawing from cybernetics, absurdist waiting, and personal mourning, the work explores how bodies and systems wear themselves down through continuous operation.

Tracings, Masie Sophia Love

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, the artist wonders what it means to remember a time and place that she has not experienced- what would this look like visualized in a painting? Love studies the histories and similarities between cartography and quilting using the two as a kind of channel to understand, record, and remember land. She explores inherited memory and the clues left behind in the form of quilts made by ancestors to create abstracted landscapes and maps of Tennessee where they lived for generations.

“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 …

Monitoring Biodiversity Growth In An Oyster Reef Restoration: Understanding How Oyster Reef Life Cycle May Impact Biodiversity., Gabriel A. Roses

Theses and Dissertations

Oyster reefs are vital to marine ecosystem health, improving water quality and providing food and habitat for diverse species. We assessed biodiversity changes for a proposed oyster reef restoration site to help guide management, future assessment, and deepen understanding of how oyster reefs function and their ecosystems dynamics.

Memory Organs, Coco Ma

Theses and Dissertations

Working across architectural sculpture, sonic works, and monoprints, this thesis explores the body as a site where memory, materiality, and cultural history converge. Drawing from muscle memory, Chinese architectural thresholds, and female narratives, it traces a body that is simultaneously physical and psychological, personal and collective, constant yet always shifting.

Initial Type Craft, Micah Angelus

Theses and Dissertations

What kinds of objects can still think when the self-contained aesthetic object can no longer be taken for granted? The historical ruptures that have placed painting under crisis have also brought into view the fallacy of artistic autonomy, raising questions about how value, contemplation, and meaning persist under conditions of deconstruction.

The Monsters We Make: Confronting Repression And Failure In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Ben Wilenski

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis builds upon psychoanalysis and Shelley’s biographical accounts to claim that, rather than creating fear through physical monstrosity, Frankenstein’s horror emerges from the return of repressed parental and social failures. While the novel never excuses its violence, it contextualizes the creature’s acts in ways that demand readers to confront complicity, neglect, and social shortcomings. The following section discusses general horror theory with a focus on notions of abjection and the synthesis of contrasting images and concepts. A baseline understanding of fear will be formed and referred to in each following segment. After establishing a basic understanding of horror vocabulary, …

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 …

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.

The Earth Holds What I Cannot, Satabdi Tripathy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores memory, landscape, identity, and gendered silence through painting, video and film. Inspired by glaciers, volcanoes, and Arctic landscapes, my work transforms personal memory into environmental memory and investigates silence, trauma, and renewal.

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.

“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.

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.

Sentential Structures In Alexander Scriabin's Op. 8 Etudes, John Paul West

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the sentence has proven to be one of the most versatile and pervasive forms in music, appearing since the mid-sixteenth century with occurrences too frequent to quantify. Sentential musical phrases emerged from music and poetry during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with the same short-short-long rhythmic impulse, originating from poetic and sing-song texts. Although the sentence is most often tied to the Classical period, it is not associated with any single era. Patterns of sentential phrases were already apparent and plentiful before the late eighteenth century, and composers used it as a device to expand musical form throughout the …

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 …

Fishing, Butchery And Smoking: Salmonids In Northeastern Iceland, Quinn Matthew Habedank

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the ethnoecology of Northern Iceland from 1880-1920 via the zooarchaeology of salmonid remains. Based on the identification of salmonid bones retrieved from Hofstaðir, the people living at the farm likely engaged in small-scale production of transportable fish products based on locally available wild resources.

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 …

The Space In Between, Cailyn Dawson

Theses and Dissertations

This paper asks the question: is it possible for our bodies to hold contradicting identities at the same time?  Through monochromatic self- portraits, the artist creates a link between quantum mechanics and painting, using the principle of superposition to depict these multiple unformed states of being.

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.

Lovepilled, Zhiliang Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

"Lovepilled" is a collection of essays and stories about love, the longing for it, and where it takes place.

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.