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Revelations: Spirituality As Privileged Perspectivism In Magical Realist Distortions, Isabella Scala-Kazanecki

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the role of spiritual beliefs in the literary mode now known as magical realism in Cuban Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (1949), Indian-Born British and American Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), and a lesser-known novel, Household Saints (1981) by Francine Prose, an American writer. The Kingdom of This World, itself the originator of the mode of magical realism, has allowed me to conclude with Carpentier that magical realism arises from “privileged revelations,” as he notes in the preface to his seminal book. But these revelations in magical realism are not necessarily always of the …

Living By The Sword: Religiosity And The Terrorist Subculture Of Russian Revolutionaries, 1904-1910, Gregory I. Mcevoy

Dissertations and Theses

The Marxist dictum of “religion is the opiate of the masses” has led to a prevailing assumption in scholarship that the socialist movements of the early twentieth century have been inherently atheistic. Religion is often associated as a remnant of old, antiquated society and incompatible with the claimed modernity of socialist progress. This assumption has led to overlooking the religiosity within certain radical movements and revolutionary culture at large. Scholarship on the political underground in Tsarist Russia has, thus far, perpetuated this impression. While it is the true that the Bolsheviks and Leninist Social Democrats rejected religion as obscurantist and …

Posters, Propaganda, & Bloody Saturdays: Making China Christian: How Media & Missionaries Made China Christian, Kristy Lee

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates the role of religious groups and media in influencing the public perception of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Defining ‘Un-Americanism’ In Culture And Art: The Dies Committee’S Investigation Of The Federal Theatre Project, Matthew G. Summers

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC) expansive definition of ‘Un-Americanism’ through the body’s 1938 investigation of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). The committee, then known as the Dies Committee after its chairman Martin Dies (D-TX), publicly presented the hearings as an attempt to root out communism in a deeply compromised government program. And indeed the FTP, an ambitious New Deal Program to provide work for unemployed professionals in the theatre, had an undoubtedly leftist bent. However, the hearings were consistently focused on the project's progressive stances on issues of race and gender, and effectively exposed the underlying …

Asian-American Literature And The Family Saga: Cyclical Histories Of Racial Melancholia And Racial Dissociation, Molly Schwarz

Dissertations and Theses

This paper analyzes the novels The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, and Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig and argues how the family saga within Asian American literature draws out elements of the diaspora to best share histories across different ethnic and racial groups. There is a brief overview of the development of Asian-American literature and an explanation of how hyphenated identity is intrinsic to diasporic literatures, and then further discussion of how each of these novels contributes to the legacies of Asian-American writing and storytelling. Then, each novel is analyzed for how the various family saga …

Cosmopolitanism Now: Fragmented Belonging, Adriana Fischetti

Dissertations and Theses

Abstract

This thesis reconceptualizes cosmopolitanism for the contemporary moment as fragmented belonging, critiquing and moving beyond traditional cosmopolitan frameworks grounded in universal reason, seamless integration, or coherent identity. Through close readings of Teju Cole’s Open City and Tremor, and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, this study argues that cosmopolitanism today emerges explicitly from rupture, contradiction, and ethical struggle, shaped fundamentally by conditions of displacement, empire, surveillance, and global capitalism. Engaging critical theorists such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Pheng Cheah, and Roland Barthes, the thesis identifies fragmented belonging as an ethically charged response to …

The Sand Creek Massacre And The History Of Greater Reconstruction In The American West, Anna E. Plotnick

Dissertations and Theses

In the traditional U.S. historical narrative, the Civil War & Reconstruction era is a North vs. South story. Nevertheless, the era of western expansion, a central theme throughout the nineteenth century, has no contingent place within this traditional narrative. Meanwhile, the history of the American West and its diverse peoples appears in many textbooks as an unrelated albeit contemporaneous narrative. Separated by geographical regions, historians often do not examine these concurrent histories. However, many of these historical events and actors were interconnected. As I am interested in understanding the Reconstruction era’s national impact, I intend to explore how Reconstruction policies …

Resilience As Accusation: A Critical Examination Of Individual Resilience Training For Burnout Mitigation, Jacqueline Christianson, Bonnie Sommers-Olson, Jessica Leiberg, Dana Kaminstein

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Burnout, a syndrome of work-related exhaustion and cynicism, is prevalent among nurses and is associated with workplace stressors. Resilience training programs are a prevalent method of burnout mitigation employed by healthcare institutions that aim to improve or alter how individuals respond to chronic stressors. Through the lens of General Systems Theory, we describe resilience training as a method of individualizing a systemic problem by problematizing a response to chronic stress exposure. Resilience training may furthermore serve as a mechanism which allows subversion of institutional responsibility for nurses’ well-being in the workplace. We describe several suggestions for nurses to resist being …

Health Equity And Children With Medical Complexity/Children And Youth With Special Health Care Needs: A Scoping Review, Elizabeth A. Flasch

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Children with medical complexity (CMC) and children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN), compared with the general population, engage with the health care system at increased rates, at multiple life stages, and for a myriad of reasons (Berry et al., 2015). Operational definitions of CMC and CYSHCN are very limited, with the terms conflated and differentiated across the literature. Because of the lack of standardized definitions and general conflation of the two terms across the literature, CMC and CYSHCN will be used interchangeably for this review. Allshouse et al. (2018) defined CMC as a subset of CYSHCN “as …

Rapid Implementation Of Open-Access Pandemic Education For Global Frontline Healthcare Workers, Jacqueline Christianson, Erica Frank, Stacen Keating, Susan Boyer, Miriam Chickering

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Background

The recent global pandemic posed extraordinary challenges for healthcare systems. Frontline healthcare workers required focused, immediate, practical, evidence-based instruction on optimal patient care modalities as knowledge evolved around disease management.

Objective

This course was designed to provide knowledge to protect healthcare workers; combat disease spread; and improve patient outcomes.

Methods

A team of global healthcare workers responded by rapidly creating a competency-based online course. To promote transcultural applicability, the course was developed by an international team of more than 45 educators from over 20 countries. Course delivery included a built-in language translation tool, routine updates, and several innovative course …

Nurse Perspectives On Labor Union Participation Prior To Implementation Of A Collective Bargaining Agreement: A Qualitative Study, Jacqueline Christianson, Bonnie Sommers-Olson, Cathleen Fox, Norah L. Johnson

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Background: Patient advocacy is a duty for professional nurses; however, not all nurses are empowered to advocate for meeting patients’ needs. Participation in labor unions may serve as a venue for nurses with limited institutional decision-making authority to advocate for patient needs; however, unionization can be a time-intensive and fraught process.

Purpose: This study examined how nurses participating in a new union in an urban United States hospital described their reasons for participating in a labor union during collective bargaining.

Methods: Content analysis of participant's interviews that took place between January and March 2023, after the nurses voted to unionize …

Evaluating Nurse Conscientious Objection: Application Of A Novel Framework, Maya Zumstein-Shaha, Lucia D. Wocial, Vicki D. Lachman, Norah Louise Johnson, Cynda Hylton Rushton, Pamela J. Grace

College of Nursing Faculty Research and Publications

Certain moral beliefs and/or values about what is good or harmful can cause nurses and other healthcare professionals to object to participating in some clinical actions. Such objections are also called conscientious objections. Invocation of a conscientious objection (CO) can produce complexities in patient care and health care delivery and must be mindfully evaluated for its soundness. In this manuscript, a recently developed framework, The Ethical Evaluation of a Nurse’s Conscientious Objection (EENCO), is applied to expose hidden elements and nuances in a proposed or actual CO by nurses or other healthcare professionals, thereby illuminating strategies that can lessen associated …

Oxygen: Essential For Life And Industry, Partner A, Partner B

CHM 103 Honors, Elements, Fall 2025

Student presentation from the Fall 2025 semester of CHM 103 Honors, taught by Professor George Dombi.

Self-Preservation: Autobiography As A Form Of Archivization As Seen Through The Life And Poetic Works Of John Clare, Meghan J. Slaff

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This paper will look at how the processing efforts of an archivist mirror that of an autobiographer through the shared motivation of adding to the cultural memory or textual canon of a society. For archival purposes, the typical steps of ingesting, preparing, and presenting a collection are creation, capture, arrangement/description, and pluralization. To create an autobiography, writers take the memories that have been created and experienced due to events in their lives and capture those memories via recording in the literary form known as autobiography. These autobiographers then arrange and describe their memories in a way that shows vast similarities …

Household Archaeology Of An Eighteenth Century Settlement In Vermont, Usa, Stephen D. Butz

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The rediscovery of ruins in the mountains of Vermont may shine light on the theory and practice of household archaeology and its potential to reveal the social and economic status of the people who once resided there. To this date, there are the remains of twelve structures identified as potential dwellings located on Egg Mountain in Sandgate, Vermont, which local folklore claim were the homes for the refugees who fled from Massachusetts during Shays’ Rebellion in 1787. Shay’s Rebellion was an uprising that took place in Massachusetts led by Captain Daniel Shays in response to the unfair treatment of veterans …

Further Results On Learning Quantum Measurement Classes: Quantum Pac Model For Povm Hypothesis Classes, Arka Prabha Das

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis investigates the problem of learning from quantum systems, where each example consists of a quantum state paired with a classical outcome. The task centers on choosing an effective measurement rule from a fixed set to enable accurate prediction of the classical outcome from the quantum state. A central focus lies in understanding whether joint measurement strategies that cannot be separated into local operations offer a real benefit in terms of the number of examples needed for successful learning. We examine conditions under which a non-separable measurement within a given hypothesis class achieves strictly better sample complexity bounds compared …

Identifying The Impacts Of Land Use/Land Cover Changes On Ecosystem Services From A Geospatial Perspective In Albany County, Kyaw Khaung Thant Zin

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Ecosystem services encompass the broad array of direct and indirect advantages that people derive from nature and its ecosystems. Considering accelerating environmental change and degradation, recognizing the importance of these services is more crucial than ever, as they illustrate the many ways in which healthy ecosystems sustain human life. However, these services are diminishing at a rapid and unprecedented rate, raising global concern over both the transformations taking place and their root causes. Among the leading threats, land-use change stands out as a particularly significant one, influenced by a variety of driving factors. Albany County, New York, characterized by its …

Mythogenesis In As I Lay Dying: A Comparative Exploration Of Mythmaking And Counter-Myths, Allison K. Groupp

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This thesis explores William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through the lens of comparative mythology, arguing that the novel constructs a counter-myth that challenges dominant Western narratives. By engaging with non-Western mythological traditions—particularly Proto-Indo European, Hindu, and Indigenous cosmologies—the study reveals how Faulkner embeds symbolic structures that transcend Christian and Greco-Roman frameworks. Using semiology and structuralist frameworks developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes, the analysis deciphers a mythopoetic narrative that refocuses marginalized myths to destabilize binary oppositions such as Christian/Pagan, civilized/uncivilized, and male creation myths with female creation myths. Each chapter examines a different mythic layer: …

Essays On Place-Based Policy And Regional Economic Development, Tingting Peng

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The first chapter examines the economic impacts of large theme park openings in China from 2000 to 2020 using a newly compiled dataset on county-level theme parks and entrepreneurship. Leveraging the staggered openings of theme parks across various counties, we document three main findings. First, theme park openings lead to a 14% increase in entrepreneurial activities, especially in tourism-related service sectors. This result is robust to the instrumental variable approach, the heterogeneous treatment effect, alternative specification and measurement, and propensity score matching. Second, theme park openings generate spillover effects on neighboring counties within a 50-75 kilometer radius. Third, we identify …

Kafka In The Plague Years: Reinterpreting Absurdity In The 2020s, Chris Lownie

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

No word better encapsulates the confusion and inequality proliferating in the post-2020 global world than “absurd.” Absurdity consumes the way we interact with one another, going about life-as-usual in pocket worlds in which the individual is alienated from both oneself and others. Life is defined by a series of problems that regularly go ignored by both institution and general populace alike, but not by the human body: the effects of sustained illness and reinfection by recurrent viruses in a world that no longer acknowledges their severity nor their pervasiveness nor steps we may take towards personal safety. Daily life has …

The Emotional Side Of Migration: Peruvian Women Migrant's Experiences In The U.S., Arinka A. Abad

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Migration is a complex social, economic, cultural, and political issue. While research often highlights the positive aspects of migration, the emotional well-being of migrants is frequently overlooked. This qualitative dissertation examines the emotional experiences of heterosexual Peruvian women migrants, focusing on those who migrate either to join male partners in the United States or alone after abandonment. It analyzes how their emotional health is affected during pre-migration, migration, and post-migration stages. The study reveals persistent stressors impacting emotional well-being using migration, transnational, and human capital theories, a gender-focused perspective, and the Ulysses Syndrome or Immigrant Syndrome concept.

The research question …

School Contexts And The Construction Of Literacy Practices And Identities Among Middle School Students Of Color, Eugene K. Gyekye

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

This dissertation investigates how middle school students of color construct and negotiate their literacy identities within an urban public school's institutional, classroom, and online contexts. The study is situated at Oakville Middle School, a culturally and linguistically diverse setting that reflects the complexities of adolescent literacy education in contemporary urban environments. The research explores how students' literacy practices are shaped by their interactions with school structures, pedagogical approaches, peer dynamics, and digital platforms and how these experiences influence their development as literate individuals.

The study responds to the persistent challenge of educational inequity, particularly the disconnect between students' cultural identities …

Understanding The Dynamical Mechanisms Governing Northern Hemisphere Wintertime Persistent Flow Regimes And Their Associated Extreme Weather Events, Tyler Christopher Leicht

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Weather regimes are characterized as patterns of low-frequency variability in the middle to upper troposphere of the extratropics. Weather regimes can also be linked to variations in surface weather, making the study of weather regimes a bridge between traditional synoptic-dynamic meteorology and subseasonal-to-seasonal variability. This dissertation identifies and categorizes persistent flow regimes (PFRs), analyzes the dynamics underpinning PFR formation, identifies the linkages to atmospheric teleconnections, and examines the occurrence of surface weather extremes before and during PFRs.

PFRs are identified from 1979–2022 and grouped into five clusters using k-means clustering, which then allows for time-lag composite analysis to determine the …

Essays On Health Economics, Quan Qi

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The first chapter examines whether Medicare Part D---the largest expansion of Medicare in recent decades---had a lasting impact on retirement behavior by providing subsidized prescription drug coverage to older adults. We employ a difference-in-difference-in-differences framework that compares changes in labor supply among individuals aged 65–68 versus 55–64 in a treatment group with employer-sponsored retiree health insurance (RHI) only until age 65, relative to a control group with lifetime RHI, before and after the 2006 implementation of Part D. Using data from Health and Retirement Study (2000-2018), we find that Part D reduces full-time employment by 6.52 percentage points among the …

Waveforms For Next Generation Non-Stationary Channels, Zhibin Zou

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Waveform design aims to achieve orthogonality among data signals/symbols across all available Degrees of Freedom (DoF) to avoid interference while transmitted over the channel. Precoding involves the decomposition of the channel matrix into orthogonal components for the purpose of constructing a precoding matrix that is then combined with the data signal to achieve orthogonality in the spatial dimension. On the other hand, modulation uses orthogonal carriers in a certain signal space to carry data symbols with minimal interference from other symbols. However, it is widely evident that next Generation (xG) wireless systems will experience very high mobility, density and time-varying …

Walk The Talk? Public Libraries And Organizational Responsiveness To Marginalized Communities, Soohyun Park

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Public libraries are public service organizations, playing a critical role in ensuring equitable access to education and information for the community. Despite their growing importance, there is limited empirical evidence on how local libraries respond to the needs of diverse socioeconomic populations within their communities. This study examines the collection management decisions of local public libraries to assess whether they make differentiated service decisions and what factors influence their responsiveness. Using the concept of organizational responsiveness, it explores organizational responsiveness through the lens of equitable distribution of public service benefits and considers the role of public administrators in shaping those …

The Senior International Officer: A Sociological Perspective On The Development Of A Higher Education Profession, Mohammad Mansoor Khan

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Internationalization of higher education institutions in the United States has progressed rapidly since World War II. The pace and specifics of this internationalization vary by institution. However, there are some shared characteristics including, but not limited to, increase in student mobility, both inward and outward, exchange of scholars, cross-border research, and internationalization of the curriculum. This increased the institutional administrative burden and necessitated the centralization of internationalization activities under a single administrative unit and led by an individual capable of providing leadership at their institution in the area of higher education internationalization. This individual is recognized as the Senior International …

Development Of Dna Nanoswitches With Aptamer Based Detection For Thrombin, Camryn A. Beckles

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Bio-transducers are devices capable of converting the binding signals from molecular recognition events into readable signals for analytical detection. There is a need for modular bio-transducers that can specifically detect a wide range of analytes using a unified readout technique, as this approach could dramatically reduce costs of healthcare diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

To create such a modular transducer, the molecular recognition properties of aptamers will be used and integrated with the already established biosensing capabilities of DNA nanoswitches that reconfigure their shape in the presence of their target molecule. In this design, the detector strands of the nanoswitch will …

The Excessive Cost Of Health: An Analysis Of Pharmaceutical Accessibility Issues In The United States, Henry Woodman Curtis

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Compared to the rest of the world, the United States has one of the worst-performing health care systems. While this is influenced by our hospital systems and clinical care in certain contexts, one of the biggest culprits for our poor ratings is the cost and availability of prescription medications. We pay more than any comparable country for the exact same medications and have a harder time actually accessing them. In this dissertation, I aim to analyze how individuals, companies, and governmental agencies have responded to various instances of high-cost or low-availability prescription medications. To begin, I examine pharmaceutical patenting practices …

Dynamics Of Mesoscale Offshore Wind Flows From An Observational And Modeling Perspective: Implications For Offshore Wind Energy, Elizabeth J. Mccabe

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Mid-latitude coastal regions of the United States, such as the New York Bight (NYB), are playing a major role in the development of offshore wind energy. However, mesoscale dynamics of local and regional circulations in these offshore waters are poorly understood. The sea breeze, especially in the NYB, will play a key role in the development of offshore wind energy, given the favorable wind speeds and high capacity factors during periods of peak demand. With limited vertical wind profile observations available offshore, the ability to accurately forecast and understand the spatiotemporal extent of the sea breeze and often associated low-level …