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The Oswald Review Of Undergraduate Research And Criticism In The Discipline Of English: Volume 27, 2025

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Submission Guidelines

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

The Great Wizarding Duel: Tolkien’S Possible Influence On Rowling, Anna Jarrell

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

Chasing Dreams In Modern America: Can We All Still Reach The Stars?, Selina Osebre Yawson

Tredway Library Prize for First-Year Research

Judges' Statement

"Chasing Dreams in Modern America: Can We All Still Reach the Stars?" is an excellent and timely examination of the American Dream during a time of political polarization and economic uncertainty. Yawson synthesizes systemic social critique with close literary analysis, applying a reading of Langston Hughes' poetry to address the current moment. Her unique selection of sources and well-reasoned call to action earned the paper an honorable mention.

Revolutionary Worldmaking: James Monroe Whitfield’S Poems In Martin Delany’S Blake; Or, The Huts Of America, Magdalena Zapędowska

Jacobson Center: Publications

Martin Delany’s Blake, serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861–62, includes five unattributed poems from James Monroe Whitfield’s volume America and Other Poems, which appear in the novel as compositions of the Cuban revolutionary poet Placido. Largely overlooked in scholarship on Blake, Whitfield/Placido’s poems are crucial to the impending revolt of the oppressed because they foster a collective emancipatory consciousness and model, through poetic form, the meticulous organization on which the revolution relies for success. Resonating with other poems and songs quoted in the novel, they speak to broader questions of poetry’s role in building communities of resistance. In turn, …

Voicing The Violence: Carmen Maria Machado's Contribution To A Queer Archive, Audrey C. Bryant

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This project analyzes In the Dream House (2019) alongside “The Husband Stitch” and “Eight Bites” from the collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) by Carmen Maria Machado. The first, a memoir, details Machado’s personal experience with domestic abuse between partners who share a female gender identity; the latter is a collection of short stories outlining everyday violations made against women. Scholars have discussed these works with specifications including female domestic horror, Machado’s use of retellings, and domestic violence and abuse. This project fills a gap in the discourse by intersecting and connecting queer theory with archival studies to support …

Plantation Matters: The Black Production Of Space In Southeastern Louisiana, 1830 To 1912, Noura Jabir

Pomona Senior Theses

Taking one Louisiana sugar plantation as a starting place, I demonstrate how African-descended laborers created life-sustaining spaces within/beyond the death-driving plantation complex during and after slavery.

Creating An Ofrenda, Sara Hinojos

Open Educational Resources

You do not need to be Mexican to celebrate Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). What you need however is a deep and thoughtful cultural understanding of the practice. This lesson plan teaches students what Dia de los Muertos is, the influence of colonialism (past and present), how mainstream media understands the celebration in the U.S., and how local communities honor the celebration. This approach is from a media studies perspective and a particular focus on art, specifically altar making or making an ofrenda. Writer, philosopher, tejana Gloria E. Anzaldúa details that altars are “‘the sanctuary of the …

Essential Caretaking For Artists With Disabilities: Exploring The Overlooked Histories Of Hazel Knapp And Grandma Moses, Bryan P. Martin

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the intersection of disability studies and art history, addressing the underrepresentation of disability in scholarship, especially concerning medical sociology and caretaking. Focusing on two early-twentieth-century self-taught American artists, Hazel Knapp (1908–95), who fell into obscurity, and Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860–1961), best known as Grandma Moses, this is a comparative analysis of how disability influenced their artistic practices and shaped their divergent career outcomes. Knapp was born with Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurodegenerative disorder, and fell into obscurity due to a lack of support for her condition, but experienced a promising start to her career that included patronage …

Robert Frost And The Myth Of Adam And Eve, Theo Johnson

CMC Senior Theses

What exactly it is about the story of Adam and Eve that fascinated Robert Frost is hard to say. Of course, he is not the first to engage with it in writing – for much of recorded human history, the Genesis account of man’s creation has held a place of unparalleled importance in our understanding of what it is to be human, provoking innumerable exegetic responses. In popular literature, too, it has served as inspiration for some of the most celebrated English and American poems. From the “bloodless myth” of Geoffrey Hill’s “Genesis” to the great theodicy of John Milton’s …

Embracing The Unmanageable: The Critique Of The Everyday And The Postwar Condition In Wallace Stevens’ And Robert Duncan’S Works Circa 1950, Kazuma Morita

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

My thesis is designed as an investigation of the ethical and political implications of the everyday in postwar American poetry. While recent scholarship of everyday life studies has clarified the centrality of the everyday or the ordinary to modernism and postwar literature, it does not elaborate enough on the impact of the political condition on literary expressions of everyday life in post-1945 period. Given U.S. military’s infiltration into everyday life of people living inside and outside the country after World War II, it is an important task to spotlight the way American postwar poets tackled U.S. war culture through their …

Occupied Lands, Occupied Histories: Activist-Historians And The Red Power Movement, Elena Rose Paz Thompson

History - Master of Arts in Teaching

I. Synthesis Essay.............................4

II. Primary Document Collection......25

III. Textbook Critique........................37

IV. New Textbook Writing.................42

Keepunumuk: Teaching The Deconstruction Of The “Myth Of The First Thanksgiving”, Pierce Thompson

A with Honors Projects

The goal of this project was to volunteer to teach a reading activity for elementary school students about the indigenous peoples (Wampanoag) contact in 1621 from the indigenous perspective and deconstruct the “First Thanksgiving myth” using the book “Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun's Thanksgiving Story” published on August 2, 2022, by authors Danielle Greendeer, Anthony Perry, and Alexis Bunten.

Cold War Karl Mundt: The Utility Of Anticommunism During The Eightieth Congress, Wattier Zachary

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines South Dakota House Representative Karl Mundt during the Eightieth Congress and his role in helping to build a movement and consensus over domestic and international communism. I argue that not only did Mundt help facilitate the Second Red Scare that allowed for the “McCarthyism” of the 1950s to thrive, but Mundt also aided in selling a combative diplomacy towards the USSR which intensified relations into a Cold War. As a ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Mundt advocated for the use of soft power, education, information, and propaganda to sell his idealized Americanism to …

Hidden Wounds And Secret Scars: The Post-World War Ii Western As A Cinema Of Trauma, Maggie Sue Scanlan

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this project, I consider the post-WWII Western film as a site that represents and navigates war traumatized American masculinity. Through a discussion of the significance of the Western as a national myth that speaks directly to American masculinity and nation-building through individual violence, I situate the genre as an ideal vehicle to reframe war traumatized masculinity and analyze seven Westerns through a threefold analysis: metaphoric (a cinema of trauma), psychoanalytic (the traumatic gaze), and therapeutic (recovery and reintegration). In Chapter One, I track anxieties and preoccupations signaling the cultural concern with war trauma in genres more routinely associated with …

"A Changed Understanding Of Our Present": Moby-Dick As Prophetic Ecological Activism, Katie Ann Schini

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale is a classic of American literature, spanning multiple genres and remaining culturally relevant nearly 175 years after its original publication. Though on the surface Moby-Dick reads as an adventure story of a man who experiences the whaling industry firsthand, Herman Melville’s text continues to invite new generations of readership through the framework of the twenty-first century climate crisis.

In this thesis, I position Moby-Dick as a text that can be used to understand our modern society’s current dispositions of ecological grief. My thesis operates at the intersection of three main literary critical theories: ecocriticism, affect, and …

Roadmaps And Blueprints: Ecofeminism In The American Novel, Maegan Bishop

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The theory of ecofeminism in literature combines ecocriticism and feminism to articulate the overlap of environmental concerns and the subjugation of women and other vulnerable populations. In American Literature, the application of ecofeminist theory is a tool used to expose cultural anxieties throughout time by emphasizing the roles of women and the importance of their connection to the environment during moments of national progression. Current scholarship surrounding ecofeminism in American literature addresses this trend as it applies specifically to texts written by women writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, but does not extend further to legitimize ecofeminism as it …

Rifles And Riflemen: Material Culture, Violence, And Early American Identity, 1720 -- 1820, John Bradstreet Weaver

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The rifle was one of many material objects which colonists of British North America brought with them from Europe. Starting in the early eighteenth century, German-speaking settlers in Pennsylvania began to manufacture rifles from locally made and imported parts. These rifles became associated with other material objects – namely a system of dress, which included wearing a whitetail deer’s tail in the hat, the hunting shirt, and forms of Native American dress – which became emblematic of some British colonists who used rifles in hunting and war. Rifles became militarily important in the Seven Years’ War, where Native American warriors, …

Reclaiming Revolutionary Relics: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Used George Washington’S Objects To Understand The Civil War, Abbi E. Smithmyer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

By combining cultural, memory, and material culture studies, this dissertation examines the ways objects associated with George Washington became instruments within the proxy war over whether the United States or the Confederacy best represented the American Revolutionary era’s principal values of liberty and equality. Exploring monuments, statues, historic homes, relics, and mementoes, as well as antebellum speeches and schoolbooks, letters, diaries, military orders, newspapers, and memoirs, this work demonstrates how the relics linked to Washington and the nation’s founding shaped how the Civil War generation thought about America’s past.

The 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States has …

The Devil In The Forest: How Le Guin Subverts A Tired Trope, Andrew Debella

UKL: The Journal of Ursula K. Le Guin Studies

Scholars understand Ursula K. Le Guin's 1972 The Word for World is Forest as a critique of settler-colonial history, but no academic interest has been given to how this novel also comments on the American religious imagination. This article reveals that Le Guin's allegory to Vietnam replicates the 'devil in the forest' trope to expose how a religiously inspired good/evil dichotomy shaped xenophobic attitudes toward the Vietnamese during the 1970s. By tracing the depictions of Native Americans through American fiction and Captivity Narratives, this article further demonstrates how Le Guin’s novel deploys similar tropes to expose and critique their influence …

The Cut Worm Forgives The Plow, August Neuscheler

Theses and Dissertations

The explorations in this thesis writing are centered on William Blake’s proverb “The cut worm forgives the plow.” It has been reinterpreted as an allegory of history and energy. A theory of their relation is proposed based on forgiveness, a theory that accepts the palimpsest of orders as evidence for the abundance of the present moment. The writing focuses on questions of proportionality, scale, archaeological screening methods, planar cutting, and a critique of entropy as grounds for this theory. Some of its subjects include the Statue of Liberty, Kate Raworth’s donut economic model, sashimi, triangulation, Joseph Beuys’ “7,000 Eichen,” semiconductors, …

Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel The Way You Do, James Thurber, E. B. White

Zea E-Books Collection

Contents: The Nature of the American Male : A Study of Pedestalism • How to Tell Love From Passion • A Discussion of Feminine Types • The Sexual Revolution : Being a Rather Complete Survey of the Entire Sexual Scene • The Lilies-and-Bluebird Delusion • What Should Children Tell Parents? • Claustrophobia, or What Every Young Wife Should Know • Frigidity in Men • Answers to Hard Questions • Glossary

The year was 1929, the height of the Roaring Twenties and the eve of the Crash and Great Depression. A “Sexual Revolution” was in progress, and two writers from The …

Liner Notes On Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music As A Praxis Of Self-Fashioning, Shawn J. Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Liner Notes on Black Trans Girlhood: Afrofuturist Affect & Black Popular Music as a Praxis of Self-Fashioning interprets Black musical performance in identity-making, with a focus on how music and Black trans identity intersect and informs Black trans girlhood. As such, Black trans girls render ourselves legible, i.e. understood without shame or judgment, by constructing our identities through the music by Black women we listen and dance to, or watch and sing. These musical connections affirm the possibilities of Black femme expression. This expression of Black femininity is due to what I call an Afrofuturist affect, by which I refer …

The Vietnam War And The Regional Context, Wen-Qing Ngoei

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This chapter traces Southeast Asia’s overall pro-U.S. trajectory from before and through the American war in Vietnam, a process in which the region’s anticommunist nationalists collaborated with the United States and Britain to gain, and remain in, power. Between the late 1940s through the early 1960s, indigenous anticommunist elites in Thailand and the Philippines rose to political dominance with U.S. assistance; in Malaya and Singapore they did so with British support. The United States and Britain, with their Malayan and Singaporean allies, would influence developments within Indonesia that precipitated the Indonesian Army’s rightwing coup of 1965, a transformative event that …

Mirrors Of The Reel: Black Women's Identity In American Cinema (2009-2024), Melanie-Penny Harrison

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study investigates whether white supremacy structures, embodied in Hollywood’s predominantly white leadership, drive negative portrayals of Black women in 31 mainstream American films from 2009 to 2024. Employing a mixed-methods approach—quantitative content analysis, qualitative content analysis (QCA), and narrative methodology—I code portrayals for racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, colorism, and internalized racism, classifying them as progressive (e.g., empowered roles), regressive (e.g., subservient stereotypes), or hybrid. Guided by Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, the analysis examines narrative structures, character agency, symbolism, and dialogue to uncover intersectional patterns (e.g., race, gender, class) across three periods: 2009–2013, 2014–2018, and 2019–2024. Across these periods, cultural …

Embracing The Both/And: Learning From The Lived Experiences Of White Facilitators Of Racial Equity Workshops, Alicia M. Wargo

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study focuses on the lived experiences of seasoned White facilitators of racial equity workshops to understand how they navigate the complexity of occupying a White racial identity while working to challenge the belief systems of white supremacy ingrained in themselves and others. Through applying Critical Race Theory as a framework to grounded theory methodology, this study examined whiteness as a sensitizing concept in micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis, situating this dissertation in the theoretical exploration of the multifaceted and pervasive nature of whiteness. Much of the research on racial equity work examines White participants in nascent stages …

A Story Of Oppression A Psychological And Creative Approach, Juan R. Morillo

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The aim of this project is to survey the manner in which oppression is expressed in selected works of literature. It is a topic that not only am I familiar with through my studies of literature and psychology, but one that I, as well as every Venezuelan expatriate has witnessed and felt for their country. The project focuses on social and political oppression, using the current Venezuelan crisis as a focal point, and selected literary sources as a framework. I will analyze dystopian classics such as George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, as well as Margaret Atwood’s The …

Symbols Of Sovereignty And How They Speak To Us: Reading Contemporary Wampum Artwork In New York State Museums, Marie Peterson

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Contemporary Haudenosaunee artworks in exhibit spaces across New York State are bringing cultural information and counter-historical narratives to the public that they might not encounter otherwise. Artwork that includes wampum depictions or materials has heuristic qualities that can engage viewers with Haudenosaunee ways of knowing and relating. Wampum heuristics and Haudenosaunee scholarship are employed to interrogate how wampum materials were collected, categorized, and researched by the New York State Museum during the salvage anthropology era. The narratives embedded in wampum artworks are traced from this salvage era history, throughout the century between the salvage era that began at the end …

Y’All Means All: Pro-Choice Abortion Activism In West Texas Post-Dobbs, Hannah S. Noblewolf

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

In the spring of 2021, a six-week abortion ban passed by popular vote in the city of Westerburg, Texas. It had a civil enforcement mechanism, allowing someone to collect a reward of $2,000 if they successfully sued someone they reported for “aiding and abetting” abortion. The ban, called the Westerburg Sanctuary City ordinance, was referred to as “bounty hunting.” When the ban passed it became the template for the state-level Texas Heartbeat Act, which provides a greater financial reward for a successful civil suit, with a minimum of $10,000 plus legal fees. In the face of this ban, pro-choice activists …

Volume 11, Issue 3, Critical Currents And Pedagogical Shifts In Popular Culture And Pedagogy, Journal Dialogue

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Volume 11, Issue 3 of Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy: On Confronting Identity and Global Challenges through Popular Culture and Pedagogy.