Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From Peer Review To Peer Conference: Increasing Collaboration In Asynchronous And Synchronous Computer-Mediated Modes In A Technical And Professional Communication Class, Sofia Tarabrina

English Language and Literature ETDs

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of different modes of peer review on students' interactions through a mixed-methods case study. The researcher recruited six students and conducted three peer review sessions in the asynchronous anonymous, asynchronous identifiable, and synchronous mode. The data sources were student pre- and post-peer review drafts, peer review comments, and the researcher's observations of student interactions. The data analysis included transcribing, coding, enumeration, classification, ethnographic analysis, and comparison.

The data analysis showed that tension in peer review interactions that might have caused dissatisfaction in students could be reduced if students performed more …

“She Didn’T Know I Was In The Room”: The Effects Of Hatfield’S Illustrations On Readers’ Interpretations Of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Mason Repas

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

When Charlotte Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," was first published in New England Magazine in 1892, staff illustrator Joseph Hatfield created three realistic-style images to accompany the text. Research suggests that Gilman had no control or influence over these images, which altered readers' perception of her story about the dangers of the rest cure for female hysteria. While Hatfield faced artistic limitations and his intentions are not discoverable today, the choices and details in his illustrations support interpretations of the short story as a piece of horror fiction in which his cohesive series of images is a more reliable …

Du Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, And Creative Works, Caitlyn Aldersea, Justin Bravo, Sam Allen, Anna Block, Connor Block, Emma Buechler, Maria De Los Angeles Bustillos, Arianna Carlson, William Christensen, Olivia Kachulis, Noah Craver, Kate Dillon, Muskan Fatima, Angel Fernandes, Emma Finch, Colleen Cassidy, Amy Fishman, Andrea Francis, Stacia Fritz, Simran Gill, Emma Gries, Rylie Hansen, Shannon Powers, Jacqueline Martinez, Zachary Harker, Ashley Hasty, Mykaela Tanino-Springsteen, Kathleen Hopps, Adelaide Kerenick, Colin Kleckner, Ci Koehring, Elijah Kruger, Braden Krumholz, Maddie Leake, Lyneé Alves, Seraphina Loukas, Yatzari Lozano Vazquez, Haley Maki, Emily Martinez, Sierra Mckinney, Audrey Mitchell, Kipling Newman, Audrey Ng, Megan Lucyshyn, Andrew Nguyen, Stevie Ostman, Casandra Pearson, Alexandra Penney, Julia Gielczynski, Tyler Ball, Anna Rini, Christina Rorres, Simon Ruland, Helayna Schafer, Emma Sellers, Sarah Schuller, Claire Shaver, Kevin Summers, Isabella Shaw, Madison Sinar, Claudia Pena, Apshara Siwakoti, Carter Sorensen, Madi Sousa, Anna Sparling, Alexandra Revier, Brandon Thierry, Dylan Tyree, Maggie Williams, Lauren Wols

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

DU Undergraduate Showcase: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Works

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

Mothering As Feminism, Meera Patel

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay proposes the concept of mothering-as-feminism, with the intention of interrogating American ideals of mothering and caregiving. Reforming the way we view mothering, as it relates to feminism, requires a re-evaluation of the American role of women and mothers—and how they are portrayed (and therefore seen and understood), valued, and supported. Focusing on the evolution of feminist theory throughout the past 70 years, as well as personal and secondary experiences, I demonstrate how political and social change occurs generationally and is dependent on the education of our children. Ultimately, I show the important role children’s literature plays …

Multilingual Students’ Language Learning In U.S. Classrooms, Monique Santos

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Over time, the United States (sometimes referred to as America) education system has shown inequality within its teaching methods, particularly in English classrooms from grades K-12. Despite the increase in diversity and English language learners in public schools, multicultural students have personally endured various forms of oppression in classrooms. Within this research, there will be an examination of the classroom setting from people who experienced their education in both their birth country, which happens to be Brazil in this particular research, as well as the United States. There is also additional research done from library databases, online sources, and readings …

Lgbtq Literature In The High School English Language Arts Classroom: A Rationale For A Unit Plan On Giovanni’S Room By James Baldwin, Jenivieve D'Andrea

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The inclusion of LGBTQ literature in the high school English Language Arts classroom is a necessary step that secondary schools should take to promote culturally responsive teaching that represents the growing number of adolescents identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer in American public schools. According to a study conducted by the Williams Institute School of Law (2020), information from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey found that about 1,994,000 of adolescents ages thirteen to seventeen identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. Of this national count, about 39,000 adolescents in Massachusetts identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. …

Read This Book!: Defending Multicultural Literature From Recent Censorship, Chloe Devine

Honors Program Theses and Projects

The aim of this research is to highlight the importance of multicultural children’s literature in the field of education as it relates to the call for a more multicultural approach to education, as well as through the consideration of the recent uptick in book censorship across the country. Specifically, I will turn my attention towards children’s literature that features Black characters and experiences, which are often featured within the multicultural realm. Despite the fact that research has consistently shown that multicultural children’s literature has benefits for Black children as well as creating an engaging reading experience for all readers, efforts …

A Song Of Ivory And Steel: Suppressive Empowerment In Game Of Thrones, Cassandra Couto

Honors Program Theses and Projects

In this thesis, I will be examining George R. R. Martin’s series, A Song of Ice and Fire (1993--), and its television adaptation, A Game of Thrones (2011-2019). Using a feminist lens, I will be addressing how the adaptation figuratively and literally strips agency from empowered female characters in the novel through portrayals of rape and blatant suppression of the characters, Daenerys Targaryen, Sansa Stark, and Catelyn Stark.

Mental Illness And Creativity In The Selected Poetry Of Robert Lowell And Anne Sexton, Nicholas Huard

Honors Program Theses and Projects

One should never underestimate the potential of someone who suffers from mental illness, as many individuals with mental illness can create great art. Madness, after all, can be seen as a sign of genius. The goal of this thesis is to show how mental illness and creativity are connected. Despite suffering bouts of madness, poets such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton displayed genius through their poetry. “Skunk Hour” by Lowell and, Sexton’s “45 Mercy Street” depict madness while displaying a deep understanding of poetic form.

For The Love Of Stories: Re-Examining Academia’S Responsibility In Presenting Literature In The 21st Century, April Trepagnier

Honors College Theses

Angus Fletcher, a neuroscientist who hung up his lab coat to earn a Ph.D. in literature from Yale, studies stories as, “a narrative-emotional technology that helped our ancestors cope with the psychological challenges posed by human biology...an invention for overcoming the doubt and the pain of just being us.” But students entering college are losing interest in this “technology.” A 2017 report by the American Academy of Arts and Science showed a “statistically significant decline” in the number of English graduates from 2011-2012 to 2016-2017. Peter Barry, Professor Emeritus of English at Aberystwyth University, may offer insight into this trend. …

The Revolting Monster - A Consideration Of Existentialist Themes In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Through A Comparison To Albert Camus' The Stranger, Felipe Rodriguez Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis is concerned with analyzing key themes and ideas in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein through an existentialist lens which is made possible through a comparison to themes and ideas in Albert Camus’ The Stranger. I aim to make a contribution to my field by fulfilling a comparison that has long been made since the late 1960s when conversations about British Romanticism and Existentialism were still common. The purpose of my first chapter is to elucidate a new argument about the relationship between these two novels. There is a discernable element of Camusian Revolt exhibited by the Creature in …

Queer Mother, Hybrid Monster: Serpentine Hybridity And Monstrous Motherhood In D’Arras And Spenser, Farah R. Paterson-Cisco

Theses and Dissertations

Disparate, deformed, and hybridized bodies of women have appeared in mythology and literature in myriad allegorical incarnations as representations of monstrosity. The monstrous serpent-woman hybrid form can be traced back quite far, though at the point when one reaches antiquity, literary examples meld into the religious, mythological, and folkloric. These hybrid beings also embodied meanings particular to their time and culture that work to distinguish them as literary characters, presenting a compelling case for the consideration of the hybridized and deformed figure as a threat to patriarchal systems. Contemporary readings through the lens of feminist, gender, and disability frameworks offer …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

“On Aslan’S Side”: Divine Sovereignty And Evil In The Fiction Of C. S. Lewis, Hannah Dubois

Honors College Theses

This thesis will explore C.S. Lewis’ theology of supernatural providence as depicted in Perelandra, the Silver Chair, and Till We Have Faces. Each novel involves characters who doubt the existence of divine involvement in their life. Lewis repeatedly describes the supernatural as intruding upon the mundane, closely resembling his account of encountering and converting to the Christian God. All three novels feature characters who come to doubt their sanity when in contact with spiritual beings, introducing a darker element to Lewis’ view of supernatural orchestration particularly in light of Lewis’ experience with mental illness. While fiction is an argumentative device …

Review Of Inklings Of Heaven: C. S. Lewis And Eschatology, P. H. Brazier

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Sean Connolly, Inklings of Heaven: C. S. Lewis and Eschatology (Leominster, Herefordshire: Gracewing, 2007). 324 pages. $35.00. ISBN: 9780852446591.

Amplifying Tutor Voices: A Qualitative Analysis For Improving Writing Center Tutoring Practices And Pedagogy, Leah Washko

English Department Masters Theses

Within the walls of university writing centers, tutors and tutees collaborate. They discuss writing, but even more than that, they communicate about ideas and theories bigger than themselves, all while discovering their identities. Exploration of how tutors define their authority and agency, while also highlighting the importance of tutors’ voices, is necessary for the continuation of writing center studies. Writing center tutors’ roles may be understood by some, but the mental hurdles, the questioning natures, and the care-giver roles they are emersed into need to be further investigated. Through a study conducted at Kutztown University’s Writing Center, tutors were surveyed …

Sweat Equity: Lynn Nottage's Radical Dialectic Of Deindustrialization, Jocelyn L. Buckner

Theatre Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Lynn Nottage has devoted her career to researching and telling stories of Black individuals and communities with expressed interest in laborers, advocating for their agency, humanity, and legacy. In her second Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, Nottage dramatizes more recent US history, illuminating the lives of workers marginalized by the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt in the early 2000s. Sweat is emblematic of Nottage's sustained effort to deploy playwriting as activism and stand in solidarity with those whose stories she chooses to tell. As a constant theme in her works, Lynn Nottage's stories align with marginalized workers' efforts and histories, …

Gender And Colonialism: An Intergenerational Conversation In African Literature, Khadizatul Kubra

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is thought that African literature tends to be dominated by the masculine-oriented politics that also characterizes African public political life. In some cases, this is true, but there is a feminist movement in Africa, and many African women writers are using global feminist principles and global anti-colonial principles to write a different kind of literature. As a consequence, recent novels such as Yvonne Vera’s Nehanda (1993), set in Zimbabwe, and Petina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2019), revise past, often male, African writers’ approaches to depicting the genders, even as they also criticize, implicitly or explicitly, still-widespread colonialist …

Review Of The Fellowship: The Literary Lives Of The Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, Joel D. Heck

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). 644 pages. $17.00. ISBN 9780374536251.

Review Of Beren And Luthien, Jonthan B. Himes

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of J. R. R. Tolkien, Beren and Luthien, ed. by Christopher Tolkien (New York: HarperCollins, 2017). 288 pages. $30.00. ISBN 9781328791825.

Review Of The Golden Key: A Victorian Fairy Tale, Tiffany Brooke Martin

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of George MacDonald, The Golden Key: A Victorian Fairy Tale, illustrated by Ruth Sanderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016). 136 pages, including “Afterward” and “Illustrator’s Note.” $16.00. ISBN 9780802854568.

Review Of C. S. Lewis And The Art Of Writing: What The Essayist, Poet, Novelist, Literary Critic, Apologist, Memoirist, Theologian Teaches Us About The Life And Craft Of Writing, Kevin Belmonte

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Corey Latta, C. S. Lewis and the Art of Writing: What the Essayist, Poet, Novelist, Literary Critic, Apologist, Memoirist, Theologian Teaches Us about the Life and Craft of Writing (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016). ix + 239 pages. $24.00. ISBN 9781498225342.

Review Of A Well Of Wonder: Essays On C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, And The Inklings, Corey Latta

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Clyde S. Kilby, A Well of Wonder: Essays on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Inklings, ed. by Loren Wilkinson and Keith Call (Brewster, Massachusetts: Paraclete Press, 2016). vii + 348 pages, including “A Tribute to Clyde S. Kilby.” $28.99. ISBN 9781612618623.

Review Of Jack Lewis And His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne: A Study Of Instructive Affinities, John Stanifer

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of D. G. Kehl, Jack Lewis and His American Cousin, Nat Hawthorne: A Study of Instructive Affinities (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2013). ix + 247 pages. $29.00. ISBN 9781610978361.

Review Of High Towers And Strong Places: A Political History Of Middle- Earth, Dominic J. Nardi

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Timothy R. Furnish, High Towers and Strong Places: A Political History of Middle- earth (Toronto: Oloris Publishing, 2016). 166 pages. $35.00. ISBN 9781940992518.

Review Of The Oxford Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien And Their Circle, Matthew Carey Jordan

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

A review of Colin Duriez, The Oxford Inklings: Lewis, Tolkien and Their Circle (Oxford: Lion Hudson Books, 2015). 296 pages, including full-color photograph inserts, “An Inklings Gallery,” and “A Select Inklings Chronology.” $16.95. ISBN 9780745956343.

“Evil Enchantment” Versus Platonic Vision: Dante, Lewis, And The Weight Of Glory, Jason Baxter

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

C. S. Lewis was convinced that, in the modern world, goodness often strikes us as bland and diluted, a kind of spiritual neutral. What we need, especially in the modern world, he thought, is a positive vision of the good, a vision of beauties that “pierce like swords or burn like cold iron,” as he once said of Tolkien’s work. We need a positive picture and we need to have positive desire, as opposed to thinking of goodness primarily in negative terms, as “not being bad.” Lewis thought we need to have a sense of the gravity and heaviness and, …

Paradise Retained: C. S. Lewis On The Nature Of Knowledge, Reality, And Morality In Perelandra, Richard L. W. Clarke

Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal

The world-view which informs Perelandra (1943) in particular and the so-called “space trilogy” more generally, of which it is the second volume, is deeply infused with that blend of Christianity and Platonism that is the hallmark of the thought of C. S. Lewis and which I explore at some length in the companion essay to this piece in this volume, “The Neoplatonic Christianity of C. S. Lewis.” Perelandra is, I would argue, a literary rendition of some of the most important philosophical arguments in defense of Christianity mounted by Lewis in Mere Christianity and elsewhere.