Arts and Humanities Commons^™

I'M Trying To Love Garbage (2021) By Bethany Barton, Peter Shea

Picture Books

Bethany Barton writes great books for kids about how minds change. In this one, the character’s arc is from thinking about garbage as just smelly icky stuff through empathizing (a little) with the creatures that feed on garbage, to eventually coming to see that all garbage is not equal; some needs special handling or it will clutter life up for a long time. The conclusion: I want to act like someone who thinks more about garbage, about what trash I create and where it ends up.”

How To Be A Nature Detective (1966) By Millicent E. Selsam, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Coming up with the most reasonable explanation of the available clues is something we all do on a daily basis. This book describes animal tracks as clues from which children can make inferences about what kind of animal left them and what they were doing when they did.

Grasshoppers, Ants, And Philosophical Fables, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Aesop contrasted the ant’s virtues of industry, forward planning, and group loyalty with the idleness of a cicada interested only in merry-making and music-making. That contrast is challenged in many picture book versions of his fable. What does it mean to work? What is the value of making music and art? Can finding delight in an occupation be as important as denying gratification? When is it right to refuse help to someone who asks for it? This review compares six picture books—Ant and Grasshopper by Luli Gray (2011), The Ant and the Grasshopper by Amy Lowry Poole (2000), The …

Sidewalk Flowers (2015) By Jonarno Lawson, Samantha Piede

Picture Books

JonArno Lawson's Sidewalk Flowers centers on a little girl accompanying her father on a morning walk across a grey landscape. On the way, she spots dandelions sprouting out of the pavement. The protagonist's attention to this tiny, beautiful detail catalyzes her expanding appreciation for the rest of her environment, spurring her to notice beauty in unexpected places. This review suggests that Sidewalk Flowers richly introduces children to the philosophical theme of attention not with words, but with color.

Buzzing With Questions: The Inquisitive Mind Of Charles Henry Turner (2019) By Janice N. Harrington, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Do insects have minds? Are they creative? Can they tell time? Can they learn from experience? As a young boy, Charles Henry Turner couldn’t stop asking such questions and his curiosity-fueled intellect led him to become the first African American admitted to the St. Louis Academy of Science and one of the first entomologist to study insect behavior. By designing ingenious experiments, Turner proved that bees see color, that spiders can spin webs around artificial obstacles, that cockroaches can learn to navigate a maze, and that moths can be trained to beat their wings when a whistle blows. This insightful …

What Is A River? (2021) By Monika Vaicenavičiene, Maughn Rollins Gregory

Picture Books

Monika Vaicenavičienė’s lush picture book What is a River? nudges us to contemplate our interconnection with living things and natural cycles, and with human history and culture. It relates a conversation between a grandmother and a young adult grandchild enjoying a picnic on a riverbank. Noticing that the river’s surface reflection of trees and flowers along its banks hides its lower depths (“Just like people”), the grandchild asks, “Grandma, what is a river?” The grandmother’s many responses do more than help her grandchild appreciate multiple meanings and values of rivers; they demonstrate how interesting some things become if we keep …

Reconciling Theory And Praxis. Defending Subjective Agency Against Althusser's Structuralism - Daniel Guerrero, Daniel Guerrero

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Louis Althusser labels Marx’s early works as humanist, pseudo-materialist, and self-contained within the ideology of German idealism. Therefore, all attempts to develop a Marxist theory based on these works are futile and ideological. Instead, Althusser proposes a ‘scientific’ reading of Marx developing a structuralist theory based on dialectical materialism. I argue that his interpretations deny individual agency and reduce social relations to mechanistic processes, which directly conflicts with fundamental Marxist ideas like alienation, production, and species-being. By discussing authors within the Marxist Humanist tradition, I argue that a theoretical framework based on Marx’s early works is not only possible, but …

The Grim Reaper Argument Is An Argument For No One, Daniel Linford, Alex Malpass

Philosophy Faculty Publications

According to a prominent philosophical argument for the beginning of time – the Grim Reaper Argument (GRA) – had it been possible for the past to be infinite, then a provably impossible scenario could have been constructed. Such a scenario is not possible, so, the GRA concludes, the past cannot be infinite. Here, we show that the GRA includes one premise acceptable only for Humeans and another premise acceptable only for anti-Humeans. Since, plausibly, everyone is either a Humean or an anti-Humean, the GRA is an argument for no one. Additionally, we argue that there may not be a way …

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Quidditas

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Front Matter

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"Gladly Wolde He Lerne And Gladly Teche": Balancing Humanity And Pragmatics In Teaching, Peter Steffensen

Quidditas

Teachers of AP courses have to balance passing on love of the subject matter and accomplishing the more pragmatic goals of the course. I have found that in the English classroom those two goals can complement one another when specific approaches are taken to teaching. This article explores those moments when humanity and pragmatics collide in the classroom and provides suggestions for navigating these sometimes conflicting goals.

Review: Out Of The Mouths Of Babes: Infant Voices In Medieval French Literature, Alani Hicks-Bartlett

Quidditas

Voicing a stirring call for readers to reconsider the silence and lacunae that are traditionally attributed to infancy, in her latest monograph, Julie Singer situates infancy as both an essential critical framework and an instructive, illuminative methodology through which a gaping archival silence can be rectified-that silence being literary representations of the medieval child, and specifically, the spoken life of the medieval child. As Singer argues, infancy and childhood entwine rather indiscernibly with each other in accordance with the medieval attribution of a longue dureé to infancy (Isidore of Seville, for instance, posited infancy as a stage lasting for about …

Review: Shaping Intellectual Disabilities In Early Modern England, Mardy Philippian

Quidditas

In Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern England, Alice Equestri has assembled an impressive collection of essays by researchers interested in early modern conceptions of intellectual disability. Like Hobgood and Wood's groundbreaking collection Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (2013) and Leslie C. Dunn's edited collection Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (2020), Equestri's volume will benefit scholars for some time to come. Of use to both early career scholars and those well established in the field of early modern disability studies, Shaping Intellectual Disabilities in Early Modern England invites readers into twelve individual studies of a diverse …

One Thing Leads To Another: A New Approach To Teaching Medieval Literature In The Twenty-First Century, Nicholas Markellos

Quidditas

Part of the problem with defining the "Middle Ages" stems from nineteenth-century historians' attempts to distinguish the Renaissance as a unique period that brought about modernity. In examining the literature of this period, however, it is clear that there was a certain element of queerness that surrounded this bewildering age. As a literature teacher, I found that my students do not always see these strange and important elements in the antiquated translations of the texts. To that end, I designed a new curriculum unit that approaches the reading of several medieval stories through a queer perspective, as well as a …

Medieval Old Age As Discourse: Conflicting Views And Perspectives In Pre-Modern German And European Literature From The Early To The Late Middle Ages, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

This article revisits and reviews the broad and intense discourse on old age in the medieval and to some extent early modern worlds and examines the major scholarly contributions to this extensive topic. The discussion of old age during the Middle Ages found expression in fields such as history, philosophy, medicine, theology, literature, the visual arts, pharmacy, and military studies. It is not that long ago that old age itself finally gained more interest in historical research, but we can by now rely on a number of well-researched monographs and edited volumes dealing with this highly complex topic. Previous scholarship …

Allen D. Breck Award Winner

Quidditas

The Breck Award recognizes the most distinguished paper given by a junior scholar at the annual conference.

Recipient of the Breck Award 2025

Kierra E. Burns

Dante And The Nine Worthies: Glory Or Fame?, Thomas L. Cooksey

Quidditas

In Paradiso 18, Dante is introduced by Cacciaguida, to eight martial heroes: Joshua, Judas Maccabaeus, Roland, Charlemagne, William of Orange, Renouard, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Robert Guiscard. Joined by Cacciaguida they form a group of nine, suggesting that Dante is playing with the topos of the Nine Worthies, popular in chivalric literature. While there are various prototypes, the canonical version of the Nine was codified by Jacques de Longuyon in his romance Voeux du paon (The Vow of the Peacock), appearing around 1312, a date tantalizingly close to the composition of the Paradiso. A comparison is instructive both …

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, …

Infinite Finite: A View On Human Progression Through Emergent Generative Systems, Fatima Abbas

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary crises reveal an imbalance in human progression, prioritizing material advancement while neglecting ethical, compassionate, and spiritual dimensions. This thesis examines natural progression through the lens of emergence, where simple interactions produce complex outcomes. Analyzing natural patterns across different scales, from cosmic formations to neural interactions, underscores emergence's universal nature.

Within this context, Infinite Finite introduces a generative digital tool simulating emergence through iterative cycles of construction and deconstruction. Depicting a century of human progression informed by historical behaviors via simulated cellular interactions, the tool visually differentiates ethical from unethical progression. This is represented through ten data visualization tiles composed …

China, Feminism, And The Legacy Of Confucius, Sor-Hoon Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

As the double burden of paid work and family demands leads Chinese women to think twice about marriage and children, we can rush to blame Confucianism’s sexism. But this is a mistake, writes Sor-hoon Tan. We need to separate Confucian philosophy from the oppressive patriarchal norms of its time. Confucian values of care and cultivation can enrich today’s feminism and support equal opportunities for all.

Understanding Sociability Through Mandevillean Pride: Comments On Robin Douglass's Mandeville's Fable, Antong Liu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

There is ‘a tendency to evaluate philosophical theories of human nature as more accurate or adequate when they are more attractive or flattering, not when they are more truthful,’ claim two contemporary moral psychologists (Flanagan and Hu 2011: 312). While this tendency may not be as widely shared as these scholars expect, the flip side of their claim indeed captures a factual truth: philosophers seldom avoid attacks on their theories and even their personalities when they insiston exposing the dark side of human nature. Indeed, not all philosophers attacked for this reasonlose their popularity, as numerous readers of Machiavelli and …

Book Review Of Philosophical Fragments As The Poetry Of Thinking: Romanticism And The Living Present By Luke Fischer, Michael Vater

Philosophy Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

"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 …

40 Years Passing By In (A) “Heartbeat”, Christopher Janney

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

This article outlines the forty-year history go Christopher Janney’s iconic performance work “HeartBeat.” Trained as an architect and jazz musician, Janney combines these two disciplines to create large interactive light/sound installations and performances. On the one hand, he attempts to make architecture more like music, more “alive” using real-time sensing devices as on his “Harmonic Convergence” installation on the Miami International Airport. On the other hand, he attempts to make music more like architecture, more physical more visual. In his “HeartBeat” performance, a dancer wears a heartbeat device that amplifies his/her heartbeat in “real time.” Over this pulse, live musicians …

Yoga Sūtra Book Four And The Yogabindu, Christopher Key Chapple

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Four themes from the fourth pāda of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra are examined here: karma (IV:2-13), individuality (IV:16), humility (IV:20-22), and freedom (IV:29-34). Affirmations and variant interpretations of these four are provided from Haribhadra Virahāṅka’s Yogabindu, most likely composed a century or two later.