Arts and Humanities Commons^™

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Swiss American Historical Society Review

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Making Old Stories New In The Anthropocene: Reading, Creating, And The Cosmological Imagination In Darren Aronofsky's Noah, Kellianne Houston Matthews

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines Darren Aronofsky's 2014 film Noah as a pattern for metafictionalizing narratives into thinking stories as we confront the uncertainty and challenges of the Anthropocene. While Ecocriticism has sought for the development and promotion of nature writing and environmentally oriented poetry and fiction- "new stories" that will shape a stronger environmental ethic"”it has placed too much responsibility for the environmental imagination on what we read rather than on the more important question of how we read. My argument addresses the readerly responsibilities that, if met, have the power to transform old stories and old habits of mind into …

Creating History Towards Utopia: The 2016 Taiwanese Lds Celebration, Ting-Chun Chang

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that emotions and memories in a community are essential to shaping a common future. Furthermore, when performed on stage, these memories and emotions create a utopian experience that moves performers and audience members towards a brighter future. The foundation for this thesis is built upon the ideas of utopian performative theories combined with the Asian Ganzhi belief that every sixty years a new cycle of hope begins. This thesis also includes a practical work. I was invited to write and direct a cultural production for the 60th year anniversary celebration of The Church of Jesus Christ of …

Posthuman Maturation In Amie Kaufman And Jay Kristoff's Illuminae: Re-Conceptualizing The Human For Adolescence And Artificial Intelligence, Gregory Alaric Williams

Theses and Dissertations

In order to empower adolescents, this thesis examines how the adult conception of the human in humanism disempowers adolescents. This thesis examines this process in Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Illuminae, a work of young adult science fiction with non-traditional text structures. In consequence of their disempowerment, the adolescent Kady and artificially intelligent AIDAN impersonate human authorities in order to gain control over their lives. When these attempts fail, Kady and AIDAN transition from a humanist conception of the human, as an isolated self that balances rationality and emotionality, to a posthuman conception of the human, a distributed self …

The Living River: Ritual And Reconciliation In The Famished Road, Marissa Deane Compton

Theses and Dissertations

In Ben Okri's The Famished Road, rituals such as baptism are easily lost in the dense symbolism. The novel is, in the words of Douglas McCabe, a "ramshackle and untidy affair, a hodge-podge of social ideologies, narrative forms, effusive enthusiasms, and precision-jeweled prose poems" (McCabe 17). This complex untidiness can be discouraging for readers and critics alike, and yet "there is something contagious about the digressive, meandering aesthetic of The Famished Road" that makes the novel difficult to consign to confusion (Omhovere 59). Commonly considered post-colonial, post-modern, and magical-realist, The Famished Road deals with, among other things, spiritualism, …

Using Reading Strategies To Differentiate Reading Instruction, Kari Allsup, Dawan Coombs

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Struggling readers have often developed learning strategies, but not strategies that help them become better readers. Consider, a student who is checked out every day before English to avoid the discomfort of reading aloud, a student who gets up every few minutes to sharpen pencils to avoid a difficult task, a student who knows how to look busy in ways that disguise a lack of comprehension. In contrast to these strategies, reading strategies can empower students to succeed, not merely avoid reading. This study examined three reading strategies within the context of a reader’s theatre focused on the drama, The …

Keep Them Coming: Discovering Why Upper-Division Students Use The Writing Center, Ethan Marston, David Stock

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Because the development of writing skills is crucial to professional success, many writing center studies attempt to determine how to best encourage undergraduate students to attend their university writing centers. Many universities require freshmen to attend the writing center while enrolled in a first-year writing class. Because of this, a large portion of writing center research focuses on the effectiveness of this requirement, and its impact on students’ perceptions of and experiences with the writing center (Bell and Stutts, 1997; Bishop, 1990; Clark, 1985; Gordon, 2008; Rendleman, 2013). This research added to the extensive debate over whether or not writing …

Generational Attitudes Reflected Through Soviet Socialist Realism, Kelsey Herdman, Tony Brown

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In his biography “Raising the Banner” artist Geli Korzhev, a Socialist Realist artist, believes that Socialist Realism should have been titled as “social realism”; that “socialism is associated with politics but it should be aimed at social issues,” and that “truth is a means to learn reality.”1 By studying Socialist Realism we see more than just the politics that governed the USSR between the 1940s leading up to its collapse in 1991. My original intent for writing this paper was to show the generational attitudes reflected through Socialist Realism, by comparing how the topics of the pieces changed over time. …

Using Technology To Enhance Second Language Literacy, Emily Adriana Pace, R. Kirk Belnap

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project is the beginning of a revision of a previous research project of the BYU Arabic department known as RAFT (Readable Article Finding Tool). This tool aims to assist learners of second languages with suitable reading material by using a list of vocabulary known by the user and providing the user with a set of articles that contain a high percentage of those known words.

Muito Como Um Rei: Afro-Brazilian Need For Educational Role Models, Grundvig Angela, Rex Nielson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This research project attempts to engage in a new verbal dialogue in the field of research about Afro-Brazilian masculinity and educational systems through the lens of literature. The novel Muito Como Um Rei (2015) is a recently published novel by the Afro-Brazilian writer Fábio Mandingo that provides an interesting view of Afro-Brazilian heterosexual culture.

Annotated Edition Of The Reminiscences Of Nate Salsbury, Katie Bowman, Frank Christianson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this project was to prepare the unpublished manuscript Reminiscences of Nate Salsbury, written in the 1890s, for publication and to enter the critical conversation on the development of the frontier myth in American history. The first of three stages of the project was to do editorial work on the raw manuscript. The editing goal was to organize and clarify the narrated episodes of Nate Salsbury’s life in order to prepare it for optimal audience comprehension. Second, I thoroughly annotated the document and curated an appendix that situated the document in its historical and biographical context. Third, …

Emotional Truth In Fiction, Tamara Thomson, Stephen Tuttle

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In the early 1990s I had the opportunity to work closely with a group of youth patients, staff members, and clinicians at the Utah State Hospital. During that time there were several accusations of misconduct of staff with the youth patients, some of whom I knew personally. My project has been to create six short stories dealing with the experiences of both the youth patients and the staff at the State Hospital that are based on the interviews I did with former patients, clinicians, and staff. I wanted to investigate the way specific individuals remembered incidents of misconduct and how …

Rediscovering Olga Wisinger-Florian, Nancy Eyre, Michelle James

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The project Rediscovering Olga Wisinger-Florian culminated in the compilation of an online bibliography of secondary texts about the Austrian artist Olga Wisinger-Florian combined with a biography and catalogue of visual works by the artist published in The Sophie Digital Library (http://sophie.byu.edu). This will make it possible for scholars, students, educators, and the art community around the world to have access to Olga Wisinger-Florian’s work.

Western Philosophy: A New Story For A New Generation, Stephanie Harrison, Dr. Dennis Packard

Journal of Undergraduate Research

In the fall semester of 2015, Dr. Packard approached me after class one day when he noticed from the class roll that I had a minor in visual arts. He came to me with an offer to help him do graphic design for a textbook he was making, an offer which I gratefully accepted. After securing funding for the project through the generosity of the ORCA grant I received, we set to work creating a textbook that would tell the story of Western philosophy in a way it had never before been told.

Interpreting Art History By Brazillian Modernist Anuta Malfatti, Michelle Turner, Rex Nielson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project is centered around the artist Anita Malfatti and her teaching of art history. Malfatti was an instrumental figure in the development of Brazilian Modernism. Leaving an oeuvre composed primarily of portraits and landscapes, the majority of critics and scholars have been dedicated to recognizing interactions Malfatti had with artists in Germany and New York. She continued to paint and depict Brazilian life throughout her life but also was a teacher of art and art history.

Her lectures still exist in notebooks, though under-researched and unpublished. The main goal of this research was to access her archive, then transcribe …

Rites And Rituals Of The Yaxhilan Queens: Analysis Of The Iconography Of The Yaxchilan Lintels 24, 25, And 26, Jillian Bentley, Allen Christianson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The ruins of Yaxchilan on the shores of the Usumacinta River, Mexico have some of the only occurrences of iconography that contain women performing sacred bloodletting rites. Most scholars seem to agree that at the end of the 8th century and beginning of the 9th century C.E., the Classic Maya were on the brink of collapse in the southern lowlands. This Great collapse has many arguable factors: disease, drought, famine, starvation, natural disasters, etc. Though no exact cause for the Great collapse has been identified, one thing that scholars seem to agree on is the desperation one can sense in …

Unveiling Poetic Patterns In El Titulo De Totonicapan, Karen Devictoria, Allen Christenson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

When the Spanish launched a conquest on the Maya empire in the 16th century, the Maya suffered devastating blows to their livelihood and culture. Perhaps the most injurious effect of this conquest was the loss of the Maya languages as the Maya were forced to converse and write only in Spanish and their written works were destroyed. It has been said, “When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.”1 After the Spanish conquest, it was only a few generations until the once highly advanced Maya language was transformed to a mere oral tradition spoken only by the elderly. …

Annie Oakley Research, Hope Collins, Frank Christianson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

For my project I researched Annie Oakley. I specifically was looking into how Annie Oakley added complexity to the American Frontier Myth and how she interacted with William F. Cody who was also known as Buffalo Bill.

The purpose of my project was to contribute to a scholarly edition of The Autobiography of Annie Oakley. To accomplish this, I worked through these three steps: I edited and annotated the autobiography, wrote a critical introduction essay, and gathered material for appendixes to the manuscript.

From Imposition To Integration: Teotihuacan Influence On Maya Culture, As Evidence By Stela 7 At Piedras Negras, Catherine Nuckols, Allen J. Christenson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

This project was inspired by the Maya monument known as Stela 7, from Piedras Negras, Guatemala (shown at right). This stela, or upright stone carving, portrays a ruler of Piedras Negras wearing a war headdress. The headdress is Maya in style, but contains an element, the Trapeze and Ray motif, that appears to have been adapted from the Central Mexican culture of Teotihuacan, which by that point had ceased to exist. Teotihuacan was a very large city situated in Central Mexico. In AD 378, Teotihuacan invaded the nearunconquerable city state of Tikal and imposed a new ruling dynasty. From that …

Trash And Contemporary Brazil: Modernization And Consumption In Brazil’S Megacities, Asa Richards Laws, Dr. Rex Nielson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Over the past 50 years the growing difference between trash collection capacity and consumption has produced new cultural developments concerning the collection, reuse, and criminalization of trash in Brazil. The thin legal framework that surrounds lixões [pronounced li-¢òõẽs] (open air garbage dumps) in Brazil has, in many ways, resulted in the rise of public trash and recycling collection in lixões that can be found in Brazilian megacities. According to my research, few statutes in either Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo exist to govern the treatment of trash collection by marginalized populations living near or on lixões. What laws that …

System Design To Reduce Risk Of Cranial Injury For Servicemen & Servicewomen, Stefan Leimer, David Morgan

Journal of Undergraduate Research

With over 320,000 of our troops returning home with traumatic brain injuries over the course of only six years, brain injuries among U.S. servicemen and servicewomen have become a growing concern. The purpose of this project is to assess the current risks these individuals are facing and to design solutions that provide meaningful protection.

Extensive research was conducted into the epidemiology of traumatic brain injury (abbreviated as TBI) among military personnel deployed abroad. Though the government has long had an extensive program for documenting and reporting injuries, TBI has only recently begun to be recorded and reported. In an effort …

Looking For Truth: Dissecting Tales Of Fijian Cannibals, Brandon Olsen, Sarah Jamarillo, May Harrington

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

After Europeans encountered Fiji in the eighteenth century, the islands quickly gained fame for having cannibal tribes. Captain James Cook, an early explorer of the Pacific islands, describes the Fijian natives as an “addicted people, eating their enemies, whom they kill in the battle”(Banivanua-Mar 26). The people had a culture of war rituals, rivalry, and conflict between tribes that inspired cannibalistic rumors. Those that visited Fiji spread wild tales that the westerners eagerly devoured. Under analysis, these stories lack compelling evidence to claim the Europeans and Americans met Fijian cannibals and instead tell more about the society the tales come …

An Annotated Critical Edition Of Wild Mike And His Victim By Florence Montgomery, Kristen Evans

Student Works

This paper is a critical edition of Wild Mike and His Victim by Florence Montgomery, a novel first published in 1875. This critical edition includes a critical introduction, footnotes, and appendices, as well as the original text.

Making Japan Great Again: The Imperial Rescript On Education, Ayoung Kang, Alistor Skabelund, Matthew Stephenson

FHSS Mentored Research Conference

The Meiji government used the Imperial Rescript on Education in order to develop nationalism and respond against the dominating presence of Western Imperialism by standardizing Meiji education and interpreting it to justify militarism.

Aspectos Morfosintácticos Del Español Dominicano, Orlando Alba

Faculty Publications

El objetivo de esta presentación consiste en ofrecer una visión general de diferentes aspectos de la estructura morfosintáctica del español hablado en la República Dominicana. Los fenómenos descritos aparecen ilustrados con ejemplos orales.

Morning Devotion, Tara Neuffer

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

artwork

Gold Star, Sarah Linford

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

artwork

Economic Religion And Religious Physics: A Comparison In Religiosity’S Impact On Women In The Sciences, Summer Perez

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

This paper explores the historical impact of religion in creating gender paucity within the fields of economics and physics that is still present today. Starting in the Enlightenment, practical applications of physics and economics began to improve the human condition in such dramatic ways that each promised salvation through practical or scientific means. In essence, they became secular alternatives to Christianity. Acting as religions themselves, each developed doctrines and dogmas that would lead to a secular salvation. However, inherent in these doctrines was a gendered hierarchy where the rational and mathematical, gendered as masculine, was equated with the divine while …

In Arcadia, Madeline Rupard

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

painting

Dame Zaha Hadid, Architect: Her History, Style, And How They Uniquely Qualified Her To Design The Guangzhou Opera House, Allison Foster

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

This paper provides a brief background on the accolades of Dame Zaha Hadid, architect, and expresses the significance of her international acclaim in light of being a woman architect. Hadid’s experiences developing into a successful, professional architect, despite existing gender and cultural minority biases working against her, are compared to the city of Guangzhou’s economic success, despite a history of foreign occupation. Hadid’s personal experiences of working and living in areas with strong multicultural influences relate to Guangzhou’s multicultural population, as it exists as a hub for immigration and trade into mainland China. Hadid’s personal style, as inspired by her …