Arts and Humanities Commons^™

We All Have The Right To Read What We Want, Yolanda Hood

UCF Forum

There are people who I am thankful for in the trajectory of my “success” in life, especially my family and my elementary school librarian, Mrs. Walker.

My Newfound Respect For The Hard Work Performers Do Before Stepping On Stage, Heather Gibson

UCF Forum

When I gave the Theatre UCF students 30 days to teach me how to perform a karaoke song, I didn’t realize I was also handing over my dignity.

Metadata Services In The Context Of Digital Humanities, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Part II of the University of Central Florida Libraries hosted research lifecycle session at THATCamp Florida 2016. The Research Lifecycle at UCF presents a unified model of campus-wide support and services available to UCF researchers. This model was designed by the UCF Libraries’ Research Lifecycle Committee with inspiration from OpenWetWare’s Research Cycle. This presentation aims to explore the services and resources that UCF Libraries currently provides to researchers, while exploring how digital humanities research, specifically, can utilize such tools.

Super Bowl Superness, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

The Rev. Norman Vincent Peale once said that if Jesus were alive today he would be at the Super Bowl. No doubt the Reverend was on to something.

The Rams Move On, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

The City of Angels, Los Angeles, the second largest city in the United States, the second largest television market, the city of cars and air pollution, the city waiting for the next big earthquake, etc. etc. etc. It is a city that has not had a team in the National Football League for over twenty years. It is remarkable that the so-called New National Pastime had no presence in LA for two decades and still claimed this high position in American sport.

The Subject Librarian Newsletter, Women's & Gender Studies, Spring 2016, Carrie Moran

Libraries' Newsletters

No abstract provided.

Yellowstone Exodus, John Herceg

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Yellowstone Exodus, a novella, is a reminder of society's fragility in the wake of naturally occurring catastrophes. The first of three parts, Yellowstone Exodus is book one in a trilogy of novellas intended to entertain, inspire, and forewarn its reader. Beginning in Denver, Colorado, this story redefines brotherhood and friendship as two best friends, Clayton Rudd and Raymond Montero, set out on a journey to reach the Montero family home in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. Obstacles awaiting them include a nightmarish environment caused by the Yellowstone super-volcanic eruption, hostile enforcement of state borders in a nation stripped of its federal government, …

Baby Bird & The Electronic Abyss, Alexis Senior

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What is a real life? A well-lived life? And how do we define either? Baby Bird & the Electronic Abyss is a collection of personal essays that questions and explores escapism and existentialism as experienced at music festivals and campsites around the United States. Within this collection, festivals are illustrated as more than just spectacular stages and bright lights—they're depicted as fascinating, budding utopias that encourage creativity, generosity, and positivity from attendees who abandon inhibitions, and oftentimes logic, in the name of fleeting freedom from the routine of their "real" lives. The narrator strives to live a fulfilled life—what many …

Hunting Down Pigs, Anna-Lisa Astudillo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hunting Down Pigs is a hybrid collection of personal essays, ranging from lyrical to braided, which more often than not defy labeling. The essays explore themes of loss, faith, and self-reliance. Growing up Mormon, with all its strictures, and losing her dad at a young age, made faith an issue that the narrator grappled with continuously throughout her life. The narrator questions the validity and purpose of religion in essays like "Possibilities" and "Going to Church." Specifically, the narrator explores the doctrine of the Mormon church and the effects of such a strict upbringing. When divine intervention fails, the narrator …

Pearl Necklaces, Jordan Redmond

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pearl Necklaces aims to excavate raw moments of connection and find beauty in the depravity of self and situation. Set in the Deep South, this collection of poems thrives on lusty nights, hard love, and the twinge of memory. The voices within range from youthful to jaded as they speak across pages, flowing into one another to create a pain-body which ultimately seeks closure in relationships with objects, family, drugs, lovers, body parts, heroes, and setting. Tuned to the lyrical voices of poets Kim Addonizio, Lynn Emanuel, and Dorianne Laux, poems such as "Learning Shapes," "Things that Make Me Feel …

Go Ahead, Daytona, John Hughes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Go Ahead, Daytona is a collection of essays meant to explore the experiences and lessons learned through law enforcement. It juxtaposes hope with cynicism and encourages the reader to explore his or her own biases through the lens of a narrator believing police work is something to be lived down, rather than up. The essays depict struggles with hypocrisy, sex, homelessness, violence, moral ambiguity, and self-awareness.

The Clockman Movement, Allison Martin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As a genre of Neo-Victorian fiction, Steampunk is largely identified by Victorian aesthetics and technology centering on clockwork and steam power. The novel The Clockman Movement seeks to emphasize the "punk" in "steampunk" by exploring the social concerns of colonialism, including sexism, racism, and classism, while embracing the more fantastic and entertaining aspects of steampunk. Before all other labels—Nordlunder, daughter, woman—Eve Traugott is a machinist. Or she would be, if one of the machinists in the capital would hire her as an apprentice. She thought it would be simple to find a machinist willing to take a chance on her …

The Role Of Occupational Branding In The Professionalization Of Technical Communication, Chelsea Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the relationship between professional identity and professional status by exploring the quest for professionalization within technical communication. An established professional identity is crucial to an occupation's professionalization process, as it enables members of a given field to create a common sense of being and facilitates a recognizable personal and collective identity. Such recognition is vital to an occupation's rise to professional status, as it creates a distilled image of the ideal practitioner for outsiders and forms the basis upon which claims of expertise may be made. By constructing the meaning surrounding their profession, members are able to …

The Gasoline Tree, Brianne Manning

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In exploration of Millennial anxieties and the power of dreaming, The Gasoline Tree imagines a soundtrack for the revelations, defeats, and curiosities of leaving childhood behind. This is a collection of 40 poems that examines eating disorders, gender roles, physical abuse, sex, infidelity, loneliness, and the fear of losing one's parents. This collection also contemplates the brutalities and muted delights of what drives us all: love, in all of its forms. "The Gasoline Tree," "Wolf of Chocorua," and many other poems construct New England landscapes that pay homage to the pastoral uniqueness of Maxine Kumin and Galway Kinnell, while poems …

Unseen America, Jeffrey Shuster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unseen America is a glimpse into the lives of what American society considers to be low status men. "Kumbaya" involves a Cub Scout dealing with the fallout from a neglectful father and an alcoholic mother. "Devil's Tower" is about an overweight boy trying to prove himself in front of his peers. In "True Patriots," we see two displaced working class men forced to come to terms with an America that doesn't belong to them anymore or need them anymore. "Zippo Heart" deals with a recently divorced young woman spurring on the advances of a loser coworker while dealing with her …

Dining With The Cyborgs: Disembodied Consumption And The Rhetoric Of Food Media In The Digital Age, Maggie Cotto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores digital media productions based specifically on food and cooking in order to demonstrate that new communication technologies are increasingly incorporating all five of the bodily senses. In doing so, they contribute significantly to the emergence of new ideological apparatuses appropriate for a global community. These apparatuses – including the formation of a posthumanist subject, the use of technology to support embodied cognition, and the establishment of entertainment as an ideological institution – have become the harbingers of a rhetorical evolution. Based on the work of Gregory Ulmer, along with Jacques Derrida, N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and …

The Florida Project: A Micro-Budget Feature Comedy, Benjamin Lancaster

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Further Adventures of Walt's Frozen Head is a feature comedy written, directed, and produced by Benjamin Lancaster. It is a part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the University of Central Florida. This film hopes to engage the popular urban legend and mythologies surrounding Walt Disney and the Disney company, and uses the story of a father letting go of his daughter to contradict the central messages of the Disney Company, i.e. believe in your dreams, and they will come true. A film of this subject matter requires the mircobudget …

La Influencia De La Medicina: Relación Entre Literatura Y Cultura En La Temprana Edad Moderna Española, Nicole Cruz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The sciences, in particular the field of medicine, have had an important role in society since its significance has been recorded in historical texts. Due to this fact, the future of medicine depends on, to a certain extent, the knowledge that has been collected in the past from the previously catalogued records. In addition to these records, literature from a specific time period could be useful to study and analyze how opinions have been formulated throughout history, how scientific accomplishments were shared, and what influences impacted society. This study will first explore panoramically the historical context of medicine in Spain …

El Rol De La Inmersión En La Producción Del Futuro Del Subjuntivo En Portugués, Evelin Pegoraro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Portuguese Future Subjunctive (FS) is frequently studied since out of all modern romance languages, this verbal tense and mood is regularly maintained only in Portuguese. Moreover, variation and alternation occur in the use of the FS by the speakers of the language through a substitution of the irregular inflections of the FS by the regular inflections of the Personal Infinitive (IP). The only difference between the FS and the IP is found in the irregular verbs of the FS, and these are usually "regularized" by Portuguese speakers. Since the regular verbs of the FS are identical to the IP, …

De Neruda A Parra: Un Análisis De Los Aspectos Estéticos Y Socio-Políticos Que Construyen La Chilenidad En La Época Contemporánea, Julia M. Lindberg

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Español: Esta investigación tiene el propósito de buscar, identificar y resaltar características estéticas y socio-políticas en la literatura chilena que unen o explican factores constituyentes de la chilenidad en la época contemporánea. Más en concreto, comenzaré por introducir un panorama actualizado del Chile de hoy, ahondando un poco en la historia del país empezando con la Guerra del Pacífico en 1879, cuando se nota por primera vez que el caso chileno es fundamentalmente divergente de los demás países del continente. Este antecedente militar y político germinal es suficiente para alcanzar la época en que me he de entrar en esta …

To Be Magic: The Art Of Ana Mendieta Through An Ecofeminist Lens, Elizabeth Ann Baker

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-born American artist whose unique body of work incorporated performance, activism, Earth art, installation, and the Afro-Cuban practices of Santería. She began her career at the University of Iowa, were she initially received her degree in painting in 1969. It was not until 1972 that Mendieta shifted radically to performance art.

Though she was raised Catholic, she developed an interest in the rituals involved with Santería, a culturally predominant Cuban religion, and it deeply influenced her work in her choice of materials and settings. Santería is one of the major faith-based lifestyles of Cuba …

Two Terms Of The Cuban Counterpoint: Transculturation In The Poetry Of Nicolás Guillén, Alanna L. Fulk

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The history of Latin America and the Caribbean was irreversibly altered by the arrival of the conquistadors, destruction of native civilizations and implementation of colonialism for hundreds of years. However, Spain also introduced the high culture of the baroque to Latin America and the Caribbean, which mixed with the cultures of native and African peoples, creating new, distinct forms of literary expression. Subsequent post-colonial cultural movements attempted to explore and reaffirm the variety of cultures that shaped both regions, including the movement of Afrocubanismo in Cuba, which occurred from 1910-1940. Afrocubanismo was a movement intended to incorporate African folklore and …

Left Brain Vs. Right Brain: An Analysis Of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Michael D. Scimeca

Honors Undergraduate Theses

El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha sits at the crossroads of two defined Spanish early modern contexts, combining Renaissance ideals with Baroque elements into one Golden Age masterpiece. The theme of duality present throughout the work finds true expression in Cervantes’ well-educated protagonist, Alonso Quijano. In him, the reader glimpses the struggle between antiquity versus early modernity, ideality versus reality, instability versus sanity, and unhealthiness versus healthiness. These medical themes and the underlying sociocultural facets will be investigated by thoroughly evaluating Cervantes’ treatment of human consciousness. In doing so, this study aims to explore the following questions: to …

Reason Is King And Science Is His Crown: A Study Of French Science-Fiction For The Dissemination Of Philosophical Thought, Lauren A. Gandy

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The thesis seeks to explore the didactic application of French science-fiction during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the portrayal and dissemination of their respective philosophical theories. Studying science-fiction novels during these centuries will allow a comparison of seventeenth and eighteenth-century dissemination methods, to determine if the foundational seventeenth-century methods were retained or modified to more accurately represent the change in philosophical attitudes. Exploration of this topic will contribute to a greater understanding of French Enlightenment theory, analysis of relatively unstudied novels in the science-fiction genre, and a novel approach to “proto” science-fiction literature by connecting the previously separate genres …

Process And Mind: Exploring The Relationship Between Process Philosophy And The Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Science Of Cognition, Larry A. Moralez

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This work examines the relationship between Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy and the nonlinear dynamical systems framework for studying cognition. I argue that the nonlinear dynamical systems approach to cognitive science presupposes many key elements of his process philosophy. The process philosophical interpretation of nature posits events and the dynamic relations between events as the fundamental substrate of reality, as opposed to static physical substances. I present a brief history of the development of substance thought before describing Whitehead’s characterization of nature as a process. In following, I will examine the both the computational and nonlinear dynamical systems frameworks for …

Migrant Child, Nicholas Sheperd

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Migrant Child is a poetry collection about injustice in the United States of America and the international community. The purpose of the collection is to humanize social injustice in the present, so as to show the reader that discrimination still happens in the United States in 2016. To that end, the collection draws on comparisons from civil rights movements of the 1960s and from present day. It is also meant to reflect injustices the author experiences in his own life. The poetry collection was created after the author spent six months volunteering throughout the State of Florida. The poems in …

It Will Turn Vicious: An Exploration Of The Cycle Of Audience Ridicule In French Drama, Stephanie C. Elfont

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The intent of this thesis is to investigate the prominence of audience ridicule in the French theatre from the medieval sottie to Ionescan Absurdism of the mid-twentieth century. Throughout the history of French drama, playwrights have exploited this tactic with either the purpose of invoking an emotional or intellectual response or inciting a social or political call to action. This exploration takes particular interest in shaming theatrical audiences during periods of political unrest, analyzing the ways in which playwrights employed language, studies of characters, and plot-related content to highlight the prevalent and pervasive ills of society and of humanity. The …

Situating Political Obligation In Political Ontology: Ethical Marxism And The Embedded Self, Chris A. Chambers

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Though various obligations typically affect our behavior without being recognized, they have a substantial impact on how we operate as human beings. The relationships we have between, say, our parents when in their household obligate us to take out the trash at certain times and wash the dishes after dinner. The relationships we have between our closest friends often oblige us to hear them out when they have undergone a traumatic experience. Upon reflection, it may be easy to point out a number of the obligations which inform our social behavior. What is not so easy, however, is pointing out …

Gendered Virtue: A Study Of Its Meaning And Evolution In Early Modern France, Mariela Saad

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Virtue in early modern France was a broad concept considered by clergymen, philosophers, and moralists as an instrument for measuring and implementing human ethics. This unprecedented research seeks to track the development of the notion of virtue from a gendered and dichotomous notion to a unique and undivided term. The word virtue is constantly present in French texts such as manuels de conduite1 , since the medieval period. Thus, it can be regarded as one of the most significant concepts defining genders in Western civilization. However, it is difficult for modern readers to grasp the complexity of the debate unless …

Slough: Revealing The Animal, Clay Dunklin

Honors Undergraduate Theses

When making my work I constantly reflect on past mythologies, images, and objects. These served people as a way to make sense of and understand the dynamics of the world around them. As we continue to alter and shape the world into one designed for exclusively human benefit, we need new models that reveal the dynamics of our relationship to the world around us. This is what artists have been doing for centuries, and I specifically look to those using animals and animal imagery in their work to further mythologize our contemporary understanding of the human-other animal relationship. My body …