Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Literatura En Las Coordenadas Del Cambio: Premio Casa De Las Americas Literatura Para Niños Y Jovenes (1975-2012), Gloria-Maria Cuesta-Gonzalez

Masters Theses

The cultural dimension of the Cuban Revolution (1959) has an unquestionable reference: Casa de las Américas, international symbol of Cuba in the field of the arts. Of its multiple artistic expression, we have put our focus in the literary prizes with which this institution recognizes children’s literary creation, and our working hypothesis is that Casa de las Américas has played an essential role in the development and consolidation, in the Latin American context, of a genre that even today in day is considered minor. The goal of our study is therefore to investigate and analyze the reasons offered for that …

Innovative Representations Of Light, Behaving As Both Particles And Waves, Among The Paintings Of Monet And Renoir, Charles Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Monet and Renoir, friends collaborating in open air about 1865, discovered that sunlight filtering through a canopy of tree leaves does not produce the splotches and dapples that studio artists conventionally represented at the time but circles of light. Sometimes the circles of light punctuating the shade are clear, separate and crisp, as though light is being propagated as particles, but if the pin-hole gaps between leaves are very close together, they will project compound or superimposed circles that look like the waves that Thomas Young saw in his double slit experiment in 1803-4. Newton’s Opticks published in 1704 had …

The Oirad Of The Early 17th Century: Statehood And Political Ideology, Richard P. Taupier

Doctoral Dissertations

The early 17th century Oirad ulus represents a major turning point in the politics that dominated Central Asian during the second millennia. The Oirad rose among nomadic and settled states to take control of the Central Asian steppes and play an instrumental role as the modern world was taking shape. Following several major studies of the 17th century Oirad over the past twenty years some fundamental issues remain unresolved. One key issue is the political status of the early 17th century Oirad. Confusions arise from conflicting sources and the absence of Oirat primary texts as well as from narratives influenced …

Formación De Intérpretes Y Políticas Lingüísticas En La Provincia Jesuítica Del Paraguay (S. Xvii - Xviii), Ana P. Rona

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores language policies regarding selection and training of interpreters by the Society of Jesus during 17th and 18^th centuries, in the former Paraquaria (the Jesuit Province of Paraguay). The Society of Jesus played a major role in the standardization of indigenous languages, as well as in translation and education policies; all areas of what is now known as language planning. Using as primary sources public and private letters produced by Jesuit authorities during this period, this study identifies overt and covert (Schiffman, 1996) language policies regarding interpreters, their linguistic repertories and the quality of their work. …

All-American Vacationland: African American, Puerto Rican, And Italian Resorts In The Catskill Mountains, 1920-1980, Laura A. Miller

Doctoral Dissertations

In the twentieth century, New York State’s Catskill Mountain resort area was an “All-American” vacationland. Each summer, many different racial and ethnic minorities sought a brief respite from their lives and labor in New York City at boarding houses, resorts, and bungalows scattered throughout the mountains. Collectively, these groups contributed to the development of a highly segregated resort area that reflected, on an exaggerated scale, the racial, ethnic, and class divisions within New York City and the nation as a whole in the twentieth century. This dissertation examines the Catskills resort landscape through a comparative analysis of African American, Puerto …

A Defense Of Russellian Descriptivism, Brandt H. Van Der Gaast

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I defend a Russellian form of descriptivism. The main supporting argument invokes a relation between meaning and thought. I argue that the meanings of sentences are the thoughts people use them to express. This is part of a Gricean outlook on meaning according to which psychological intentionality is prior to, and determinative of, linguistic intentionality. The right approach to thought, I argue in Chapter 1, is a type of functionalism on which thoughts have narrow contents. On this view, the attitude ascriptions of a regimented psychology capture what people really believe and desire. These attitude ascriptions have …

Antigone Claimed, "I Am A Stranger": Democracy, Membership And Unauthorized Immigration, Andres Fabian Henao Castro

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation offers a new framework through which to theorize contemporary democratic practices by attending to the political agency of unauthorized immigrants. I argue that unauthorized immigrants themselves, by claiming their own ambiguous legal condition as a legitimate basis for public speech, are able to open up the boundaries of political membership and to render the foundations of democracy contingent, that is to say, they are able to reopen the question about who counts as a member of the demos. I develop this argument by way of a close reading of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone[1], which allows me to …

Interactive Audience And The Internet, John R. Gallagher

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes up a question posed by Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in 2009: “In a world of participatory media—of Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Del.icio.us—what relevance does the term audience hold?” Using a case study methodology (e.g., Dyson and Genishi; Stake; Yin), I examine how three popular internet writers—all writers who engage with political issues in different venues—conceptualize their audiences and respond to audience feedback. Using established scholarship about audience, including Ede and Lunsford’s work, as well as newer digital scholarship (e.g., Arola, Carnegie, Edbauer Rice), I extend the existing conversation on audience to the context of digital …

Signs Of Wildness: Codes Of The “Primitive” In Masculine Commodity Culture, Matthew P. Ferrari

Doctoral Dissertations

This project broadly examines articulations of the “primitive” emerging from various sites of popular cultural production, considering their operation within the wider “semioscape”– defined by Thurlow and Aiello (2007) as “the globalizing circulation of symbols, sign-systems, and meaning-making practices.” Taking my lead from Kurusawa (2002, 2004), Torgovnik (1991, 1998), Chow (1995), and Di Leonardo (1998), who have demonstrated the importance of the “primitive” as an interpretive discourse, I add to this body of thought by extending its scope into the realm of popular media and cultural production, examining cases within film, television, advertising, sports, and associated lifestyle commodities. I pose …

African American Environmental Ethics: Black Intellectual Perspectives 1850-1965, Vanessa Fabien

Doctoral Dissertations

The historical scholarship in environmental history centers around the narratives of elite white men. Therefore, scholars such as William Cronon, Dorceta Taylor, Noël Sturgeon, and Carolyn Merchant are calling for research that uncovers the political and moral stances of people of color on nature, land ownership, and environmental pollution. This dissertation addresses this call by engaging William H. Sewell Jr.’s cross-disciplinary approach between history and the social sciences to introduce a nuanced historical analysis that interrogates the channels via which African Americans’ environmental ethic sculpted the development of North American environmental history and activism. This dissertation contends that African Americans …

Resurrection: Representations Of The Black Church In Contemporary Popular Culture, Rachel J. Daniel

Doctoral Dissertations

From 1997 to 2013, there have been multiple representations of the black church in popular culture. African American artists have always explored spirituality within black communities; in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, however, the increasing fame of Tyler Perry, T.D. Jakes, Steve Harvey, and other prominent African American Christians has placed black church culture on the center stage of American mainstream media. This dissertation examines contemporary black Christian popular fiction, stage performances, black church films, and rap music. These representations demonstrate that black church culture is distinct from secular black popular culture and white evangelical Christian …

Project Space(S) In The Design Professions: An Intersectional Feminist Study Of The Women's School Of Planning And Architecture (1974-1981), Elizabeth Cahn

Doctoral Dissertations

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture (WSPA) was an ambitious, explicitly feminist educational program created by seven women planners and architects who used the school to introduce ideas and practices of the 1970s women’s movement into design and planning education in the United States. Between 1974 and 1981, WSPA organized five intensive, short-term residential educational sessions and a conference, each in a different geographical location in the United States, after which the organization ceased formal programming and the organizers moved on to other activities. The founders and participants involved in WSPA collectively imagined and created a feminist space for …

Shadows Know, A Poem 11/12/2014, Charles Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Partly written during an illness several years ago; I finished it last year.

Textual Analysis Of Two Translated Transcripts: 2012 Presidential Debate And A Speech Presented By Cyrille De Lasteyrie, Laryssa M. Witty

Masters Theses

Delia Chiaro (2010) describes humor in two broad categories: referential and verbal. The former focuses on the meaning of a story or event and the humor embedded within. In the case of the latter, idiosyncratic features such as word play displays humorous undertones. This Master’s thesis examines oral text transformation to another language via transcription. The transcripts themselves consist of 10 minutes of the 2012 Presidential debate between François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy and 10 minutes of a monologue presented by French animator Cyrille de Lasteyrie. Both transcripts are linked by the commonality of humor and exhibit the two categories …

Costume Design For My Fair Lady By Alan Jay Lerner And Leonard Loewe, Emily I. Taradash

Masters Theses

This paper discusses a theoretical costume design for the Musical "My Fair Lady" by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. The costume designer chose to set the production in 1912, stylizing choices clothing based on period silhouettes and social research. The paper includes character analysis, research, and a discussion of the design process.

Problem-Solving Pedagogy: A Foundation For Restructuring, Updating, And Improving Undergraduate Theory And Musicianship Curricula, Michael T. Simonelli

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to provide the ideological and practical foundation for an improved approach to undergraduate theory and musicianship pedagogy. I will discuss the structure of conventional theory programs and explore problems inherent to traditional curriculum design. Problem-solving pedagogy, an approach rooted in creative composition and improvisation, will be presented as a complement to traditional theory pedagogy. Balancing problem-solving pedagogy with a more traditional pedagogical approach will provide a practical foundation for improving undergraduate theory and musicianship curricula.

Constructing Abe No Seimei: Integrating Genre And Disparate Narratives In Yumemakura Baku's Onmyōji, Devin T. Recchio

Masters Theses

The Onmyōji series has had an incredible impact on Japanese fiction. It has created an entire genre of material called onmyōjimono and sold 5 million copies counting only the novel series. Despite this, it has been woefully understudied by both Japanese and English speaking scholars. The Japanese scholars that do acknowledge it use it as a springboard to launch a survey of Abe no Seimei in written and performed media throughout history, and the English speaking scholars have limited their analyses to the form that oni take in the narrative. My research has revealed that Yumemakura Baku utilizes a complex …

Mishoonash In Southern New England: Construction And Use Of Dugout Canoes In A Multicultural Context, Jacob M. Orcutt

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the history of New England’s dugout canoes – a history that can be traced from 8500 BCE to the twenty-first century. The historical record and archaeological evidence surrounding dugout canoes suggests that the use of dugout canoes changed significantly over time, and that their form varied considerably in different regions of New England. While historians have claimed that these varied forms represent European and colonial influences, I argue that the Eurcolonial influence on dugouts was much more visible in the way the canoes were used than in the shape the vessels took. In addition to analyzing the …

Beauty Through Control: Forming Pro-Anorexic Identities In Digital Spaces, Kay A.S. Mccurley

Masters Theses

Pro-anorexia is a complex, multi-layered phenomenon that exists only online. The women who participate in these websites are learning to negotiate how to manage an identity that is normalized within the group but stigmatized within larger society. Using an open-ended survey, distributed online directly to pro-ana website users, I aim to illustrate pro-anorexic experience. After a brief demographic sketch of typical pro-anorexic spaces, I examine pro-anorexia in depth by asking three primary research questions: 1) how do pro-anorexics craft their online identities within the community; 2) how do individuals interact with one another in a highly contested and heavily policed …

The Phonological Characteritics And The Historical Strata Of The Qianjiang Dialect, Liyan Luo

Masters Theses

The Qianjiang(潛江) city is located not only on the boundary of the Southwestern mandarin and the Gan dialect, but also on the boundary of three different sub-cluster regions of the Southwestern mandarin. Therefore, it is difficult to classify the Qianjiang dialect into any region. As a result, the phonological features of the Qianjiang dialect have not yet been systematically studied so far. In order to provide a thorough understanding of the Qianjiang dialect, this thesis focuses on investigating phonological characteristics of the Qianjiang dialect and in particular the aspiration of the Middle Chinese (MC) voice obstruent. As many ancient phonological …

Inferring Word-Meaning, Morpheme-Based, And Word-Based Second Language Vocabulary Teaching Methodologies, Qingli Liu

Masters Theses

In this study, an experiment was conducted to compare the three teaching methods: the inferring word-meaning method, the morpheme-based teaching method, and the word-based teaching method. The results showed that students taught by the inferring word-meaning method outperformed both the students taught by the morpheme-based method and the word-based method in terms of word retention. The possible reason is that the inferring word-meaning section enabled students to pay attention to and spend more time on each word. On the other hand, the disadvantage of the inferring word-meaning method is that it might not be an efficient way to teach a …

A Study On The Acquisition Of Chinese Directional Complements, Lin Lin

Masters Theses

This paper adopted second language acquisition theories and research methods to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners acquire Chinese directional complements (DCs). It included two main parts: a corpus study and a questionnaire survey. The corpus came from the compositions of 47 Chinese learners at intermediate and advanced levels at a New England university. And the data also included the questionnaire survey of 82 novice, intermediate, and advanced levels’ Chinese learners and 15 native Chinese speakers who study in the same university. The corpus study shows that L2 learners at intermediate and advanced level preferred to use DCs with extended …

The Effect Of Colorblind Racial Ideology On Discussion Of Racial Events: An Examination Of Responses To The News Coverage Of The Trayvon Martin Shooting, Stephanie Lawrence

Masters Theses

This study explores how participants respond to news coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting based on their colorblind racial attitudes. The purpose of this study is to understand how people’s beliefs about the salience of race and racism, as well as how framing within news coverage, contributes to how people privately respond to racial events and their willingness to publicly express their views in discussions. Participants answered questions about their racial ideology, their views about the role of race in the Trayvon Martin shooting, and whether or not they were willing to express these views in a discussion after reading …

Proto-Féminisme Dans L'Epistre Othéa De Christine De Pizan: Appropriation Et Réinterprétation De Deux Figures Mythologiques, Minerve Et Médée., Nathalie D. Lacarriere

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on Christine de Pizan’s mythological allegoric work entitled Epistre Othéa, written around 1400. True to the beliefs she portrays in many of her later seminal works, such as The Book of the City of Ladies, or The Treasure of the City of Ladies, Christine displays in this piece a strong didactic vision. The crucial pairing of text and image in the two manuscripts that I chose to focus on prove the power she exerted as a woman and as an artist but also mark her intention to strengthen her moral and political message through …

Imperial Janus: Patterns Of Governance In The Western Borderlands Of The Tsarist Empire, Nicklaus Laverty

Doctoral Dissertations

Why did the Tsarist Empire opt for different governance strategies in each of the territories of the Western Borderlands (here defined as Poland-Lithuania, the Baltic territories, Finland, and Hetman Ukraine)? The existing political science literature tends to reduce such a question to a distinction between direct and indirect rule, usually developing in the context of a Western European maritime empire. This literature falls short of explaining the Tsarist case and requires the addition of intervening variables concerning the role of local elites and leadership choice. Employing an interdisciplinary literature combining sources from political science, sociology and history, this dissertation develops …

Elegy For Allen, Prose/Poem 9/12/2014, Charles Smith

Charles Kay Smith

This Elegy is a poetic version of a eulogy I made at Allen Midyett's memorial service in late summer of 2013.

Arthur’S Heirs: Situating Medieval Welsh, Spanish, And Scandinavian Texts In Their Literary And Historical Contexts, Nahir I. Otaño Gracia

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses a significant gap in Arthurian scholarship by adapting postcolonial and translation theory to analyze Medieval Arthurian literature from the peripheral cultures that interacted throughout the Irish Sea and the Atlantic littoral. This project uses a similar approach as that traditionally employed in Mediterranean studies to investigate Arthurian texts and related materials from the Celtic (Irish and Welsh), Scandinavian (Norwegian and Icelandic), and Iberian (Castilian and Catalan) cultural peripheries to point out both the local and transcultural roles of these texts. By highlighting that Arthurian literature was not only transmitted from Britain through France to the rest of …

Between Men: A First-Person Documentary Video, Thomas C. Prutisto

Masters Theses

ABSTRACT

BETWEEN

MEN:

A

FIRST

PERSON

DOCUMENTARY

VIDEO

May

2014

THOMAS

C.

PRUTISTO,

B.S.,

ROCHESTER

INSTITUTE

OF

TECHNOLOGY

Directed

by:

Professor

Susan

E.

Jahoda

Cultural Discourse Analysis Of Russian Alcohol Consumption, Elena V. Nuciforo

Doctoral Dissertations

The study uses cultural discourse analysis to explore alcohol consumption that is valued as normal and enjoyable, and to examine how alcohol consumption is viewed as a problem in both folk and official discourses in Russia. An event called “posidet’” (to sit) is deeply embedded in Russian cultural discourse in the form of a communication ritual with enjoyable alcohol consumption. The ritual has a structured sequence, commonly upheld norms, and a multilayered “sacred object” that provides access to cultural meanings of Russian personhood, relations, actions, emotions, and location in the nature of things. A ritualistic corrective sequence in case someone …

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …