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Articles 3151 - 3180 of 11019

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

There's No Place Like Home, Stacey Lynn Rathert Jan 2015

There's No Place Like Home, Stacey Lynn Rathert

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I grew up on a farm in Northeast Kansas, under a big sky that had open views of the fields, pastures, and farmsteads. During that upbringing I learned about hard labor as well as work ethic, and what it took to survive in an often harsh and unforgiving environment. It is these experiences from my formative years, in that environment, where most of the driving force behind my artwork is derived. The work materializes as objects and narratives in sculptural manifestations. The themes range from domestic activities taught to me by the women in my life, to the hands-on, “dirty” …


Notes On Distance Dialing, Liam Baranauskas Jan 2015

Notes On Distance Dialing, Liam Baranauskas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My mom thought watching professional wrestling would turn me gay, so I saw the WWF mostly at my dad’s house, on his twelve-inch black and white television with aluminum foil for an antenna. Every other week I got two hours of gyrating pretty boys, unexamined racism, heavy breathing, and the occasional obese man whose blubbery folds could endure endless punishment until he ended his match by sitting on his opponent. There was a Jewish accountant wrestler who would berate the crowd for cheating on their taxes. There was “Kamala the Ugandan Giant.” There was a clown. The greytoned pixels on …


Transformation Of The American Mafia, 1880-1960, Connor Anthony Hagan Jan 2015

Transformation Of The American Mafia, 1880-1960, Connor Anthony Hagan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis aims to discover how the American Cosa Nostra transformed in the early 20th century. The goal of this project is to show how the American mafia’s interactions with the US government evolved the mafia from a group of discriminated immigrants into consummate insiders who adapted to the American historical landscape. To explore this transformation and evolving relationship, this thesis analyzed numerous sources from US government archives and personal testimonies of American Cosa Nostra members. The American Cosa Nostra operated as a shadowy, yet powerful organization throughout much of the 20th century. During this time, the American mafia influenced …


Faculty Perception Of Department Chairs' Leadership Style And Perceived Effects On Music Faculty's Self-Reported Productivity, Jessie Lee Primer Jan 2015

Faculty Perception Of Department Chairs' Leadership Style And Perceived Effects On Music Faculty's Self-Reported Productivity, Jessie Lee Primer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceived effectiveness of the leadership styles of music department chairs and the responses to the leadership styles by faculty. This study specifically investigated the leadership styles of music department chairs serving in public higher education institutions with NASM accredited music units in the states of Arkansas and Mississippi. The study examined the perceived types of leadership styles used by music department chairs and their relationship with music faculties' self-reported productivity as seen by faculty members within the department. The need for this study is to assist universities in recruiting and developing …


Observation And Analysis Of Undergraduate Applied Piano Lessons And Individual Practice Sessions, Fen-Fang Chen Jan 2015

Observation And Analysis Of Undergraduate Applied Piano Lessons And Individual Practice Sessions, Fen-Fang Chen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify what practice strategies were presented by piano teachers in applied lessons and how their students practiced in subsequent practice sessions. Moreover, the study also attempted to identity what practice strategies and applications were associated with the students' performance improvement. Five university piano professors participated in this study. Each participant professor recruited two piano-major (BA, BM, BME) undergraduate students from his or her piano studio, with one student in the first or second year of college (as the lower-level), and the other one in the third or fourth year (as the upper-level). A …


The Delicate Art Of Being: Psychological Responses To Environmental Damage In American Fiction Of The 1970s, Andrew Timothy Thomas Jan 2015

The Delicate Art Of Being: Psychological Responses To Environmental Damage In American Fiction Of The 1970s, Andrew Timothy Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This Master’s thesis looks at three works of American literature from the 1970s—James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970), Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (1979), and Leslie MarSilko’s Ceremony (1977)—with two primary research questions in mind: How do these novels act as responses to the politicization and globalization of the American environmental movement? and How do these novels depict psychological responses to ongoing environmental damage and destruction? This study is particularly interested in depictions of abjected environments inhabited by socially abjected people. Through investigations of ecohorror, ecotrauma, and ecomelancholy as manifested in aesthetic representations of abjected environments, I read these three environmentally aware texts as …


English Identity And Muslim Captivity In The Mediterranean, 1580-1640, Joel Gillaspie Jan 2015

English Identity And Muslim Captivity In The Mediterranean, 1580-1640, Joel Gillaspie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the emergence of English identity that captivity and Muslims challenged from 1580-1640 as expressed captivity narratives. The narratives provide numerous insights into the emerging English identity as Englishmen explored and became captives in the Mediterranean in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period. The captivity narratives are unique in that they portray Englishmen at their weakest and in the most helpless situations as England attempted to spread its trade relations throughout the Mediterranean. Few other genres of literature provide such insight into English identity through the particular experience as captivity. Overall, this can provide one more step …


Fetishizing Southern Brutality: An Intersectional Analysis Of Animalistic Dehumanization In Interracial Pornography, Shawna Faye Felkins Jan 2015

Fetishizing Southern Brutality: An Intersectional Analysis Of Animalistic Dehumanization In Interracial Pornography, Shawna Faye Felkins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Pornography has been a widely debated issue within the feminist movement since the sex wars of the 1970’s. The conversation has shifted to a sex radical position within the third movement, seeking to be “sex positive” in representations of pornography as a potential site of empowerment. This work, however, seeks to complicate the idea that all depictions of sex are empowering by examining the popular genre of interracial pornography through the lens of the southern tropes that are often enacted within them: the jezebel, southern belle, and black brute. By using these historical tropes with the work of Judith Butler …


Lucy Negro, Redux, Caroline Randall Williams Jan 2015

Lucy Negro, Redux, Caroline Randall Williams

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lucy Negro, Redux is a collection of poetry that uses the lens of Shakespeare's "Dark Lady" sonnets to explore the way questions about and desire for the black female body have evolved over time, from Elizabethan England to the Jim Crow South to the present day. Research for the collection began with the discovery in early 2012 of a connection between the historical Elizabethan figure Black Luce--a notorious brothel owner--and William Shakespeare, by Professor Duncan Salkeld of the University of Chichester. A grant from the University of Mississippi yielded an opportunity for on-site research with Dr. Salkeld in order to …


Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock Jan 2015

Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, And Consumption In The Antebellum American Novel, Laura Jean Schrock

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human "nature," newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the "organic angel," a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation's budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at …


Please Don't Forget About Me: African American Women, Mississippi, And The History Of Crime And Punishment In Parchman Prison, 1890-1980, Telisha Dionne Bailey Jan 2015

Please Don't Forget About Me: African American Women, Mississippi, And The History Of Crime And Punishment In Parchman Prison, 1890-1980, Telisha Dionne Bailey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite the vast amount of research covering incarcerated men in the southern prison system from the beginning of the nineteenth century to present, the incarceration of women has gone almost unexamined. As the forgotten offender, historians, criminologist, and others interested in Mississippi carceral studies have failed to include a historical study that focuses on the incarceration of African American women in Mississippi. To date, there are two major historical works that explore Mississippi penology and its notorious Parchman Penitentiary. David Oshinsky’s, Worse Than Slavery and William Banks Taylor’s, Down on Parchman Farm, are the two pivotal historical works that examine …


Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas Jan 2015

Speaking In Wild Tongues: The Borderlands Of Eudora Welty And Alice Walker, Sara Gabler Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes her experience undergoing a dental procedure as a battle between her wild tongue and the dentist. Beginning with a discussion of Anzaldúa’s concept of the wild tongue, this project asks how writers across the US South depict unruly tongues and infelicitous speech. Methodologically, this thesis inverts the comreading model in literary studies of reading Third World writers through First World theorists. Instead, beginning with Anzaldúa, I propose to reverse this process and assert a new reading methodology of reading First World writers through Third World theorists. The trope of the wild tongue will mobilize …


Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran Jan 2015

Thin Bodies, Elizabeth Meliza Tran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Thin Bodies, is a fictional thriller revolving around a retrospective, female voice. It is a short novel-length view into the insular community of the sorority, specifically in the U.S. Deep South. The town and university are both fictional, as are the characters, sororities, and events, but they are based in realistic institutions of socialization and community. Sarah Beth, our protagonist and narrator, considers her coming-of-age through her recruitment, initiation, ensuing leadership, and eventual fall from grace in her sorority, Theta Kappa. The group of women that this novel intends to characterize struggle with identity and how they are perceived against …


Is This Fire, Gregory Sherl Jan 2015

Is This Fire, Gregory Sherl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Is This Fire is a collection of poems dealing with the themes of faith and loss. In one section, "The Third Testament," parts of the Bible have been reimagined. There are poems about Joan of Arc, as well as poems that touch on miscarriages, as well as the Columbine massacre. There are, of course, also love poems.


An Analysis Of Student Teachers’ Instruction In A Beginning Band Setting, Eric C. Bonds Jan 2015

An Analysis Of Student Teachers’ Instruction In A Beginning Band Setting, Eric C. Bonds

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated the teaching behaviors of student teachers in a beginning band setting and identified their instructional targets to compare the data between the participants from two different conditions, the on-podium condition and the off-podium condition. Previous research of expert and experienced teachers in a beginning band setting suggests those teachers were mobile during instruction, were proactive in managing transition periods, remained off the podium for greater durations while providing instruction, used modeling frequently, and provided specific directives toward goal attainment. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether student teachers more closely exhibit the instructional strategies of …


The Dead Rise The Dead And Walk Among The Living: An Examination Of The Haunting South, Queerness, And Grotesqueries In Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" And "Local Color", Jordan Alexis Savage Jan 2015

The Dead Rise The Dead And Walk Among The Living: An Examination Of The Haunting South, Queerness, And Grotesqueries In Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" And "Local Color", Jordan Alexis Savage

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project is conceptualized through a multitude of intersecting and overlapping theories that work together to allow an examination of circulations and intersections of queerness, grotesqueries, and the haunting South. Throughout this reading of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Local Color I want to think through the ways in which images and moments in the text can be queer and grotesque while also lending themselves to the images and eruptions that make up the haunting South. My reading of grotesqueries and the haunting South purposefully moves away from the Southern Gothic, rooting itself instead in a space that …


Ramped Soapbox, Alyssa Marie Radtke Jan 2015

Ramped Soapbox, Alyssa Marie Radtke

Honors Theses

This is a collection of mostly autobiographical disability poetry.


Al-Arabiyyah, Le Français, And The Soul Of Algeria: The Language Tango Between Arabic And French In Algerian Education Policy And Defining Post-Colonial Algerian National Identity, Amir Aziz Jan 2015

Al-Arabiyyah, Le Français, And The Soul Of Algeria: The Language Tango Between Arabic And French In Algerian Education Policy And Defining Post-Colonial Algerian National Identity, Amir Aziz

Honors Theses

In Algeria, Arabic and French are the two most commonly spoken languages, sharing a contentious relationship with one another in relation to national identity. The centrality of French and its continued importance in Algerian society are due to the legacy of French colonialism, discussed in Section 1.1. The centrality of Arabic and its prominence is attributed to the spread of Islam and Arabo-Islamic culture, discussed in Section 1.2. The core of my research inquiry thus focuses exclusively on Arabic and French, due to their high visibility in Algerian society. The Berber language is the third most commonly spoken language, spoken …


Defining The Revolution: A Study Of Contemporary China's Sexual Transformation, Zackary L. Whitehead Jan 2015

Defining The Revolution: A Study Of Contemporary China's Sexual Transformation, Zackary L. Whitehead

Honors Theses

The use of the word revolution typifies much of the research and media coverage of contemporary shifts in Chinese sexual attitudes and behaviors. I argue that this language, while useful in intimating the extent of social transformation, remains clumsy due to the historical backdrop of Western sexual liberation and China's own cultural history. While the PRC government continues to disapprove and outlaw the proliferation of pornography, rising rates of premarital and extramarital sex and the spread of HIV/AIDS and other developments demonstrate ongoing shifts in Chinese society. Yet, the government's domination of politics and the Chinese people's desire for continued …


Gender Performance, Trauma, And Orality In Adichie's Half Of A Yellow Sun And Purple Hibiscus, Lauren Elizabeth Rackley Jan 2015

Gender Performance, Trauma, And Orality In Adichie's Half Of A Yellow Sun And Purple Hibiscus, Lauren Elizabeth Rackley

Honors Theses

This thesis examines Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus in order to explore the implications of trauma on middleclass Igbo women's gender performance. The traumas that the women encounter within the novels occur within the domestic sphere and are results of the Biafran War in Half of a Yellow Sun and domestic abuse in Purple Hibiscus. This thesis interrogates women's experiences within the domestic sphere, ultimately reflecting a larger national trauma that Biafra and later Nigeria undergo as a result of colonial occupation. This thesis concludes with an exploration of the culturally specific practice of …


Honestly, Woman, You Call Yourself Our Mother?: Mothers And Witches In Harry Potter, Mary-Eileen Rankin Rankin Jan 2015

Honestly, Woman, You Call Yourself Our Mother?: Mothers And Witches In Harry Potter, Mary-Eileen Rankin Rankin

Honors Theses

This thesis aims to analyze the importance of maternal nurture and the witches as mothers trope in the Harry Potter series. This nurture is traditional as well as perverse and appears in characters besides the adult women. Rowling creates characters who appeal to paradigms of the Early Modern bad mother witch who harmed children among other accusations associated with female sexuality and motherhood. Additionally, Rowling challenges the negative stereotype of associating witches and bad mothering by presenting witches as good mothers. The power of maternal nurture in the series is best seen through the good mothers. This theme plays such …


A War On Women? The Malleus Maleficarum And The Witch-Hunts In Early Modern Europe, Morgan L. Stringer Jan 2015

A War On Women? The Malleus Maleficarum And The Witch-Hunts In Early Modern Europe, Morgan L. Stringer

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the topic of gender and witchcraft, specifically why women were so heavily represented in witchcraft trials. The demonology text, The Malleus Maleficarum was analyzed. Several other demonological texts were also analyzed and then compared to one another regarding their statements about women, men, and witchcraft. Then historiography pertaining to gender and witchcraft were analyzed and critiqued. The Malleus Maleficarum contains a high degree of misogyny, but it presents an extreme misogynistic view that is not present in other demonology texts. The argument that the Early Modern European Witch-Hunts were a war on women fails to account for …


The Pen Is A Thing The Hand Already, Andrew Montgomery Freiman Jan 2015

The Pen Is A Thing The Hand Already, Andrew Montgomery Freiman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Pen is a Thing The Hand Already is a lyric epic set in the classroom of an American MFA program. The student’s voices as well as the teacher’s all act interchangeably to expand and complicate the reader’s understanding of self. This is a poem.


Is The God Of Christian Theology Apathetic?, Kenneth Wayne Gilmore Jan 2015

Is The God Of Christian Theology Apathetic?, Kenneth Wayne Gilmore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The argument of my thesis is that the God of Christian theology has adopted the doctrine of impassibility from Plato and Aristotle. According to this doctrine, God does not experience a variety of psychological states such as anger, sorrow, joy, and love. I will argue that the doctrine of impassibility is not only incongruent with the God of Scripture who is dynamic, redemptive, and loving toward his creation, but that it is antithetical to other core fundamental doctrines in Scripture. I begin by giving an overview of the debate in Part I by surveying the three views on passibility and …


Missouri! Bright Land Of The West: Civil War Memory And Western Identity In Missouri, Amy Fluker Jan 2015

Missouri! Bright Land Of The West: Civil War Memory And Western Identity In Missouri, Amy Fluker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project argues that Missouri’s singular position as a border state not only between the North and South, but also between the East and West shaped the state’s Civil War experience as well as its memory of the conflict. During the Civil War, Missouri was a slaveholding border state on the western frontier and home to a diverse and divided population. Neither wholly Union nor Confederate, Missouri’s Civil War was bitterly divisive. In its aftermath, Missourians struggled to come to terms with what it had been about. They found no place within the national narratives of Civil War commemoration emerging …


Thisness, Henry Wise Jan 2015

Thisness, Henry Wise

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a series of poems which explore the unnamed American narrator’s search for identity while living in Taiwan. In these poems, he considers the political situation of Taiwan. This work is meant to contemplate the continuousness of life, the futility of love, the complications of language, the power of the world’s elements, and the essence of what exactly life is all about.


I Eat Shit Food And Am Not Worthy: Negotiating The Queer Weight Of "White Trash" Embodiment In Dorothy Allison's Corpus, Rebecca Albright Jan 2015

I Eat Shit Food And Am Not Worthy: Negotiating The Queer Weight Of "White Trash" Embodiment In Dorothy Allison's Corpus, Rebecca Albright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that Dorothy Allison’s work—and specifically the women who hate me (1983), Trash (1988), and Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature (1994)—explores the unexpected alliances and radical difference and desire produced by interactions between fatness, queerness, and “white trashiness” on the terrain of late-twentieth-century representational and lived southern culture, and specifically how queer and “white trash” embodiments are both legible in terms of fatness, much in the way that gravy thickens in Allison’s writing to envelop and signify simultaneously lack and excess, shame and ecstasy, disgust and desire, and difference and community. Indeed, it is in the …


The Black Death And Its Impact On The Church And Popular Religion, Mclaurine H. Zentner Jan 2015

The Black Death And Its Impact On The Church And Popular Religion, Mclaurine H. Zentner

Honors Theses

This thesis concerns the religious impact of the Black Death, the plague that devastated Europe during the middle of the fourteenth century. It explores the effect of the Black Death on the Catholic Church and the religious movements that emerged in response to it. The conclusions drawn here are based on the research of both primary and secondary sources. The Church played a significant role during the Middle Ages because religion was an important aspect of daily life for European Christians. When the Black Death struck Europe in 1347, the Church struggled to cope with the plague's damaging consequences and …


Up And Down, Guibing Qin Jan 2015

Up And Down, Guibing Qin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1953, one day before the Korean Armistice Agreement, two Chinese young peasants decide to join the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. Wu Xiu-quan is hesitant because he is the only son and he has a young child bride of seven years waiting to marry him. Wu Xiu-bang, his cousin, convinces him that joining the army would bring honor to his family. The cousins hiked over night to get to the enlist office by the Yangtze River, only to be told that the Korean War has ended. They were sent home. Wu Xiu-quan’s father captured him and gives him a good …


Being Nice Is Lethal: Disciplining And Subverting Southern Femininity In Contemporary Southern Popular Culture, Kaitlyn Vogt Jan 2015

Being Nice Is Lethal: Disciplining And Subverting Southern Femininity In Contemporary Southern Popular Culture, Kaitlyn Vogt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis focuses on the performance of southern femininity in contemporary southern popular culture, specifically prescriptive literature and reality television. Both texts provide valuable insight into how southern femininity is disciplined and subverted by individual women and the public. Humorous prescriptive literature in the first chapter provides the data necessary to delineate key markers of “ideal” southern femininity and how primarily elite white women perform it. The second chapter focuses on the show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and how June Shannon opened up a liminal space for thinking about alternative southern femininities before ultimately closing it with her scandal …