Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Shadows Of Salem: Recovered Memories In The Sandusky Case, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

In 2012 the former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of the sexual abuse of children.  However, none of his accusers accused him of anything until Victim 1, Aaron Fisher, entered treatment with a psychologist who diagnosed him at first sight as a victim of sexual abuse. The psychologist denied that he engaged in recovered-memory therapy. The record suggests otherwise. If a competent defense had shown at trial that the psychologist practiced on Victim 1 the same mode of therapy he rejected out of hand, the case against Sandusky might have collapsed, much as the …

Resilience In Recreation: Stories Of A Changing Climate, Casey L. Auberle

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

As the impacts of climate change become increasingly prevalent, the outdoor activities that bond us to our local communities and environments are under threat. In Missoula, MT, drought, rising temperatures, and wildfire smoke change what it means to fish, ski, run, and recreate in our town. In a series of Q&A style podcasts, environmental philosophy graduate student Casey Auberle creates a platform to share stories of a changing climate through the lens of local recreators and climate activists. Capturing these voices invites us to consider our relationship with nature on both an individual and communal scale, to find unity in …

Hi Friend! Msw Portfolio Of Community Building And Advocacy, River Gerard Segar

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This MSW Portfolio emphasizes the importance of being rooted in community and demonstrates how to engage in community building in a way that helps center marginalized voices. This portfolio also highlights advocacy in the United States for transgender people and asserts the need for increased cultural competency in clinical practice with people in non-monogamous and/or kink relational structures.

Things Montaigne Got Right About Medicine, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

In an article in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine a few years ago, I documented a number of Montaigne’s insights into medicine that have held up over time.  Not everyone was convinced.  Therefore I here augmented my case, adducing several other Montaignean insights and adding some particulars to one or two that were mentioned in the original article.

Building Collaborative Capacity For Coexistence With The Montana Beaver Working Group, Shane Randle

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

Despite beavers’ recent surge in popularity, prevailing negative attitudes and the persistence of beaver removal practices remain obstacles for those advocating living with beavers. The Montana Beaver Working Group (BWG) advances beavers’ role in ecological and community resilience through members’ collaborative efforts, including beaver-related restoration and conflict resolution projects. Bringing together people with diverse values and perspectives, the BWG builds collective understanding, develops a holistic vision for beavers in Montana, and supports members in pursuing it. As the group’s impacts and membership have grown, so too has their need to adapt. For my Civic Engagement Project, I strengthened the BWG’s …

How Shakespeare Films Distort History, Ruth Vanita

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

The Oscar-nominated Hamnet exploits the playwright’s fame to manipulate facts of his life and work and encourages viewers to derive fake history from the movies.

Return To Roots: Strunk, White, Orwell, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

Where did I get the idea that writing is a disciplined expression of free thought?

Why The “Dead Silence” About The Slave Trade In Mansfield Park?, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

Legend has it that Jane Austen excluded the topic of slavery in toto from the text of Mansfield Park even though (or because) the family patriarch, Sir Thomas Bertram, spends the first half of the novel on his estate in Antigua. It is true that Sir Thomas is off-camera. However, in the family circle one evening shortly after his return from the West Indies, the reticent heroine, Fanny Price, attempts to open a discussion of the slave trade—without success. Mansfield Park does not impose silence on the question of the slave trade; rather, it depicts the imposition of silence on …

Showpony, George Theodore Ellington

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The poetry collection Showpony focuses on the real-life experiences of a woman in her twenties during the 1970s, who is treated by psychiatrist Dr. Robert J. Stoller at UCLA in a desperate attempt to make her normal. Mrs. G struggles with homicidal and suicidal thoughts, psychosis, as well as her homosexuality and transgender identity. Showpony examines the ways in which psychology has pathologized these experiences and the ramifications for patients, particularly those who have been publicly showcased as examples of their conditions used to train future students. The collection critiques the exploitation of patients by psychiatrists and psychologists, highlighting unethical …

Know Fear: The Culture Of Fear In Community Conversations, Penelope Meredyk, Lotus Porte-Moyel, Fiona Carson, Cosley Bruno, Barrett Clement, Sophia Sproull, Morgan Davis

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

“K(no)w Fear” is an award winning piece of verbatim theater based on word-for-word interviews and collected research that's goal was to cultivate a connective and thoughtful community open to exploring what shapes us all: fear. Our GLI Capstone team gathered the resources for this theater piece by conducting interviews with a mixed demographic of people we know as well as strangers on the street, asking questions like: “How do you feel about death?” and “If fear were a place for you, where would it be?” With consent, their answers were used to build an immersive, verbatim theatre piece where actors …

The Legal Philosophy Behind Zoos Confinement Of Animals, Jamie Lynn Tucker Crockett

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

In my essay, I will be diving into the controversial issue of Animal containment, focusing on zoos in the United States. I will be taking this opportunity to establish a new way of thinking about the argument which states the pros of zoos outweigh the negative effects they have on the animals who live there. Neither side of the argument has a malicious intention towards harming animals. Instead, each side shows a different approach of what it is to properly care, and respect for animal rights. Those arguing in support of zoos commonly reference arguments dating back to Aristotle. However, …

Lake As Body: Ecofeminism And Animacy At The Great Salt Lake, Shae Barber

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Water shapes cultural, social, and ecological systems. Yet, dominant economic, political, and academic frameworks often treat water as a backdrop or passive resource, ignoring it as an active participant in meaning-making and relationship-building. Viewing water as “nonliving” obscures how it participates in and co-creates relationships, limiting understanding about impacts of and responses to climate change and environmental degradation.

This thesis takes a mixed-methods and participatory approach including semi-structured interview, photovoice, and participatory mapping to examine relational practices between environmental advocates and the Great Salt Lake, a desiccating saline lake in Utah, U.S. As the lake continues to decline, dominant Western …

A Psychogeography Of The Lower Colorado River Basin, Arren L. Kimbel-Sannit

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Dried-up canals. Superheated strip malls. Proliferating data centers. Infinite appetite for growth despite its apparent circumstances. Arizona may well be the state of the American future. This multi-genre series of essays from Arren Kimbel-Sannit offers a personal, political-economic and ecological critique of growth and accumulation in Arizona — from the perspective of someone who grew up in its suburban expanses, reported on its politics, and long sought to clarify his relationship with home.

Hope For The Drowned: Baptism, Faith, And The Open Community Of Grace In Marilynne Robinson’S Housekeeping And Lila, Mackenzie M. Miller

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis explores the baptismal imagery across two of Marilynne Robinson’s novels, Housekeeping and Lila. The hermeneutic used to understand baptism is based on some of the works of Rowan Williams, Mircea Eliade, and Northrop Frye. In its death and rebirth function, baptism is understood for its connection to the formation of self and identity. Baptism is also explored as a means of community initiation. Further, connecting these two baptismal functions, this thesis also looks at the role community plays in the formation of that identity. In this process, I compare Housekeeping’s Ruth and Lila’s titular character; …

Continental Violence And The "Oregon Question": George Frederick Ruxton And The Nineteenth-Century Pacific Northwest, Rory Orion Johnson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper builds on recent efforts to depict Indigenous polities across North America in their international relations with European and Euro-American colonists and their centralized governments. It examines George Frederick Ruxton, a private English citizen and former army lieutenant, as he developed his response to the U.S.-British Oregon dispute while living in London in early 1846. He concluded that continental warfare was imminent and took overt steps to influence British policy, which he believed could halt U.S. expansion and definitively resolve the “Oregon Question.”

Thistlebloom Moondog, Gary W. Jensen

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

An aging grieving artist decides to write a memoir as part of a self-healing process, using samples of song lyrics from his extensive collection of original Americana songs as narrative prompts.  Steeped in wanderlust, aspiration, paradox and dysfunction, his is a tale of vexing sub-clinical troubles rooted in the mire of developmental and religious trauma.

The Birth Of Afghanistan: From Ancient Persia To A Modern-Day Multiethnic And Linguistic Country, Tyler A. Worm

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis offers a comprehensive historical analysis of the formation and evolution of Afghan identity from antiquity through the early medieval period, emphasizing the region’s role as a dynamic crossroads of civilizations. It traces the origins of Afghan populations to Indo-Iranian pastoralist migrations and examines the successive influence of major imperial formations, including the Median and Achaemenid Persian empires, the conquests of Alexander and the Seleucid period, and the rise of the Kushan, Parthian, and Sasanian states. Through this longue durée approach, the study demonstrates how Afghanistan’s geographic position facilitated continuous cultural interaction, economic exchange, and political contestation, producing a …

Heart Of Stone: Geomorphization Through Stone-Oriented Affects, Grace F. Foster

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis draws from the work of geologist Marcia Bjornerud to bring a scientific (specifically geologic) understanding of humanity’s relationship to our home planet to bear in a literary context. I employ Bjornerud’s term “geomorphization” to expand from inter-species kinship to inter-substance kinship and to establish stone as an active, lively subject without relying on anthropomorphization. Geomorphization as I define it refers to recognizing similarity between ourselves and stone/Earth on the basis of our stoniness rather than stone’s human-ness. Geomorphizing ourselves entails what Bjornerud calls “timefulness,” a geologic perspective on temporality that sees the past as continually acting in the …

Living The American Dystopia: Parallels Between Louise Erdrich's Future Home Of The Living God, Leni Zumas's Red Clocks, And Us Abortion Legislation, Erin R. Walden

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis highlights the parallels between contemporary U.S. culture and legislation (particularly after the overturning of Roe v. Wade) and two pieces of feminist speculative fiction: Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks. Through a rhetorical analysis of political and cultural discourse, legislation, and the two novels, utilizing the frameworks of theorists such as Catharine MacKinnon, Michel Foucault, and Stacy Alaimo, I investigate the similarities in legislation, culture, rhetoric, and atmospheres of reproductive dystopian fiction and our current political environment after the U.S. Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health …

“An Extremely Dangerous Institution:” The Cultures And Controversy Of Public Social Dances In Montana, 1900-1930, Danielle Allison Brown

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This paper explores public social dances east of the Continental Divide in Montana from 1900 to 1930. Rural social dances in schoolhouses and urban dances in dance halls created two different dance cultures. The relaxed nature of rural dances preserved the traditional values of nineteenth-century social dances, which reinforced community and family ties. Urban dances reflected the modern fads of the roaring twenties and challenged traditional values with sexual suggestiveness. Progressive Era moral reformers concerned about the possibility that social dance promoted illicit sexuality participated in an anti-dance movement and pushed for regulations of social dances. The anti-dance movement in …

"More Boldly I Shall Go:" Jacobites, Hanoverians, And The Fabrication Of Nostalgia, 1745-1766, Jacob Louis Shropshire

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This study investigates how Jacobites and Hanoverians constructed competing forms of nostalgia, identity, and political meaning in the decades after the rebellion of 1745. Although the defeat of Prince Charles Edward Stuart at Culloden ended any realistic hope of a Stuart restoration, it sparked a cultural struggle in which both supporters and opponents of the Stuarts depicted the Highlander as a symbol of heroic resistance or barbarism. A psychic struggle emerged as a result, and the Highlander became beloved by Jacobites and loathed by Hanoverians. These representations circulated through paintings, engravings, clothing, glassware, newspapers, pamphlets, and verse, which became central …

Illusions Of Fairness And Sacrifice, Brady Schwertfeger

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The American West is a shifting landscape. An incongruous expanse of isolation and urbanity, wilderness and extraction, wealth and welfare, clear water and fire. Fifteen years ago, I moved to my mother’s ancestral homeland of Montana, and have been here ever since. Before that, I was born and raised in Texas, both the West and the South (and often something else entirely), depending on who you ask. My experiences in this region have shaped me indelibly, and have inspired this collection of essays built around culture, politics, and justice in the West. “Pinedale, Wyoming” considers the musician as itinerant wanderer …

Cormac’S Court: Knights Without God In A Savage Land; Or, Chivalry And Existentialism In Cormac Mccarthy’S The Road, Zoë Margaret Metelerkamp

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Cormac McCarthy scholars have examined the influence of romantic grail quest literature and existential philosophy on McCarthy’s oeuvre, but they have treated these subjects independently of each other. This thesis offers a novel exploration of McCarthy’s use of these specific philosophical and literary precedents by focusing on the ways The Road unifies medieval literary principles in Chretien’s Perceval with the existential chivalry Søren Kierkegaard extrapolates in Fear and Trembling.

Highway Kind, Caitlin C. Thompson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

What Veracity Looks Like, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

The first victim of the first school shooter.

Post-Finasteride Syndrome: Medically Unexplained, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

Post-Finasteride Syndrome (PFS) is a controversial illness associated with a host of distressing symptoms—most notably sexual dysfunctions—reported to persist long beyond the intake of finasteride itself. It appears the PFS population consists exclusively of younger patients with alopecia, even though millions take a higher (if pharmacologically similar) dosage of finasteride for benign prostatic hyperplasia. This dichotomy is not what one would expect to observe if finasteride caused PFS. No medical explanation of this one-sided syndrome exists. The surge of cases of PFS following a publicity spike in 2011 and 2012 suggests that PFS owes much nonbiological factors. The present analysis …

An Undecorated Marine, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

In honor of what would have been my father’s 100th birthday.

Ai And Me, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

How well did AI interpret an article of mine published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas?

Mrs. Dalloway Turns 100: Love Between Women Comes Of Age, Ruth Vanita

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

At 100, Virginia Woolf’s classic remains startlingly original—both in its style and depiction of female sexuality.

Steve Jobs And Disclaimed Paternity, Stewart Justman

Global Humanities and Religions Faculty Publications

Steve Jobs, the revered techno-visionary and co-founder of Apple, once said that at the age of 22, “I knew I wasn’t ready to run a real company. But Apple was my baby, and I didn’t want to give it up.” The actual baby born when he was 23 was another matter.