Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Pollen Forecasting In Sarasota, Florida, Daniel J. Gessman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current predictions of pollen levels rely strictly on historical Averages, regardless of environmental factors that might affect the timing of pollen release by different plants. For this thesis, the goal was to develop a statistical model that will accurately forecast pollen levels by correlating those daily counts to atmospheric and meteorological conditions. This project used ARIMA modeling on IBM’s SPSS Statistics 24 of daily pollen count information for multiple allergenic pollens in the Sarasota County, Florida area over a 11-year period. The pollen species in question for this project are oak and cypress trees, grass, and ragweed pollens; and Alternaria …

(Dis)Enchanted: (Re)Constructing Love And Creating Community In The, Shannon A. Suddeth

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a queer fan community for the television show Once Upon a Time (OUAT) that utilizes the social networking site Tumblr as their primary base of fan activity. The Swan Queen fan community is comprised of individuals that collectively support and celebrate a non-canon romantic relationship between two of the female lead characters of the show rather than the canonic, heterocentric relationships that occur between the two women and their respective male love interests. I answer two research questions in this study: First, how are members of the Swan Queen fan community developing counter narratives of …

Contre L’Amour Courtois: 
Le Vrai Amour Chez Marie De France Et Chrétien De Troyes, Elizabeth Walley

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes were two of the most influential French writers of the twelfth century. Both of these poets use different devices and themes of l’amour courtois, a model of how love was portrayed in literature at that time, to warn against the folie and the dangers to which adhering to the doctrines of this model could lead. They use narrative voice and commentary from characters to directly explain to readers why l’amour courtois is not an ideal example to follow, and they rely on the outcomes of their stories to portray potential outcomes for …

"There's A Real Hole Here": Female Masochism And Spectatorship In Michael Haneke's La Pianiste, Morgan J. Jennings

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this project, I examine the relationship between female masochism, performance, and spectatorship in Michael Haneke’s film La Pianiste (2001). The film stages a relationship to sexuality that structures the subject’s excruciating negotiations with the other as always mediated by the law, the letter, or the body as instrument, which is allegorized by the protagonist’s occupation as a piano teacher. In my analysis, I identify the ways in which the film paradoxically offers a critique of mediation’s effect on the feminine position while encouraging viewers to confront the possibility that desire is only possible through these mediations. Contributing to feminist …

Embodying Character, Adapting Communication; Or, The Senses And Sensibilities Of Epistolarity And New Media In The Classroom, Jodi L. Wyett

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay describes a classroom role-playing activity that incorporates both modern social media and the tools of eighteenth-century composition. Students communicate with each other as characters in the assigned novel, by either texting, tweeting, or writing longhand with quill pens. The exercise aims to help students grasp the sometimes-elusive historical contexts of eighteenth-century writing as well as the ways in which we interpret and adapt those contexts and their attendant modes of communication when we read for meaning in our own moment. My experiences suggest that the activity is particularly effective at helping students to reflect upon their own interpretive …

Embodying Gender And Class In Public Spaces Through An Active Learning Activity: “Out And About In The Eighteenth Century", Ann Campbell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article explains how and why the learning activity "out and about in the eighteenth century" fosters students' understanding of historical and cultural issues related to gender and class in eighteenth-century novels.

“Less Of The Heroine Than The Woman”: Parsing Gender In The British Novel, Susan Carlile

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay offers two methods that will help students resist the temptation to judge eighteenth-century novels by twenty-first-century standards. These methods prompt students to parse the question of whether female protagonists in novels—in this case, Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724), Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Charlotte Lennox’s Sophia (1762)—are portrayed as perfect models or as complex humans. The first method asks them to engage with definitions of the term “heroine,” and the second method uses word clouds to extend their thinking about the complexity of embodying a mid-eighteenth-century female identity.

Arabella’S Valentines And Literary Connections [Dot] Com: Playing With Eighteenth-Century Gender Online, Melanie D. Holm

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This article describes two digital assignments that ask students to imaginatively embody characters from eighteenth-century texts written by women in order to cultivate a greater awareness of the critical role of gender and gender critique in these works. The first of these assignments, “Arabella’s Valentines,” asks students to translate dialogue from Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote as humorous Internet memes. The second assignment, “Literary Connections [dot] com,” asks students to imagine how characters from the course archive might represent themselves on an internet dating site. Through creative role-play facilitated by these digital genres, students engage with the texts in stimulating …

Review Of Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, And Belief In Early Modern England, Amy Mallory-Kani

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

Review Of Teresa Barnard, Ed. British Women And The Intellectual World In The Long Eighteenth Century., Judith Dorn

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of Teresa Barnard, ed. British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century.

Charlotte Charke’S Gun: Queering Material Culture And Gender Performance, Jade Higa

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay juxtaposes readings of material culture and gender performance in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). It argues that the transient relationship Charke has to the objects in her life mirrors the fluidity of her gender. The essay ultimately uses Charke’s narrative as a case study in a questioning of a binarized gender matrix. The thesis suggest that, though we lack language to fully describe it, characters and historical figures like Charke move beyond and explode gender binaries.

General Editor's Note, Laura Runge

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

No abstract provided.

“Can You Believe They Think I’M Intimidating?” An Exploration Of Identity In Tall Women, Elizabeth Joy Fuller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the United States today, there is a dominant cultural narrative telling us that tallness is desirable and enjoyed by those who experience it. Much of the existing research on height correlates tallness with promotions, higher salaries, and general happiness. However, this research does not take into account the limitations of some of the previous research which tends to accept tall people’s vocabulary of motives at face value as the totality of their experience as a tall person. In particular, tall women tend to have much more to say about their lives as tall women than simply that it has …

"Typescript Of The Second Origin". Counterculture And Politics In The 1970s'., Antoni Maestre-Brotons

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

This article explores how, like other science fiction and fantasy novels, Typescript of the Second Origin relates to 1970s counterculture, radical politics and anti-establishment movements. Pedrolo, a leftist and pro-independence strongly committed author, echoes the radical left’s breakaway from the bourgeois reactionary way of life and consumer society in the novel. The beginning of a post-apocalyptic era in the novel stands for some of the values attached to hippie culture: the search for an ‘authentic’ —natural, primitive, non-technological— life; anti-establishment activity —as shown in self-organisation and the dissolution of the political system—, universal solidarity —the first member of the new …

Political Wishful Thinking Versus The Shape Of Things To Come: Manuel De Pedrolo’S "Mecanoscrit" And “Los Últimos Días” By Àlex And David Pastor, Pere Gallardo Torrano

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

Despite almost forty years separating Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Mecanoscrit del segon orígen (1974, trad. Typescript of the Second Origin) and the brothers Àlex and David Pastor’s film “Los últimos días” (2013, US tit. “The Last Days”), it is not difficult to find several socio-political areas of intersection which converge on a biological issue at the end of both works: the pregnancy of one of the characters at the end of each story.

Yet, such an interpretation would be rather limited as it ignores the socio-political landscape from which each work originated. Published in the aftermath of the first …

Alba As Eternal Mother: Violent Spaces And The ‘Last Woman’ In Manuel De Pedrolo’S "Mecanoscrit Del Segon Origen", Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

The ambitious literary project of Catalan author Manuel de Pedrolo i Molina (1918-1990) has generally been perceived as belonging to the tradition of popular literature, a label often reinforced by the unprecedented success of his minor work Mecanoscrit del segon origen. This has clearly damaged Pedrolo’s status in the Catalan literary; as Kathryn Crameri highlights, “(w)hen authors such as Manuel de Pedrolo championed more popular genres such as crime fiction” –or science fiction as far as this study is concerned– “they had to endure criticisms of the quality of their writing” (Crameri, 2008, p. 23). This article will challenge …

Introduction. "Typescript Of The Second Origin": Paradoxes Of Catalan Literature, Sara Martín

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

No abstract provided.

"Typescript Of The Second Origin" And Current Ya Dystopian And Post-Apocalypse Fiction In English: Prefiguring The Female Hero, Isabel Santaularia

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

YA post-apocalypse and dystopian novels formulate alternative realities where traditional gender roles and conceptions of masculinity and femininity can be contested and/or re-invented. Manuel de Pedrolo’s novel Typescript of the Second Origin (1974) is a case in point since, in the aftermath of a devastating alien attack, the fate of the human species is left in the hands of a resourceful teenager, Alba. Through the application of sheer determination and common sense, Alba manages to survive apocalypse, keeps her male child companion alive long enough to be impregnated by him, and becomes the herald of a new, more equalitarian society. …

Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination In Contemporary Indian Literature, Sucheta Kanjilal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project delineates a cultural history of modern Hinduism in conversation with contemporary Indian literature. Its central focus is literary adaptations of the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Among Hindu religious texts, this epic has been most persistently reproduced in literary and popular discourses because its scale matches the grandeur of the Indian national imagining. Further, many epic adaptations explicitly invite devotion to the nation, often emboldening conservative Hindu nationalism. This interdisciplinary project draws its methodology from literary theory, history, gender, and religious studies. Little scholarship has put Indian Anglophone literatures in conversation with other …

Film Review: Concerning Violence - Nine Scenes From The Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense (2014), Piotr Cieplak

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This is a review of Göran Olsson’s Concerning Violence - Nine Scenes From the Anti-imperialistic Self-Defense (2014) - an unusual documentary, which, formally and thematically, probes the complex relationship between image, voice and history.

Preserving Human Rights Media For Justice, Accountability, And Historical Clarification, Jay D. Aronson

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article examines the preservation of digital images and video (and the social media or Internet pages in which they are embedded) that provide information about human rights abuses and war crimes. Archival collections have played a crucial role in historical clarification and justice and accountability efforts in the aftermath of human rights abuse and war crimes. The ubiquity of smart phones with good cameras and social media has dramatically increased the amount of visual data available to investigate such crimes. However, this data often disappears quickly from public view and can be challenging to introduce into legal or other …

Book Review: The History Of A Forgotten German Camp: Nazi Ideology And Genocide In Szmalcówka, Darren J. O'Brien

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

An Evaluation Of The Pointe Program To Guide Dance Instructors To Use Behavioral Coaching Procedures With Their Dance Students, Mallory J. Quinn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study evaluated the POINTE Program, a manualized behavioral intervention designed for use by dance instructors to improve student dance performance using behavioral coaching procedures. This study consisted of three phases. Phase 1 was a formative evaluation of the POINTE Program, which assessed the technical adequacy of the manual. Feedback from 3 experts in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and 4 dance instructors were used to improve the manual content in this phase. Overall, the experts and instructors viewed the POINTE Program as providing accurate information on the basic ABA backgrounds and suggesting behavioral coaching procedures appropriate for use in a …

Cartesian Method And Experiment, Aaron Spink

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The conception of René Descartes as the arch-rationalist has been sufficiently exploded in recent literature; however, there is still a large lacuna in our understanding of how empirical research and experimentation fits within his philosophy. My dissertation is directed at addressing just this problem. I contend that Descartes’ famed method is not a singular monolith but instead two interdependent methods: one directed at metaphysical and epistemological truth, while the other directed at empirical questions and contingent facts of the world. I claim there is evidence for this position not only in his actual scientific practice, but also in the rhetorical …

Traveling Women And Consuming Place In Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters And Journals, Cassie Patricia Childs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Traveling Women and Consuming Place in Eighteenth-Century Travel Letters and Journals considers how various women-authored travel narratives of the long eighteenth century employ food in the construction of place and identity. Chronologically charting the letters and journals of Delarivier Manley, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Janet Schaw, and Frances Burney, I argue that the “critical food moments” described in their letters and journals demonstrate material, cultural, and social implications about consumption. My interdisciplinary project is located at the intersection of three seemingly divergent topics: food studies, human geography, and women-authored travel narratives. Approaching “place” as a way of being-in-the-world, my project …

Heteroglossic Chinese Online Literacy Practices On Micro-Blogging And Video-Sharing Sites, Yi Zhang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates Chinese online users’ adoptions of various languages and other meaning making signs in their online literacy practices in two popular Chinese CMC sites, Weibo (micro-blogging) and bilibili.com (video-sharing). Adopting the theoretical framework of heteroglossia (Bakhtin, 1981), I explore how various meaning making resources are creatively and playfully utilized by Chinese users in their online communication. After two-month data collection, I sampled the non-standard literacy practices (e.g., foreign language transliteration) identified from micro-blogging postings and comments in Weibo, as well as spontaneous (known as “bullet curtain” comments) and traditional text-box comments from featured videos in bilibili.com. The findings …

“The Nations Of The Field And Wood”: The Uncertain Ontology Of Animals In Eighteenth-Century British Literature, J. Kevin Jordan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the relationship between important intellectual discourses of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries and the ontological status of non-human animals. The Enlightenment marks a distinct change in the ways in which humans gather knowledge and interact with the world, a change that forms the foundation for modern relationships between human and non-human animals. Through a theoretical framework that draws from animal studies and ecofeminism, I analyze the ways in which the status of non-human animals is shaped by the intersection of multiple anthropocentric concerns. In doing so, this dissertation probes the foundation of what defines the animal apart …

Practical Theology In An Interpretive Community: An Ethnography Of Talk, Texts And Video In A Mediated Women's Bible Study, Nancie Hudson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study of social interaction in a small religious group used ethnography of communication as a research method to collect and analyze data from 20 months of fieldwork. As a long-term participant-observer in a women-only interdenominational Bible study, I investigated the group’s patterned ways of speaking, how print and electronic learning materials influenced the practical application of Scripture to daily life, and how the contemporary format for women’s Bible study alters the traditional Bible study experience. Patterned ways of speaking in this setting included group discussions and conversational narratives about religion, motherhood and lack of time. Using affirmations of faith, …

Active Suffering: An Examination Of Spinoza's Approach To Tristita, Kathleen Ketring Schenk

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Humans' capacity to attain knowledge is central to Spinoza's philosophy because, in part, knowing things enables humans to deal properly with their affects. But it is not just any sort of knowledge that humans should attain. There are different types of knowledge, but only two of them–rational and intuitive knowledge–enable humans who attain them to know things clearly. Because rational knowledge attends to universals whereas intuitive knowledge attends to particulars, intuitive knowledge is better than rational knowledge at enabling humans to deal with their affects. Most scholars recognize both the importance of knowledge to humans' dealing with their affects and …

Humanitarian Military Intervention: A Failed Paradigm, Faruk Rahmanovic

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the end of the Cold War, traditional justifications for war have diminished in relevance and importance, while the use of Humanitarian Military Interventions (HMI) has proliferated, to the point that formerly traditional wars – e.g. Afghanistan and Iraq invasions – have become retroactively redefined as HMIs. While HMI suffers from a number of problems, from international law to historical track record, its proponents have managed to turn aside all arguments by claiming they represent either statistical outliers, improper implementation, or at best indicate a need for a certain degree of fine-tuning. Crucially, the validity of the HMI practice is …