Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Unnatural Nature: A Visual Artist’S Reflection On Myth, Medium, And Feminine Being, Rong Xu

Masters Theses

My artistic journey has been guided by a childhood fascination with mythology and how our ancestors interpreted the natural world. As my practice evolved toward digital media, I began questioning what "nature" truly means—is it an objective reality or a construct filtered through cultural lenses and personal experience?

The transition from traditional to digital tools—from physical brushes to Apple Pencil and Wacom stylus—removed much of the spontaneous dialogue with materials that once mirrored nature's own randomness. While I initially celebrated my ability to simulate traditional techniques digitally, I now recognize this transformation demands a fundamental reconsideration of how artists connect …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

To Stain The Soul, Shaoqing Chen

Masters Theses

The process of art-making is a BDSM activity. Painting doesn’t start from the brain. It starts from the hands. Most of the time, painters move through muscle memory, not thought. So, who is in control? I believe there is a higher being—the God of Art. Not a person, not a legend, but something beyond exciting. It loves to see the artist sacrificed, suffering, twisted. It wants something beautiful and painful.

My art practice in the studio is like a BDSM moment in a dungeon. I am the submissive. The god is the one who gives orders. The more I suffer—both …

A Personal Manual Of Escapism, Qing Wen

Masters Theses

In this fast-paced, information-saturated era, avoidance has become a common mechanism of self-preservation. Confronted with global crises and structural instability, the current generation increasingly adopt a pessimistic stance toward the future: some retreat into virtual worlds, others find themselves unable to bear the weight of real-life responsibilities, and many turn to art as a private sanctuary. But is avoidance only a pejorative term?

It wasn’t until recently that I realized, nearly all of my creative work has stemmed from a place, or an action of escape. The imagined worlds I’ve built, the spaces I created to flee from reality—without knowing …

Where Motion Lingers..., Cheng-Lin Lee

Masters Theses

In the pursuit of seamlessness, modern technology has become oversimplified, reduced to simple taps and pushes of buttons. This standardized interaction feels distant and mechanical, offering services without inviting touch, movement, or emotion.

This thesis explores how technology can blend into everyday life in a gentle way. The designed objects will focus on integrating familiar movements that elicit moments of harmony within interactions with technology. Through design transformations, this project seeks to uncover how everyday movements, like lifting a handle and placing flowers, can transform our technological exchanges into something felt rather than simply performed.

The findings reveal that when …

Rooted In Embodied Making: A Notebook On Process, Vija Lietuvninkas

Masters Theses

This thesis takes the form of a wooden box containing an archive of fragments – scanned notebooks, sketches, photographs, emails, journal entries, and other materials – that trace a year of embodied, process-based inquiry. Rather than presenting a linear argument or a polished final product, the work reflects a nonlinear, exploratory methodology grounded in making, wandering, and self-reflection.

Born within the context of the 2025 Sustainability Design Lab, an interdisciplinary initiative at RISD examining the material culture of wood across design fields, this project documents the artist’s evolving engagement with green wood as both material and metaphor. Through practices such …

Pressing Into Absence, Linda Sok

Masters Theses

Pressing into Absence traces the materials, processes, and works I have engaged with between March 2023 and May 2025, positioning historical and contemporary narratives in dialogue with one another. This book interweaves colonial-era source materials (from 1864- 1928) - writings, etchings, and paintings of Cambodia produced by persons from the United States of America and France - with personal anecdotes from my travels to Cambodia in 2024. These accounts are layered alongside speculative reflections in the form of text, sketches, mind maps, and material explorations. These archival remnants and personal experiences are folded together and positioned as equally reliable sources. …

Where The Ocean Ends, The Mountains Becoming, Yuchen Wang

Masters Theses

The father figure casts a long shadow—both a scaffold and a snare. Inherited silence, latent anger, and the fear of being seen are unspoken legacies that bind me. I move within a structure he built that promised protection yet enforced obedience. There, love was often inseparable from control.

This work emerges from the fracture between resistance and inheritance, between the instinct to escape and the compulsion to remain tethered. The paternal presence is no longer a person, but rather a system—an architecture of power and repression—that continues to influence my gestures, choices, and silences. Even distance fails to sever the …

Smora: Breath As Memory, Pratikesh Pundkar

Masters Theses

Smora: Breath as Memory explores smell as a medium for memory, presence, and emotional communication in a world dominated by visual and audio stimuli. The project investigates olfactory interaction through multisensory design, proposing a tangible product system called Smora Cassette that captures, stores, and shares scent memories. Grounded in user research, expert interviews, and material prototyping, Smora speculates a future where smell reconnects us to the truth of lived experience, offering a poetic yet grounded alternative to AI-generated realities.

Exploring Al Balad, Danah Alqunfuzi

Masters Theses

Al Balad is a well-known destination for Jeddah’s visitors. With its inclusion in UNESCO World Heritage, the site has been transforming to fit the standards and become a more tourist destination. The reason the site is included in UNESCO is due to its diversity and unique architecture and sense of place. Preservation of this type is problematic because it threatens to suppress the dynamics that gave rise to Al Balad, freezing it in time. This thesis asks: How can landscape representation capture agents of change, the present moment, and the past so that the forces that breathe life in historically …

Graphic Gestures On The Digital Surface; In Defense Of The Observational, Soyoung Ro

Masters Theses

This thesis offers a subjective and process-based exploration of digital tools, challenging the dominant function-driven mindset that often defines digital design today. Rather than prioritizing speed, efficiency, or usability metrics, this work is a shift in focus toward experience, spatial awareness, and the subtle dynamics of interaction.

Rooted in acts of attention—looking inwards, looking outwards—this approach begins by setting aside assumptions about what tools are for, in order to ask how they shape our behaviors and ways of thinking. In doing so, it proposes a design methodology grounded in presence over productivity, process over execution, and agency over automation.

The …

Show Time!, Georgia Oldham

Masters Theses

Time is always ticking and never easy to hold on to. Luckily, twisting over sketchbooks and doodling in page margins, sequential artists are on a mission to capture it for everybody. They’re even going to tell you a story along the way. This thesis explores my relationship to sequential art as it relates to time, storytelling, accessibility, and the performing arts.

Textus Complexus, Vishakha Ruhela

Masters Theses

textus complexus investigates how language shapes thought by merging scientific rigour and poetic action to challenge reductive narratives. My inquiry stems from a fascination with complexity as an existential condition—one that resists homogenisation, preserves collective memory, and demands inclusive, multidimensional engagement. Hybridity, as a spectrum from complicated to complex, becomes a methodological tool to uncover latent connections that lead to cross-communication, and articulate transitional spaces through recursive processes. By systematising multiplicity via layering, modularisation, and indexing, my work foregrounds expression through form, where structural clarity emerges from cumulative gestures rather than simplification.

The projects in this thesis trace the roots …

No One Thing, Kate Brown

Masters Theses

Graphic design has mobility. It is oriented toward action, travel, and distribution.

My projects put me in touch with people and ideas, language, and visual form. They’re broad, conversational, and curatorial in spirit. They allow me to cut a path through the discipline of graphic design, and to branch opportunistically out to others, when I can—to art, architecture, fashion, writing. I expand my field of operations. Make it as big as you are. Make it 1:1. Take the part and run with it. Fold it up, send it away.

A Futurist Exegesis Of Matthew 24:1-42, Kenneth Garcia

Masters Theses

This thesis explores a Futurist exegesis of Matthew 24:1-42, emphasizing its prophetic fulfillment in future events rather than historical or allegorical interpretations. It critiques Preterist and Historicist views, arguing that key elements—including the abomination of desolation, the great tribulation, and the second coming of Christ—remain unfulfilled. By analyzing the text in its historical, grammatical, and theological context, and correlating it with Daniel’s visions and Revelation, this study defends the position that Jesus’ discourse predicts end-times events such as the rise of the Antichrist, the rebuilding of the third temple, and global tribulation. This work affirms the hope of Christ’s imminent …

The Shared Roots And Divergent Paths Of African American Spirituals And Afro-Caribbean Music, Jana Jones

Masters Theses

The resilient perseverance of African culture manifested itself in the music of the diasporic communities of the transatlantic slave trade. This slave trade led slaves to two main areas: North America and the Caribbean. While there were common roots and shared experience of slavery that influenced similar growing musical traditions of African American and Afro-Caribbean music such as rhythmic and melodic elements, over time, their music evolved along distinct paths due to differing social, political and religious contexts. Through a comparative study of lyrical themes, melodic patterns, rhythmic characteristics and cultural functions, this research traces the influence of the African …

Surviving Olympus, Kendra Alexandria Grant

Masters Theses

Pandora has lived with her mother and grandfather always watching the world from a distance for her safety, as her mother told her. Their safety comes to end when Zeus takes them from their home and intends to put them to death, but the kindness of a stranger saves them with the plot of a fake marriage. Follow as Pandora learns to navigate her new world of Olympus in this dystopian society of clones and an impending war.

Vampyres Reimagined, Madison Marie Strand

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the intricate interplay between imagination and reality in fantasy literature, encapsulated within the first ninety pages of my novel, A Ruin of Memories. It is an explorative contribution to the genre, with themes of mental health, loss, and belonging in an environment that morphs reality with the supernatural.

The artist statement serves as a reflective insight into my creative process and personal journey as a writer. It outlines my motivations for crafting A Ruin of Memories, rooted in my desire to paint a picture of spiritual warfare through the lens of vampyres, werewolves, and witches. Through this …

Character Dialogue And How It Works In Cinema, Janet Best

Masters Theses

BEYOND THE DOOR is a psychological thriller screenplay about an abandoned house and two sixth-grade girls with a shared trauma.

The Influence Of Paint, Kaylyn Dunn

Masters Theses

This thesis is made up of multiple essays aimed at examining the relationship between identity, craft, and narrative development. It emphasizes how societal expectations affect self-worth, personal happiness, and identity development. It combines literary, sociological, and Christian viewpoints to highlight the significance of portraying complex and diverse individuals to reflect on the relational nature of identity. This thesis also provides a thorough analysis of theoretical frameworks and practical methodologies for creating compelling characters. By examining psychological models, sociocultural influences, conflict, voice, and genre-specific techniques, it demonstrates how complex character creation enhances narrative. The culmination of this thesis, a novel called …

Science And The Humanities: Are They Two Polar Entities?, Elizabeth Mckenna Silvey

Masters Theses

Science and the humanities are often perceived as being separate entities. In academic settings, there is little to no overlap in these courses of study. One can obtain a Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor of Arts degree, but there are no academic majors that allow for the study of both the humanities and the sciences. Despite the seemingly different courses of study, it is through careful examination of literature and thoroughly delving into pieces of literature in order to excavate the meaning and purpose behind the work, that one is able to see the distinct connections between the two …

Waffles And Spaghetti: The Effects Of Cognitive Processing Methods On Team Performance And Communication, Jonah Daniel Browning

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to shed light on a practical method for resolving conflicts in team environments that stem from miscommunications brought on by differing cognitive processes. Our brains use different cognitive processing techniques to make sense of and explore the vast amount of information the world presents them on a daily, even hourly basis. Each person has their own thinking style which influences how teams collaborate and problem solve. However, miscommunication can often arise when individuals fail to recognize and adapt to the varying processing methods, which can lead to frustration and inefficiency.

This research seeks to …

The Development Of Cosmological Theories And Their Correlation With Biblical Scripture In Ancient Times, Margaret A. Burcie

Masters Theses

Agnostics and astronomical researchers like Harlow Shapley's contributions to cosmology, specifically his recalibration of the Milky Way and the discovery of its true structure and size, marked an important moment in individuals’ understanding of the universe.”1 These theorists have redefined humanity's place in the cosmos by accentuating empirical observations over religious theories, laying the groundwork for modern cosmology while simultaneously reigniting the age-old debate about the universe's origin. “Theories may crumble, but good observations never fade,”2 accentuate the lifelong importance of scientific research.

This paper focuses on the relationship between the development of cosmological theories and biblical interpretations; these will …

Little Disciples: Providing At Home Christian Educational Resources To Parents For Their Children’S Spiritual Growth, Samantha Hatfield

Masters Theses

It has always been difficult to keep young people attending church after they reach the freedom of adulthood, but their absence continued to grow with each generation. It is hard to prove whether their decline in attendance is due to lack of spiritual formation in younger years or just the changing of the times is hard to prove, but it can be inferred that more training and honest conversations in earlier years would positively affect this statistic as well as the spiritual wellbeing of future generations. Since the most formative years of children based on brain development are between ages …

Into The Shadows In Context: A Personal Writing Philosophy, The Fantasy Tradition, And A Novella, Genevieve Mumford

Masters Theses

It is important for the aspiring fantasy novelist to consider why he or she writes. Some personal motivations for writing include the desire to glorify God by mirroring His creativity, utilizing one’s talents, reflecting the Gospel of Christ, creating quality art, and providing clean entertainment. Christian authors should be free to pursue whatever type of writing they wish, knowing that when they focus on the story first, the message will flow into it naturally. In addition, fantasy novelists should study key works in this genre. Fantasy stories generally include otherworldly settings, magic, and the victory of good over evil. J. …

Bringing Light To The Knowledge Gap Regarding Menopause Symptoms And Hormone Therapy, Jayme Kendall

Masters Theses

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to raise awareness about the knowledge gap regarding many common menopause symptoms and the positive impact of hormone therapy (HT), a.k.a. hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and menopause hormone treatment (MHT).

Methods: An initial review of current literature is useful for identifying relevant professional resources of knowledge and understanding the problem. Further, analyses of The Menopause Society, the 2002 Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study, and Dr. Mary Claire Haver's work shed light on the problem and provide insights to help build a successful educational campaign. Additionally, visual analyses of "When to Try Hormone Therapy," …

Creativity As A Universal Calling: Exploring The “God As Creator” Motif And Imago Dei As Foundations For Christian Practice And Ministry, Catherine Delanee Belcher

Masters Theses

“I’m just not a creative person.” This phrase is frequently expressed in various contexts, from elementary school art classes to collaborative projects in academic and church settings. It often functions as a convenient explanation for a perceived lack of enthusiasm or participation. Why is this statement so readily accepted as an unchangeable reality rather than challenged as a misconception? There appears to be a widespread belief that creativity is an exclusive attribute, reserved for artists, musicians, or visionaries. This assumption invites a critical theological inquiry: Is creativity an innate ability bestowed upon a select few, or is it a divine …

The Craft Of Christie: A Dissection Of Agatha Christie’S Creation Of Character, Rachel Grace Olds

Masters Theses

Agatha Christie’s writing is widely known, but not deeply known. She is a master of the genre of mystery, and many critics and scholars have lauded her genius. However, she is not often recognized for her mastery of the craft of character. In fact, several critics have misunderstood her characters as two-dimensional beings that exist only to advance the plot. This thesis aims to examine the way Agatha Christie crafts her characters, how her methods of the craft of character work to perfectly mislead her readers, and her ultimate purpose for creating and implementing manipulative elements for the reader. In …

Examining The Relationship Between Biblical Characters And Mental Health: Identifying A Christian's Well-Being, Shanetia Sharie Chapman

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to examine the intersection between biblical texts and mental health within the framework of Christian belief systems. Through a critical analysis of key biblical narratives involving figures who exhibit experiences analogous to contemporary psychological struggles, this study investigates the influence of scriptural interpretation on believers’ perceptions of mental health and their coping mechanisms. By employing textual analysis, the research seeks to evaluate the potential of biblical teachings as therapeutic resources. Ultimately, this thesis aims to contribute to developing culturally and theologically informed approaches to mental health awareness and support within Christian communities.

"I'M Good," Ain't Nobody's Happy, Nikkole Stafford

Masters Theses

The composition of this thesis will comprise an artistic statement, critical paper, and the first 90 pages of a fiction-based manuscript created during the pursuit of my master’s degree in creative writing at Liberty University.

Beginning with the artist’s statement, I will present the creative mindset utilized in composing the chapters of the manuscript that best reflect my declaration to be entitled as an author. My critical paper will follow my artist’s statement, which will further discuss the fundamental themes that highlight this story, which are social acceptance, faith, and redemption. Using the platform of a fiction novel, I will …