Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Survival Of Punic Identity In The Imperial Roman Age, Ryan Alcanio

Theses

After the Roman conquest of Carthage in 146 BC, North Africa began the process of becoming a Roman Province. From the 1st century AD onward, the surviving culture of the Carthaginian and Punic peoples underwent significant changes that better incorporated it into the Roman world. The Punic religion became adopted into the Roman Pantheon and took on Roman attributes while the Punic language survived mostly intact thanks to the written form adopting the Latin alphabet by the 2nd century AD.

Return, Shasta Hecht

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This capstone project is a collection of nonfiction essays that work in collaboration to provide a profile of place. The place of focus is White Pass, the mountain the author has grown up on and experienced for the last twenty-one years. This collection is made up of essays that explore her physical, emotional, and spiritual connection to the land and community of White Pass, while also examining themes of family and identity. Each essay gives a different perspective in regards to the setting. The ultimate purpose of this project is to navigate the complexities of White Pass in regards to …

Geisha As Living Embodiments Of Art Representing Japanese Cultural Aesthetic, Addie Richmond

Undergraduate Distinction Papers

Since the Edo period, geisha have existed as living embodiments of the Japanese arts and aesthetic culture. The true world of the geisha is little known or understood, especially in the west, and misconceptions continue to be perpetuated through popular media. The primary representation of geisha often focuses on their role in relation to male patrons, rather than on artistic accomplishments and cultural value as individuals. This research analyzes the evolution of aesthetics, as being central to expressions of Japanese artistic practices that contributed to the role of the geisha within historical social spaces. Through establishing context for historical precedent, …

Removing The Masc: Dismantling Gendered Occupations Through Social Work Education, Austin M. Raines

DSW Capstone Projects

The “Masculine mystique” refers to a psychological mask that men wear, enabling them to maintain power and distance themselves from traits associated with femininity” (Kahn, 2009, p. 283). This capstone project seeks to solve the Social Work Grand Challenge of improving the lives that hegemonic masculinity harms and limits. It emphasizes the relationship between the two areas of life (work-home), once thought to exist in different realms but are today more interwoven than ever (Lin & Burgard, 2018; Sok et al., 2014). Men have higher rates of traumatic injuries and exposure to significant physical risks, violence hazards, and stricter normative …

Brave Spaces, Radical Openness, And Youth Loneliness, Taylor Curry, Mariah Thomas, Riese Munoz

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

It is no secret young adults, no matter where in the world they come from, face social pressures with the potential to be isolating. For today’s youth, not only are they feeling the commonplace anxieties about fitting in, finding success, and uncertainty of the future, but these anxieties are exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Young adults from all over the globe report feeling more anxious, more depressed, and more lonely. However, it is also no secret that deliberate community building, creation of art and writing as a means of self-exploration, and participation in spaces designed for acceptance fend off these …

Seam/Seem; Exploring Material, Craft And Embodiment Through Textile Sculpture, Heather Baumbach

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

I will argue that transforming textile materials from their origin as planate fiber, and manipulating shape and form through the employment of traditional craft techniques creates soft sculptures imbued with references to the human body. By highlighting the connections between the poetics of textiles and those of skin and the body, I examine themes of feminism, domesticity and labor encouraging speculation about intimacy, fragility, and embodiment.

Anthology Of A Mess, Yusuf Akman

Theses and Dissertations--English

Anthology of a Mess is a collection of poems by Yusuf Akman, written at the University of Kentucky. Poems in this thesis deal examine the journey of a poet in three chapters. The first chapter examines myth-making, ekphrasis, and language. While the second one is a genre-defying work in which the modes of mockumentary, lyric essay, and fairy tale co-exist. Last but not least, the final chapter contains autobiographical poems, starting in Turkey and continuing in Kentucky. These poems explore eco-homo eroticism, roadkill, religion, and what it is like to be a queer Turk in Kentucky/the South. Throughout these sections, …

Together Now, Alfonso Zapata

Theses and Dissertations--English

Together Now is a collection of poems by Alfonso Zapata, with work written between 2021 and 2023 at the University of Kentucky. This thesis contains poems which examine the close relationship between families, art, and the histories each contain. These poems use these subjects in order to illustrate the emotional and physical impact communities have upon those who live in them; art can evolve a person, shape them in beautiful ways, and give us the ability to process tragedy together; on the other end of the spectrum, societal neglect, environmental crisis, and food insecurity can rip these communities apart potentially …

Kill On The Left Foot, Daniel Collins

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection of essays and short stories represents experiences during and related to my military service as a Tactical Air Control Partyman in the United States Air Force. Recurrent themes in this collection involve patriotism, fatherhood, masculinity, trauma, and recovery. The work itself represents the study and practice of the elements of fiction and foundational concepts related to creative nonfiction.

Emerging Hues: Essays From The Teneral Stage, Lucy Jayes

Theses and Dissertations--English

This collection of essays features work created and revised over two years in the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. They reflect a period of intense evolution in the author’s life and delve into topics of modern-day motherhood and cycles of intimate partner violence.

The Reflexitve Fritz Lang: Meta-Cinematic And Genre Critiques In His American Films, Justin J. Roberts

Theses and Dissertations--English

Director Fritz Lang is best remembered and most celebrated for the films he made in Germany, including Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), between 1919 and 1933. But he spent over half of his career working in Hollywood. This dissertation is a reconsideration of his American films, focused on how Lang used various Hollywood genres to question and critique the way Hollywood films and genres functioned, as well as trends within those genres. This dissertation is a roughly chronological reading of twelve of Lang’s American films, sorted by genre. We can see how his thinking about the function of film and …

Conceive And Control: Cultural-Legal Narratives Of American Privacy And Reproductive Politics, Emily Naser-Hall

Theses and Dissertations--English

Law and literature share a foundation in narrative. The literary turn in legal scholarship recognizes that the law itself is a form of narrative, one that simultaneously reflects socio-cultural norms and creates social and political regulations with a complex matrix of power. Cultural narratives from the 1950s to the mid-1970s pertaining to reproductive politics, domesticity, and national identity both produce and are productive of legal rulings that govern and restrict private acts of sexuality and speech. The Supreme Court used cases concerning sex and reproduction to enumerate, explicate, and complicate the right to privacy, which appears nowhere in the U.S. …

Echoed Malice: Identity And The Doubled Voice In Gothic Horror, Brandon West

Theses and Dissertations--English

My dissertation argues we would benefit from focusing on the voice when analyzing gothic and horror texts. That is, I contend, there remains significant fertile ground for us to till in these texts if we shift our focus to the voice and its various iterations across these texts’ long history. To demonstrate this point, I delineate three variations of this theme: the doubled voice in the possession narrative, the split voice in the ventriloquist-dummy dynamic, and the inherent uncertainty of the voice without discernable origin. Each of these variations, I argue, offers fruitful readings of oft-studied texts and, moreover, offers …

Myth, Mockery, & Misery: An Evolution Of Disillusion In Modern-War Expression, Richard W. Halkyard

Theses and Dissertations--English

Industrialization in 19th-Century America yielded a regrettable by-product: the modernization of warfare. Mass armies, technological innovation, and unprecedented rates of industrial productivity prompted the creation of machines designed to inspire fear, increase destructive capability, and inflict mass-death. The modernization of warfare altered forever the way war was experienced and represented literarily. Authors who attempted to represent the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, as well as World War I, articulated modernized warfare with a disillusionment which stems from the tragically dehumanizing effects of mechanical violence on an industrial scale. Myth, Mockery, & Misery argues that as far back as 1862, romantic idealization …

Ovid's Caeneus As A Queer Hero: Understanding Gender And Gender Variance In The Ancient Mediterranean., Rj Palmer

Theses and Dissertations--Modern and Classical Languages, Literature and Cultures

Caeneus, as written in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a notable blend of ancient and Hellenistic versions of the myth. Ovid’s Caeneus can be understood as a transgender man, since he was assigned female at birth, but asks for his gender to be changed by the god Neptune, and goes on to live the rest of his life with the body, appearance, and social roles of a man. Ovid incorporates Caeneus’ trans identity with his use of grammatical gender endings for Caeneus, using masculine gender for Caeneus except when discussing his pre-transition childhood, or when the centaurs address him mockingly while fighting. …

The Psycho-(Geo)Political Driving Forces Of Comfort Women Social Movements In South Korea, Jaeyeon Lee

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

"Comfort women" refers to the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forced to serve the Japanese imperial army sexually, physically, and mentally during WWII in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Since 1992, Korean activists have held the Wednesday Demonstration, which is the weekly protest in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, to call for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government. Since 2011, Korean activists have also installed comfort woman statues in and outside of South Korea.

This dissertation examines the psycho-political driving force behind the Wednesday Demonstration and comfort woman statue movements in South …

Rhyming Tactics In Korean Hip-Hop With Two Approaches Of English And Korean Syllable Structures, Gihyun Gal

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Rhyming Tactics in Korean Hip-Hop with Two Approaches of English and Korean Syllable Structures

Today, Korean Hip-Hop (KHH) has been slowly moving beyond a localized pop culture through the internet and media. This study finds that rhyming patterns in KHH are much more complex than prior research suggests. Especially, this study focuses on an evolution of Korean Hip-Hop through the time such as since 1989 to 2015. Park (2016) discusses how Korean rappers think about using rhyming tactics as "[m]over, the concept of rhyming was not conceptualized as belonging to the Korean language by most of rappers. Even if rappers …

Sexualidad, Afectos Y Sociedad: Las No Monogamias Consensuadas (Nmc) En La Literatura Y El Cine Español, Sandra Nava Nieto

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Cuando pensamos en las relaciones sexo-afectivas que podemos tener en la sociedad occidental, el sistema monógamo es la opción estándar. La amatonormatividad, el patriarcado y la monogamia son un potente trío que se retroalimentan en cuanto a la promoción de la discriminación de la mujer y de los afectos no heteronormativos. El sistema monógamo sigue vigente, no solo mediante legalizaciones, sino mediante refuerzos sociales de las normas de género. Las relaciones no monógamas consensuadas (NMC), un grupo heterogéneo de relaciones sexo-afectivas fura de la monogamia, pueden ser un punto de inflexión para cambiar los roles de género y desestructurar la …

Álvaro Cunqueiro: La Existencia Fabulada, Patricia Maria Gamboa

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

My dissertation focuses on the narrative works by Galician writer Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-1981): Merlín y familia, Las crónicas del sochantre, Cuando el viejo Sinbad vuelva a las islas, Las mocedades de Ulises, Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes, Vida y fugas de Fanto Fantini della Gherardesca and El año del cometa con la batalla de los cuatro reyes. Specifically, I analyze their existential dimension through the study of three concepts—journey, dream and myth—which, in my view, articulate Cunqueiro’s peculiar form of existentialism. Filled with fantastic characters and situations, Cunqueiro’s work has been critiqued …

Forum On “Conquest”: Past-Present Politics Of Coloniality In Cinema On Latin America, Stephen Jakob Turner

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

My dissertation analyzes the representation of Spanish “Conquest” in film as a critical commentary on the cultural present. Chapter 1, “Directorial Discord: The Cultural Politics of Representation in Apocalypto (USA/Mexico/UK, 2006) and Retorno a Aztlán (Return to Aztlán, Mexico, 1991)” focuses on the representation of the (im)possibility of Indigenous heroic protagonism and futurity in the origins of “Conquest.” Chapter 2, “‘The World is Thus’: Resistance and the Power of Ambivalent Conversion in Gabriel Retes’s Nuevo Mundo (The New World; Mexico, 1976) and Roland Joffé’s The Mission (USA/Paraguay, 1986)” posits that the “Conquest” problematizes the myth of …

Mujeres En Crisis: Posturas Divergentes Frente Al Neoliberalismo, Silvia Encinas Caballero

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

Popular belief has always attributed women an innate capacity to overcome periods of crisis, whether these are provoked by an economic debacle or by a natural disaster. My dissertation explores the representation of women in Spanish narrative and film from the beginning of the global economic crisis in 2008 up to the recession caused by the Covid- 19 pandemic in 2020. I study how specific cultural production can serve to perpetuate models of patriarchal domination or to provide alternative representations of women as independent, resilient individuals in times of economic crisis.

I analyze four novels and three films in which …

Truth In Horror: Cinematic Representations Of Social Violence In Spain, Latin America, And The United States, Kelly Ferguson

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

My dissertation, Truth in Horror: Cinematic Representation of Social Violence in Spain, Latin American, and the Latinx United States, investigates the recent explosion of political horror films that straddle the past and present, reflecting both the current political moment and the polemic historical memories of state repression against racialized others and ideological dissidents. Chapter One, “Paranoid Horror and the Return of Franco,” studies four Spanish horror films, Tras el cristal (1986), Pa negre (2010), Mientras duermes (2011), and Musarañas (2014), all of which feature child protagonists that seek out truth about violent family secrets, but ultimately reject it as …

Masculinidades Insubordinadas Y Subversivas. La Construcción De La Figura Del Gaucho Rebelde En La Literatura Rioplatense A Través De La Representación De Tres De Sus Tipos Humanos Más Característicos: El Cantor, El Matrero Y El Caudillo, Miguel Angel Martos Maldonado

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This research work explores the construction of the masculinity of the rebellious gaucho in several literary works written by authors from the River Plate, and how it serves as a vehicle for the transmission of ideas –often of political content– of their creators. The basic concept underlying this study is that some writers of works set in the rural world show a serious social commitment, and often combine their literary activity with politics. For this reason, they choose as a key figure in their writings a gaucho who rebels against authority and, emphasizing in him the traits traditionally considered as …

Taken: Slavery, Forced Migration, And Environment In The Early United States, Christopher L. Leadingham

Theses and Dissertations--History

This work examines the development and collapse of the slave trade in Kentucky. It pushes readers to think about the slave trade in an environmental context. The development of the slave trade in the state depended on the violent acquisition of Indigenous lands. The networks of credit and capital that settler colonists established—wealth concentrated in land, stock, crops, and people—fueled the development of a slave system west of the southern mountains. That system increasingly relied on the forced movement of enslaved people in and through Kentucky. The state’s legal system and other institutions worked to support slave trading companies especially …

'Grave Fears Of Collision' : James Beecher And The Administration Of Freedmen's Bureau Policy In Reconstruction South Carolina, Cameron Sauers

Theses and Dissertations--History

As an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau and military officer, James Beecher embodied Federal power in the South Carolina Lowcountry. During Presidential Reconstruction, Beecher became a key administrator of Order No.15 that promised formerly enslaved peoples’s “40 acres and a mule” that formerly belonged to white plantation owners. Beecher, despite his antebellum abolitionist politics, was remarkably unsympathetic to freedpeople’s desire for independent landholding. Beecher believed that freedpeople were unfit for immediate citizenship and should sign labor contracts to return to plantations where they might be inculcated with Northern free labor values. Amid epidemic disease, famine, and white paramilitary violence, James …

"Any Changes, Eh?": Party Defection, Party Switching, And Shifting Allegiances In Antebellum America, 1830-1860, Jacob Wood

Theses and Dissertations--History

Political party ties hardened during the Second Party System period, most noticeably in the transition from the Federalist and Democratic-Republicans to the Democratic and Whig parties. “Any Changes, Eh?” argues that politically-minded Americans still found ways to leave their political parties and support another, even in the face of social and political ostracism. As party ties grew stronger, party defection shifted from direct to indirect methods to challenge political system. Sometimes these movements were permanent conversions, other times they were a protest vote only to make a point to their home party. Party defection took a variety of forms beyond …

The Kids Were Alt-Right: Radical Right Youth Activism And The Origins Of The White Power Movement, 1960-1980, Austin Zinkle

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation explores the young people—primarily young men—involved and weaponized within the radical racist Right during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. This project argues that young people were an active bedrock of support within racist and antisemitic organizations such as the American Nazi Party, the National Alliance, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and others, and created a unique coalition that ultimately developed into a revolutionary racist Right and eventual white power movement by the 1980s. This dissertation makes a significant intervention in scholarship on the radical Right’s development over the past sixty years and serves …

Orphans, White Unity, And The Charleston Orphan House, 1860-1870, Ruth Poe White

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation explores the ways the Charleston Orphan House, a nineteenth-century whites-only benevolent institution, promoted white unity in South Carolina between 1860 and 1870. Just as it had during the antebellum era, the Orphan Home knit together white society by providing poor white families a source of social security, middling white families a source for cheap labor in the form of indentured service, and elite whites an opportunity to display social prominence. Yet, maintaining this delicate balance throughout the siege of Charleston and the Home’s eventual evacuation to Orangeburg, South Carolina was no easy feat. The Chairman of the Board …

Enduring The Elements: Civil War Soldiers’ Struggles Against The Weather, Cameron Boutin

Theses and Dissertations--History

This dissertation is an environmental history that studies the variety of ways that soldiers in the American Civil War experienced the pressures of weather over the course of their military service. For the troops of the U.S. and Confederacy, the weather was more than simply a passive backdrop to their time in the military, but a central preoccupation. This dissertation analyzes how weather intersected with some of the most central experiences of soldiering – tent camping and winter quarters, marching, bivouacking, manning sentry posts and field fortifications, and fighting in battles. Life in Civil War armies consisted of all of …

From Displaced To Displacers: Scottish Crofters, First Nation Peoples And Commons Enclosure From The 1700s To The 1800s, Anna Herrington

Theses and Dissertations--History

In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the enclosure of common systems shaped the displacement of people on a global scale whilst bringing the people---Scottish Highland crofters and Mi’kmaq First Nation Canadians from the margins where they have dwelled for centuries in historical scholarship to of the centre of not just their history, but our collective history. Both populations experienced attacks on their ties to their lands, resources, and culture through enclosure. The enclosure process lasted over two centuries and was interspersed with violent protest, proactive resistance, interspersed with periods of acceptance and determination against their forced removals. Investigating …