Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Racial-Sexual Normativity In/As Narratives Of “The Human”, Jeri Brand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis synthesizes Sylvia Wynter’s and Judith Butler’s models of identity-formation to analyze discourses of racialization and sex/gender difference in normative scientific theories of “the human.” I argue that eugenicist white supremacism and sex/gender normativity form a single conceptual framework – what I call “the racial-sexual matrix” – throughout these scientific narratives. I then trace an epistemological consistency across 18^th- through 21^st-century scientific literature as evidence for the ongoing legacies of coloniality, white supremacy, and eugenics in current hegemonic sex/gender ontologies. Finally, I contend that the racial-sexual matrix functions as an index of proper humanness not …

Visualizing Ancient Empire In Tudor England: Imperial Monarchy, Reformation, And The Antique Soldier In The Title Page To Richard Grafton’S Large Chronicle (1569), Peter Nicholas Otis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes the iconography and visual sources of the title page to the first volume of A chronicle at large and meere history of the affayres of Englande (1569) by the Tudor author Richard Grafton. Representing the visual synthesis of several distinct but interrelated currents that developed in the preceding century, the title page to the Large Chronicle offers a rare glimpse into a transitional moment in the middle Tudor perception and visual representation of the British past. These currents include imperializing royal iconography, with origins in antecedent representations in the late fifteenth century; the entry of the ‘classicizing’ …

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …

Without Us There Is No Britain: Black British Photography And Film Networks, 1950-1989, Maria T. Quinata

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation tracks three moments from 1950 to 1989, when images were put to work by Black photographers and filmmakers to stake individual and communal claims to Britain and Britishness: first, through the emergence of photographic portraiture taken in domestic living spaces during the 1950s to 1970s; second, through the Black Panther Movement and their use of photography in the late 1960s to mid 1970s, and last, with the efflorescence of Black film and video collectives in the 1980s. At each of these moments, I attend to the simultaneous production, negotiation, and co-mingling of new social identities that were diasporic, …

Algorithmic Love: Twenty-First Century Organizations Of The Romantic, Sandra Moyano Ariza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the highly computed and accelerated experiences of digital love as well as their cultural and artistic representations in order to shed light on the human and more-than-human entanglements producing the algorithmic love experience. The recent turn to love in critical theory and cultural studies examines how love circulates in neoliberal societies and in the subjective processes of the users, foregrounding the control of populations and the very much lamented “end of love” (Illouz 2019). My study of love supplements the neoliberalist critique of algorithmic love with a posthuman and media theory approach that attends to the material …

No Ela Without Ella: Understanding The Naming And Crafting Of Gendered Subjectivities In Puerto Rico, Carmín Quijano Seda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At the beginning of the 20th century, the official metadiscourses about gendered job titles sedimented the idea that names or indexes pointing to women should be interpreted as unskilled, cheap, or even free labor in Puerto Rico (Azize, 1985; Muñiz Mas, 1998; Baerga-Santini, 1999). For this reason, Puerto Rican women organized and fought for equality in work settings. Furthermore, they became more active in politics and the government. Nevertheless, the Estado Libre Asociado (ELA) and local media discourses and interpretations about women’s labor discouraged them from participating in more senior positions (Acevedo Gaud, 2012).

However, this interpretation seemed to have …

Frenetic Journey Toward Muddledness: An Experimental Short Film, Fernando Vieira

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As an artist and Film Studies student, I saw the capstone option as an opportunity to consolidate academia with the art of filmmaking into one project. This became Frenetic Journey Toward Muddledness, an experimental short film written, directed, and edited by me. It is a film influenced by early avant-garde cinema, German expressionism, and film noir. Composed of pieces of unrelated footage and featuring an ambiguous, non-linear, and mostly silent narrative, the editing of the film prompted me to ask myself questions about its genre. Its hybridity made it possible to position the film within different categories, but there …

Of Method: A Propaedeutic To Coleridge's Prose Works, Michael A. Granger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Coleridge’s prose works, published and unpublished, demonstrate a thorough and critical testing and understanding of British and German philosophical responses to skepticism and the ability of philosophy to progress by maintaining a double-minded and conflicted suture of both the practical or imaginative eclipse of knowledge and theorizing the hypothetical epistemological absolute that explains the relativity of facticity. Any inadequate method of inquiry stagnates within attempting a purely figurative or purely demonstrative solution to skepticism. Thus, the appropriate way to approach Coleridge’s understanding of philosophy is the struggle to make inquiry adequate though progression. Coleridge’s methodological impulse originates explicitly in a …

Culturally And Socially Responsive Teacher Professional Learning At The American Museum Of Natural History, Jessica Correa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project consists of a series of professional learning sessions to support teachers in their implementation of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education (CR-SE) using the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as a resource and case study. Through the lens of Historically Responsive Literacy, the series also seeks to reestablish social science as a critical element of natural history for teachers. This series can help teachers see the museum as not only a place to explore life and physical science, but also a place to explore identity, social/emotional development, cultural studies and American History. The project includes resources and directions for …

The True And Only Technic: Technological Ubiquity And Its Critics, Heretics, And Zealots, Hampton A. Dodd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against technological ubiquity, the philosopher, the ecologist, the theologian, the psychologist, the radical, the reactionary, and the poet have each responded. This analysis seeks to explicate the nature of such responses, as well as to explore their contemporary form and elucidate what those presently publishing might offer as programs toward the future. In order to do this, what follows is broken up into a series of sections, each focused on what I have perceived to be the foremost themes present throughout technological critique: becoming, freedom, identity, faith, space, time, and progress. Prior to such thematic excavations, this analysis offers a …

'Since No Expressions Do': Queer Tools For Studying Literature, Filipa G. Calado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how digital methods and tools for studying text engage with queer literature. I critique digital methods and tools by posing computation, where textual data is cleaned and structured for electronic processing, against the complexity of queer subjecthood and affects expressed in textual style, form, and voice. While tools like quantitative text analysis, for example, transform, and necessarily reduce, qualitative elements of gender and sexuality into numerical data such as word frequencies or concordances, I argue that this reduction opens up possibilities for interpreting the formal qualities of queer literature. Just as digital formats transform and manipulate text …

Visualizing A Life, Uprooted: An Interactive, Web-Map And Scroll-Driven Exploration Of The Oral History Of My Great-Grandfather – From Ottoman Cilicia To Lebanon And Beyond, Alyssa Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is an interactive data visualization narrative of the oral history of my great-grandfather, Hovsep Aghek Yeni-Komshian, born April 2, 1895 to an Armenian family in Kilis, Cilicia, Ottoman Empire.

Before World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, millions of Armenians lived throughout what is today Eastern Turkey, their nearly 3000-year history in the region making them one of the oldest indigenous groups of the area. However, today the Armenian presence in Anatolia has largely been erased due to the Armenian Genocide (1915-1923), during which nearly the entire local Armenian population was murdered or forcibly deported …

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …

Towards Sociobiogeochemistry: Critical Perspectives On Anthropogenic Alterations To Soil Nitrogen Chemistry Via U.S. Urban And Suburban Development, Christopher D. Ryan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ecological impacts of changes to land use are relevant to concerns about climate change, eutrophication of waterbodies, and reductions in biodiversity. As a foundational component of ecosystem functioning, changes to soil biogeochemistry have significant effects on overall ecosystem health. With cities continuing to grow and develop in extent, the impacts of urbanization and suburbanization on soils are of particular concern. Despite a wide range of natural climatic and geologic conditions, several factors have driven similar patterns of land transformation and management across the United States. In particular, federal initiatives including the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, …

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

Spain's Vision Of Empire Through Conquest, Ideology, And Law In The Sixteenth Century, Penelope Yau-Wen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how the process of exploration, discovery, conquest and colonization of the Americas by Spain developed along with a vision of empire that involved the formulation of political theories, laws and policies by the governing elites, while responding to the actions by the conquistadors on the field. Although events on both sides of the Atlantic were not necessarily coordinated, the interests of the Court and the conquistadors intersected and were justified through a discourse that had been shaped by Humanist intellectual currents.

The thesis intends to show how the Castilian imperial vision was an experiment that began to …

The Complete Sight And Sound Greatest Films Of All Time Database, Katie Donia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Once every ten years, Sight and Sound, a film magazine produced by the British Film Institute (BFI), conducts an international poll of critics and film journalists to determine the “Greatest Films of All Time.” The first poll was conducted in 1952, and ten years later the BFI decided to make their poll decennial, allowing for the list to change and thus to demonstrate how time, changing opinion, and the continuous creation of new films change the film canon. However, despite the opportunity for long-term analysis, there is not an easy way online to see how a film’s ranking has changed …

A Municipal Modernity: Women, Architecture, And Public Health In Working-Class New York, 1913–1950, Jessica Fletcher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“A Municipal Modernity” is the first study to analyze the architectural history of the district health centers in New York City that women reformers and their allies founded to address poor health in working-class communities. It reveals that women’s philanthropic adaptive re-use was foundational to the architecture of the public health care in New York and led to a program of municipal district health centers. Philanthropic reformers adapted buildings in the 1910s and 1920s to provide affordable health care for low-income women and children in European immigrant and Black neighborhoods. During the New Deal, municipal officials followed the example set …

The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thematic project examines the notion of self-division, particularly in terms of the conflict between cognition and metacognition, across the fields of philosophy, psychology, and, most recently, the cognitive and neurosciences. The project offers a historic overview of models of self-division, as well as analyses of the various problems presented in theoretical models to date. This work explores how self-division has been depicted in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, Don DeLillo, and Mary Shelley. It examines the ways in which artistic renderings alternately assimilate, resist, and/or critique dominant philosophical, psychological, and scientific discourses about the self and its …

Galina Ustvolskaya's Writing For Violin And Piano, 1952–1964, Patrick Doane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Galina Ustvolskaya, Russian composer born in 1919 in Petrograd, navigated a life amidst the tumultuous changes in Soviet-era music and the upheavals of her home city. This dissertation explores Ustvolskaya’s compositions for violin and piano, to deepen the understanding of her musical language and style.

Despite the constraints and challenges imposed by the era’s political landscape, Ustvolskaya boldly crafted a distinct musical identity, writing social-realist compositions while privately cultivating a highly complex, individual style.

Few scholars have undertaken a comprehensive look at her music. This dissertation contributes to a growing body of recent scholarship by employing Russian music theorist Valentina …

"My First Best Love": Women's Writing On College Friendships 1880–1905, Alyssa J. Kayser-Hirsh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, American society encouraged strong bonds between women. As separate sphere ideology took hold, highly-structured female relationships were created and maintained through shared rituals, language, and expectations. The resulting friendships enabled women to build a range of emotional ties with one another. At the same time, an expanding array of gender segregated educational institutions further promoted homosocial networks. Women’s college students built community through their shared experience inhabiting a collective space, forging social circles as well as one-on-one intimate relationships. This thesis examines women’s experiences of friendship within the college setting between 1880 …

Digital Rhetoric Of The Invisible: Bisexual Literacy Practices On Tiktok, 2020–2021, Olivia Wood

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses auto- and digital-ethnographic methods to analyze the literacy practices of bisexual TikTok users primarily during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, during which time TikTok exploded in popularity among U.S. social media users, especially among young adults. It is also an exercise in neuroqueer composing, diverging at times from the norms of academic writing and the dissertation genre to perform and intentionally draw attention to neuroqueer styles of thinking and communication. I argue that bisexual invisibility and contemporary bi+ rhetorical activity must be understood within the context of LGBTQ+ political history, particularly …

Turf War: Interstate Banking And Industry Consolidation, 1965–1998, Erin Cully

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the advent of interstate banking in America during the second half of the twentieth century. To become the giants they are today, US financial institutions had to overcome, in fits and starts, the political limits on their geographical expansion across municipal, county, state, and national borders—and not always in that order. Faced with new competitors and harsh economic conditions, some bankers set their sights on expanding their markets to stay afloat. Many policymakers and regulators were responsive to this demand, hopeful that it could serve as a catalyst for economic growth. Challenging restrictions on interstate banking meant …

“After Being Equals, Is This The Sequel?”: Vivian Fine’S Memoirs Of Uliana Rooney As Artistic Commentary On Shifting Reactions To American Women’S Music, Tonia L. Passwater

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although it has been acknowledged that American female modernist composers encountered obstacles to success, the nuanced and multi-faceted nature of these obstacles has yet to be fully examined. In this dissertation, I explore the worlds of Marion Bauer, Johanna Beyer, Vivian Fine, Miriam Gideon, and Ruth Crawford Seeger through the lenses of music history, reception history, and socio-linguistics in order to contribute a more thorough understanding of the obstacles women encountered.

Before a note composed by a woman was ever heard, a battle was being waged with gendered identities. These identities are the starting point for my analysis of obstacles …

Accessibility In Asl Through Dance, Jocelyn Supanich

Honors Theses

My honors thesis project was a dance for camera or a dance film that I created as my senior capstone project for my BA dance degree. I wanted to create a film that increased awareness surrounding the accessibility of American Sign Language (ASL) for dancers and through dance. I wanted to show how dance and ASL can be seen as similar through the lense of them both being languages and ways of communicating using movement of the body. This idea is where the title stems from: “Expression in Motion”. Both ASL and dance are forms of expressing oneself, and they …

Chinese Cinema Under Censorship: The Evolving Identities Of China, Siyuan Liu

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

This thesis examines a selection of the most notable Chinese films that interacted with Chinese censorship regulations. Contemporary Chinese cinema has found itself in one of the most interesting situations in the present day. After the glorious1990s and 1980s New Wave movement Chinese cinema has diminished in terms of influence, style, and international recognition. And it is due to the strict censorship enforced since the beginning of the century. In this project, the author analyzes some of the most notable names in Chinese cinema: Jia Zhangke, Jiang Wen, Lou Ye, etc., most of whom were victims of the Chinese Film …

‘The Power Of Three Will Set Us Free': Witchy Womanist Readings Of Toni Morrison’S Sula, Opal Palmer Adisa’S It Begins With Tears, And Migdalia Cruz’S The Have-Little And Miriam’S Flowers, Anamaría Flores

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Witchy womanism is a critical methodology for reading, teaching, and writing about literature in order to generate emancipatory knowledge, activate Queer, Black, and Indigenous consciousnesses, contribute to 21^st century women’s, Black, and Indigenous liberation movements, and foster (re)connections to ancestral rituals and knowledge. Born at the intersections of Black Studies, BIPOC Queer and Gender Studies, Caribbean Studies, English, Hip-Hop Studies and Latinx Studies, “‘The Power of Three Will Set Us Free’: Witchy Womanist Readings of Toni Morrison's Sula, Opal Palmer Adisa's It Begins With Tears, and Migdalia Cruz's The Have-Little and Miriam's Flowers" is a multidisciplinary …

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

Park Use, Urban Environmental Justice, And Place Attachment In Parks In Low-Income Neighborhoods In New York City, Javier Eduardo Otero Peña

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This three-article dissertation brings environmental psychology themes and questions to a large-scale public health research project about a subset of community parks and park renovations in low-income neighborhoods in New York City (NYC). What attributes and perceived aspects of the physical and social environment of parks and their neighborhoods are associated with higher park use? How do residents of gentrifying low-income neighborhoods feel about park renovations that took place in their communities? What can be learned from parks, park renovations and place attachment from exploring user-generated content in the Google Maps platform? Each of the articles presented in this dissertation …

Más Allá De La Crisis Y La Emergencia: Aproximaciones A Los Movimientos Migratorios Contemporáneos A Través De La Traducción Y La Comedia, Fabiola Fernandez Peer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Esta investigación propone una reflexión original sobre la migración más allá de los marcos de la crisis y de la emergencia en referencia a acontecimientos concretos de estos últimos diez años de “crisis/emergencias migratorias” en y entre las regiones sur y norte del continente. El análisis del ensayo visual de la escritora/artista visual Verónica Gerber; el ensayo y la escritura ficcional de la escritora Valeria Luiselli y los performances de comedia de los comediantes/influencers George Harris y Jóse Rafael Guzmán revela que estos materiales pugnan con el discurso oficial, mediático, artístico, humanitario referido a la migración. Señala el impacto …