Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Babel, Daniel Horowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is a series of three memoiristic essays around the vortex of identity. The first is an exploration of how childhood overmedication split the continuity of the author’s self-conception. The second traces the slipperiness of Jewish and Queer identifications detailing their synthesis in the klezmer revival in New York City in late 1980s and early 90s. The third is a polyphonic narration of the recovery of a lost klezmer’s life story in the face of the silence of time and slaughter.

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

The Queer Life Of Lorena Hickok, Samantha D. Leyerle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life of Lorena Hickok, a remarkable woman whose story has been glossed over throughout history. Hickok was an accomplished journalist and writer, and her life offers a fascinating glimpse into being queer in the early twentieth century. While much has been written about Hickok’s relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt, this thesis aims to go beyond their connection to examine Hickok’s entire life and experiences in greater detail. Through analyzing her work as a writer, as well as her personal correspondence and unpublished autobiography, this thesis illuminates the quiet details of defining moments in history, including the Great …

Algorithmic Sovereignty: Machine Learning, Ground Truth, And The State Of Exception, Matthew Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines the influence of algorithmic security technology on political theories of sovereignty and the state of exception. In computer science, an exception is a special circumstance that prevents a program from terminating normally. In political theory, the state of exception, as theorized by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, cannot be encoded within the normal liberal legal order. With states’ increasing turn toward algorithmic answers to questions of ‘security,’ which, per Agamben, is the long-term form of the political state of exception, the relationship between the concept of the exception in these two disciplines comes to the fore. In …

The Gilded Tropics: Winslow Homer And John Singer Sargent In Florida, 1886-1917, Theodore W. Barrow

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the Floridian works of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent in the context of tourism, race, and the environment as perceptions of the tropics in an Anglo-American context. Both artists sojourned in Florida and produced a number of watercolors and related oils that not only testify to a rapidly-expanding tourist industry to the Sunshine State, but also update the Romantic myths of the tropics with a more sober, ironic Realist take. While Homer and Sargent continue to be popular subjects for studies and exhibitions on their own, this dissertation is the first to consider how their shared …

Play Makes Perfect: An Exploration Of Game And Play Elements In Composition And Performance, Gabrielle Chou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to explore the intersection of play and games in Western classical music and define a new category of pieces, “ludic pieces,” which contain play structures and game mechanics within their composition. Starting with surveying perspectives in ludology and ludomusicology, including those by Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, Jesper Juul, Katie Salen, and Eric Zimmerman, I will examine various definitions of a “game” and what its qualifying aspects are. I will then turn to music and consider pieces that interact with play and games without containing game structures, including examples of musical humor and pieces which evoke the imagery …

The Politics Of Expertise And The Articulation Of Authority In Democracy: Cognitive Style And Intelligibility In The Education Of Problem-Solving And Professional Decision-Making In The Domain Of Law, Michael W. Raphael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Computational complexity refers to the representational aspect of problem-solving. This representational aspect is commonly understood to describe the regularities that organize the definition of the problem-situation, the qualities that designate its difficulty, either in terms of the process of arriving at a definition of the problem or in the process of arriving at a solution. It is for this reason, that it is commonly said that “representational design precedes computational efficacy.” The point of this maxim is to serve as a reminder that an efficient use of resources begins with the design of near decomposability, the specification of the properties …

Transnational Ritual Poetics Of Blackness In Performance, Nina A. Mercer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I investigate transnational ritual poetics of Blackness through a historical, cultural, and spatial lens, centering my exploration on the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and waterways. I show how these formal poetics activate Africana cosmologies, cosmogonies, and mythologies dramaturgically by centering contemporary New York City performance works that bring together dance, theatre, and music. I contextualize NYC performance case studies in relation to performance practices in contemporary Salvador da Bahia. I am particularly interested in how the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and water as formal poetics catalyze interventions along contested water-ways and landscapes marked by Black …

Haunting At Troy: Troy Narratives, Trauma, And Desire For The Past In Late Medieval English Literature, Woo Ree Heor

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The mythical city of Troy functioned as an imagined point of origin for many medieval nations, providing a tangible connection to the legendary past and nation-building tools useful for the ruling class. Troy provided a convenient foundation narrative upon which ideas of collective identity could be built for these nations, and England, where construction of a homogeneous past was difficult due to frequent ruptures in its development of communal identity, was an eager producer and consumer of such a legitimizing device. However, the trauma of war and destruction intrinsic in Troy narratives also generates potent political anxiety about the reanimated …

English Learners In Nyc, Raquel Neris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

English Learners in NYC is a Digital Humanities project that intersects Migration Studies and Foreign Language Learning Studies by presenting a podcast series about the learning experience of international students in English as a Second Language (ESL) programs at English schools in New York City. The project aims to provide visibility to the educational migration in this specific context and to promote a discussion on how international students and educators can reimagine their teaching and learning experience. It also aims to reveal ESL schools' challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic and how they incorporated digital technologies during and after this event. …

Teaching Beyond ‘Kings Leopold’S Ghost’: New Sources And Voices In A Global History Curriculum On The Democratic Republic, Jen Chapin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The complicated history of the Democratic Republic of Congo is not typically part of high school curricula, yet events and historical trends concerning this nation connect with many key topics and themes, including feudalism, Haitian Revolution, New Imperialism, genocide, World War I & 2, Decolonization movements, Cold War politics, neo-colonialism/globalization, modern China’s economic power, authoritarianism, cult of personality, grassroots democracy movements, responses to climate change, etc. Designing and delivering a rigorous yet accessible curriculum on Congo poses a challenge for teaching beyond “King Leopold’s Ghost”, meaning, working past the prevalence of materials focusing on Belgian king’s genocidal two-decade rule over …

Changing Homelands: The Election Of Menachem Begin And The Diplomatic Campaign To Bring Ethiopian Jews To Israel, Abraham Silberstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines diplomatic efforts by Israel, the United States, and non-governmental organizations to facilitate the immigration of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. While much of the historical literature on this topic has focused on the 1980s and 1990s, when tens of thousands of Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel, this thesis largely considers the mid-late 1970s. For the first 25 years of its existence, the State of Israel had not been eager to see Ethiopian Jews enter the country, and the government deemed them non-Jews for the purposes of immigration. This started to change in 1973, when the Sephardi Chief …

Does Political Advertising Persuade? A Quantitative Assessment Of The Effects Of Campaign Contact In The Context Of Race, Ethnicity, And Immigrant Origin In New York City Council Primary Elections From 2001 Through 2017, Laura M. Tamman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a quantitative analysis of the relationship between New York city council campaigns’ spending and election results between 2001 and 2017, controlling for key factors such as incumbency, I find substantial and statistically significant positive effects for radio advertising on election outcomes. I find small but significant effects for mail, and smaller sized effects for canvassing. My findings underscore the need for further study of the role of ethnic and community media outlets, such as radio, in shaping voter behavior. Moreover, I argue that the fixation of the current persuasion literature on television ads in presidential general elections misses critical …

A Field Of Relations: A Mixed Analysis Of Toni Morrison’S “Recitatif” With Voyant, A Text Analysis Tool, Asma A. Neblett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Several academic and literary articles focus on the claims about identity in Toni Morrison’s posthumously published short story, “Recitatif.” However, few of them offer analyses that approach the function of the story in ways that align with Morrison’s description of it as an “experiment.” Even fewer through tools of text analysis, which is a method of distant reading. In this paper, I provide a mixed analysis of “Recitatif” through close reading and text analysis via Voyant, a digital tool. I concentrate on the recitative device, how it facilitates the message of the story, and how the results may expand the …

Only For The Pleasure Of Telling: Filling The Void In Pasolini's Trilogia Della Vita, Courtney Munson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since Pasolini deliberately cultivated an unrecognizable and illegible public image that embraced incoherence, much of the scholarship surrounding him is plagued by contradictions and mutual exclusivity. For some, Pasolini was a utopian prophet, for others apocalyptic, but most agree that he, through his transmedial and highly self-inscribed life-work, was responding primarily to the crises of neocapitalist consumerism, especially its degenerative effects on sexual conventions and the body. Through an investigation of Pasolini’s controversial essays on film theory, the details of his biography, and the films of the Trilogia della vita, this thesis argues that it is a mistake to …

Creative Figures: Portraiture And The Making Of The Modern American Artist, 1918-1930, Sasha Nicholas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1918 and 1930, American artists began depicting themselves and their intertwined circles of creative collaborators with unprecedented intensity. Creative Figures: Portraiture and the Making of the Modern American Artist argues that American artists turned to their own images during this formative period of American modernity to vie for cultural authority and to navigate pressing questions of creative, social, and national identity. The dissertation studies a kaleidoscope of portraits that exemplify this phenomenon, focusing on paintings and photographs by Berenice Abbott, James Latimer Allen, Thomas Hart Benton, Florestine Perrault Bertrand Collins, Imogen Cunningham, John Stuart Curry, Aaron Douglas, Yun Gee, …

Diggin’ In The Racial Literacy And Culturally Responsive And Sustaining Crates, Jordan Bell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Racial Literacy first became scholarship in 2004 with Lani Guinier and France Winddance Twine’s racial literacy works. Likewise, Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Education’s seminal work is associated with Gloria Ladson-Billings’ (1995) introduction of culturally relevant pedagogy. While racial literacy and culturally responsive and sustaining education scholarship appeared around the late 20th and early 21st centuries, these frameworks were being developed in Black educational spaces since their inception in the United States. These frameworks were created in response to rampant antiblackness throughout various periods of United States history. In recognition of pre-21st century Black educators’ contributions to racial literacy and culturally …

Phantom Shootings, Allan Ambris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone is a website designed to critique NYC Open Data reporting with respect to shootings through a series of visualizations and discoveries. The NYPD Shooting Incidents datasets (Historic and Year to Date) introduce themselves to the user by claiming to be a “list of every shooting incident that occurred in NYC.” The supplied documentation reveals that this is not the case.

After understanding the supporting materials, there are still undisclosed truths. My exploration of the data revealed that a single victim may be represented across multiple entries. Additionally, multiple victims may be represented by a single entry. It is …

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

Searching For Mami & Abuelita: Reimagining Ethnic Studies Praxis Through Women Of Color Feminisms, Art, And Archiving, Wendy S. Barrales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Weaving art-based methods, women of color (WOC) feminisms, digital participatory archiving (PAR-chiving), and Ethnic Studies pedagogy, this dissertation investigates how I explored and produced knowledge collectively with young women of color that reimagines classrooms as learning spaces for liberation. This dissertation, searching for mami & abuelita, is an extension of the women of color archive (wocarchive) a digital storytelling project documenting, preserving and sharing the experiences of our matriarchs of color. This project, born out of an interview with my abuelita Aída about her life in rural Veracruz, sought out to document and preserve the stories of women of color …

Digital Against The Digital, Gemma Stevanella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this digital capstone is to provide the viewer with an exploratory experience designed to untangle some the ramifications of owning and using a social media account. Through the help of a journal that assumes the form of a timeline, this digital capstone illustrates how some of the technologies that power fashionable and successful ways of capturing and sharing personal moments online have hidden roots in environmental issues, communities’ exploitation, political and regulatory decisions, data surveillance practices, and psychological and emotional conditions, especially in adolescents.

Off The Books: Making A Space For Bipoc Representation In Young Adult Publishing, Elisha Fernandez

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The publishing industry in the United States has long been dominated by white voices, resulting in a significant lack of representation for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the form of both authors and characters. This project aims to survey young adult BIPOC readers to explore their experiences with representation in the young adult (YA) genre and assess the impact of representation on their consumption of literature. Through assessing quantitative and qualitative answers to an online survey, the results reveal correlations between representation, enjoyment of literature, and the frequency of YA literature consumption among different BIPOC groups. These …

Hmong Parents' Perspectives On The Effectiveness Of Hmong Language And Culture Programs, Lia Vang

Doctorate in Education

In this dissertation, I examined Hmong parents' perspectives on the effectiveness of Hmong language and culture (HLC) programs in helping their children maintain the Hmong language and cultural practices. It was guided by three research questions that sought to uncover Hmong parents' experiences with heritage language shifts (HLS), their perceptions of their children's experiences, their perceived effectiveness of Hmong language and culture programs, and the roles they believe home and school play in the language and culture maintenance process. Drawing from a phenomenological research approach, narratives from semi-structured interviews with nine Hmong parents from two Hmong charter schools brought forward …

Reinvest In Us: Reimagine The Role Of Police In The U.S., Jamil Davis

College Honors Program

In America, we must question and understand what is “law and order.” Over centuries, America developed a racialized slave-class politically and socially through power and force. Police are the foot soldiers of maintaining law and order as Slave Patrols evolved into the State Police. In my thesis, I discuss how their efforts in traffic enforcement enable a dominant class to target and enslave the oppressed class. Traffic control leads to 18 million interactions a year which is 34 people a minute. The numbers of interactions along with persistent practices regarding discrimination cause police to be a social liability. When bad …

Classical Influences On Anti-Federalism In Late18th-Century America: An Analysis Of References To The Roman Republic, “Cato,” And Caesar In The Anti-Federalist Papers, Anastasia Kaliabakos

College Honors Program

As a classics major, connecting antiquity to the modern era has always been important to me. Studying the past as a way to inform our perspective on the present is often valuable: as Patrick Henry said, “I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.” Relating classics with the founding and constitutional periods of the United States of America is particularly revealing in one’s endeavor to explain the ideas and decisions from that time. A group of figures undoubtedly influenced by Greek and Roman antiquity was the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists were, in short, opposed to the …

Angels Of Many Houses: Reconciling Domesticity In 19th-Century Victorian Literature, Amanda Vierra

College Honors Program

The rise of the Victorian middle class is known for solidifying a separation of gender roles, with women operating in the private, domestic sphere and men in the public sphere. This historical value placed on domesticity is reflected in the rise of domestic fiction, the dominant genre of Victorian literature, which commonly depicts young, middle-class women making their way in the world. The plot of these narratives revolves around women perfecting or contending with their place in the domestic sphere through courtship, marriage, and family. Scholars on domestic fiction have continued to argue over whether domestic fiction reflected the oppressive …

Signs Of Life, John Kohlepp

University Honors Theses

Inspired by the isolation of the COVID pandemic, John Kohlepp explores Manuel DeLanda's theories of identity and assemblage with a modular exhibit of trompe l’oeil paintings of humble objects found in his home and nearby surroundings. The exhibit offers the opportunity to recombine these interrelated elements into new patterns of meaning. The thesis offers an exploration of the philosophical and biographical inspirations behind the media and concepts engaged by the artist.

Untangling The Phenomenon Of Teacher Anxiety During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Voices Of Secondary Ela Teachers, Jenise Gorman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Hybrid simultaneous teaching, surgical masks, Lysol wipes, and uncertainty capture the zeitgeist of teaching during COVID-19. This study builds on teachers’ daily stressors in the classroom. Many shifts in education that never seemed possible created angst and anxiety in the classroom (Cupido, 2018; Dubey and Pandey, 2020; El Rizaq & Sarmini, 2021; Zuo et al., 2020; Garcia and Piotrowski, 2022). Teachers entered the 2020-2021 school year having to learn many firsts.The purpose of this study was to understand the interplay of work-life lived experiences of secondary English teachers with moments of anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a post-intentional phenomenological …

A Critical-Inclusive Approach To Instructing On Genocide Education In The United States: Delivering An Equally Critical And Inclusive Approach To Professional Development, Cassidy S. Ernst

Master's Projects and Capstones

This paper presents a new approach to teaching the preconditions for genocide. Bringing together a number of theoretical insights from recent research, it focuses on the pedagogical value of a critical inclusive approach to genocide education. Such an approach incorporates persecuted groups commonly excluded from educational narratives, such as the experiences of homosexuals during the Holocaust. It also places genocide education within a wider framework focused on prevention and advocacy. Through utilizing a critical-inclusive approach to genocide education in the classroom, youth will be equipped with a stronger conception of genocide, genocidal ideologies, and measures that can be taken to …

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …