Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Biomorphic Grotesque In Modernist And Contemporary Painting, Audrey Howell

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper looks at the concepts of the biomorphic and grotesque in art from the start of the 20^th century to the present with a focus on painting and drawing. Included in the discussion of the grotesque throughout history are the works of Dadaist Otto Dix, painter Georg Baselitz, and feminist artists Judy Chicago, Hannah Wilke, and Ana Mendieta. Each used grotesque imagery to comment or react to a larger sociopolitical issue. Biomorphic artworks from the 20^th century are mentioned as well, with specific examples of work by Lee Krasner, Willem DeKooning, and Hans Bellmer. These artists together …

2014 Commencement Program, Columbia College Chicago

Commencement Programs

The commencement program of the 2014 Columbia College Chicago graduation ceremonies.

Comparing The Reproductive Climates Of Japan, Norway And Italy: A New Way Of Looking At The Reasons For Low Fertility Rates, Samantha Graham

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

In recent years, much has been made of the looming demographic crisis that is forming in Japan. The declining birthrate and graying of the population has made many government officials, sociologists, and scholars very anxious about what will happen when a nation begins to shrink. These same officials and scholars are also looking for a reason for the decline, and many have placed the blame on Japanese women without examining the reasons these women have for having fewer children or forgoing motherhood altogether. But Japan is not the only nation suffering from population decline. Other smaller, industrialized nations also face …

Shifting Paradigm: A Detailed Exploration Of 3d Technology In Museums, Alycia Piazza

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis explores the impact of 3D technology on the overall museum experience. Detailed analysis of the current utilization of 3D scanning and printing in the areas of exhibition, conservation, research, accessibility, education, and programming, has yielded informed findings on the potential advantages and distractions this technology creates. The information discussed raises important questions and opens the doors to critical discourse; it provides museum professionals with valuable insight and theoretical suggestions on how to best incorporate this technology within the museum setting, with careful consideration to its capabilities for both the present and future.

Rieglematica: Re-Imagining The Photobooth Through Female Performativity And Self-Portraiture, Allison E. Riegle

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper explores the historical significance and advancements of automatic photobooth portraiture from the late 1800s onwards, focusing specifically on the intention behind the photobooth’s creation and the significance and cultural implications of its introduction into society. As it gradually became a staple of modern society, regularly visited by citizens to have their portraits taken, numerous artists sought out the photobooth as both a studio and a stage in which to document performative self-portraiture. The space and aesthetics of the photobooth have inspired artists to re-envision the confines of the booth and use its automatic function as a point of …

Reading In Vogue: The Function Of Fashion In Three Chopin Short Stories, Rachael Scardelli

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Since its debut in 1892, Vogue magazine has been a temple for fashion and consumerism amongst the elite. It provided instructions on mannerisms, tastes, marriages, and the latest styles. In 1900, the average family income was $769 with $108 allocated to clothing costs; the average elite consumer was spending more than $556 on clothing per year. Today, that would be a clothing budget of more than $12,000. With the ever-increasing interest in cultural studies of objects, particularly clothing and fashion, it is startling that more has not been done with the nineteen short stories Kate Chopin published in the magazine …

An Investigation Of American Students’ Tonal Acquisition Towards Disyllabic Words With Same Or Different Tones, Yuan Yuan

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Mastering Mandarin tones is an indispensable path to achieving high Chinese language proficiency and a headache to a lot of American learners. Scholars keep studying this area, but this problem remains unsolved.

Through long-time observation of beginners, I found an interesting phenomenon: many students were able to correctly produce a certain tone (Tone X) which was contained by a monosyllable. However, when the students encountered a disyllabic word with the tone which they were skillful at (Tone X) and another different tone (Tone Y), the students showed no advantage on Tone X. This phenomenon motivated me to do research on …

Collapsing The Secret Self: Thackeray's The History Of Pendennis As A Performative Parody, Rachel Freire

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

By collapsing the distinctions between private and public as he presents individual interiority as yet another performance, Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis undercuts disciplinary individualism, so that performances are not the product of social regulation but rather are as genuine as any presumed private thoughts or feelings. Pendennis actively performs the dissolution of interiority, as it thematically and stylistically enacts the awkwardness of genuine affectation as a routine and unavoidable reality of modern life. Reveling in the discomfort that accompanies the absence of secrecy, Thackeray parodies the privileging of secrecy and one’s interior self that pervades the Bildung genre he …

Re-Enchanting The Spectacle, Shayna Cohn

Graduate School of Art Theses

“Re-Enchanting the Spectacle” explores guiding notions and central themes within the art practice of Shayna Cohn. Cohn’s installation spaces and sculptures within them, evoke a type of fabricated aura and melodramatic attitude of entertainment sites. By isolating the affect outside of the original environment, Cohn references the perceptual duality of entertainment sites within this “post-sacred” era. Entertainment venues become sites of potential transcendence, yet are also inextricably tied to their automated mechanization. Drawing on the Peter Brooks’ analysis of the historical and poetic relationship between melodrama and the sacred, Cohn argues that contemporary notions of melodrama can be found within …

2014 Manifest Program, Columbia College Chicago

Manifest Urban Arts Festival Programs

A program for the Manifest Urban-Arts Festival held by Columbia College Chicago on May 16, 2014.

Whovians And Directioners: Challenging The Fangirl Identity, Brianna Vancant

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Using notions from fan blogs and fan theory, this project analyzes the inconsistencies surrounding the phenomenon of so-called fangirls in the Doctor Who and One Direction worlds. The term fangirl is usually defined as an irrational adolescent female who is only a fan of very specific types of entertainment because of factors that are perceived by other fans as superficial and irrelevant. In contemporary music and television fandom, these fangirls are often criticized and policed by other fans, many times disregarded as not ‘true’ fans. The project studies this distorted perception and how it leads to misconceptions about the wider …

The Queer Blogger: Interrogating The Commodification Of Identities, Anne Lacy

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Using Queer blogs found throughout American blogging networks, while drawing upon Marxism, Michel Foucault’s notions of confession and coming out, and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, this project is a materialist analysis that unveils how Queer identities are being consumed and commodified. In contemporary American society a phenomenon is occurring online: Queer blogs are acting as a platform where subjectivities are attempting to resist hegemonic notions of identity while they are simultaneously being incorporated into a capitalistic agenda of subject formation. This project ultimately calls upon an act of resistance, as these Queer blogs are in fact a negotiable space for …

Charles Williams’S Theology Of Publishing, Michael J. Paulus Jr.

SPU Works

No abstract provided.

The Neglected Heavens: Gender And The Cults Of Helios, Selene, And Eos In Bronze Age And Historical Greece, Katherine A. Rea

Classics: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

Why is it that the sun and moon held such a small place in cults of the Greeks, and is it that the sun is male and the moon is female in Greek myth? Aristophanes in Peace 406-413 claims that “we sacrifice to you [the Olympians], the barbarians sacrifice to them [the sun and moon]”. But if we look at nearby or related civilizations, the situation is quite different. In Ugaritic, Minoan, and Hittite religion (as well as among other Indo-European speaking people), the sun and other celestial deities have much more prominence. However, while the Greeks acknowledged the divinity …

Writing Women In Northeastern China: Melancholic Narrative In Mei Niang's Novellas, Li Guo

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

Mei Niang (1920–2013), the pen name of Sun Jiarui, is a female fiction writer, translator, and editor of Funü zazhi (Ladies’ journal). In the semi-colonial Northeast China, Mei Niang’s exploration of melancholic narratives shore up manifold levels of socio-historical discourses that are constructive of women’s subjectivity. Melancholic narrative functions as an inverted mirror of both the author’s cultural displacement from her diasporic experience, and her portrayal of colonial domination of local elites by the Japanese in Northeast China. Also, the author’s depiction of feminine melancholia revokes the modernist ideology of love and its constitutive male-centered discourses, dismantles the social disenfranchisement …

Introduction To Forum: Nation, Gender, And Transnational Modernism, Ping Zhu, Li Guo

Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

This forum, sprouted from a thematic panel at the 2013 Annual Meeting of Association for Asian Studies in San Diego, situates its theoretical focus on the intersecting relationship between gender and nation in early twentieth-century China within a transcultural framework. Viewing both "gender" and "nation" as centrifugal sites for discursive production in modern China, the five contributors of this special issue probe into the complex cultural mechanism which placed gender at the center of the nationalist discourse. Reciprocally, the authors explore how the instability of both discourses on gender and nation opens up space for creating subversive cultural imaginaries and …

A Mixed-Methods Study Of The Variables That Influence Florida Southern Baptists' Affirmation Of The Inerrancy Of The Bible, David A. Mcgee

Faculty Dissertations

The culmination of the resurgence within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was finalized by adopting the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (BFM 2000). The SBC had discovered in the 1970s and 1980s that belief in the inerrancy of the Bible was not being affirmed by their leadership, particularly within their six seminaries. After a twenty plus year battle, the SBC attempted to affirm in more precise language the inerrancy of the Bible through the BFM 2000. However, this raises the question, how has this firm commitment to the inerrancy of the Bible, as affirmed by the leadership, translated to the …

I Am Not A Tree, Ashley Coulter

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

I am not going to gut my thesis like a fish. To give you an “abstract” is to give you the “big picture” of this intricate, complex work. I don’t know “love” or “hope” or “humanity” or “loss.” I know a wooden rocking horse, the touch of bare feet on a cold tile floor, the bond I feel when driving for hours on the interstate behind the same car, the sudden hint of despair that comes over me when the car begins to veer toward the exit, as if I’m losing my travel companion. To give you the “big picture” …

Rise Up Singing, Buffalo Gay Men's Chorus

Programs

Tonight we bring you some of Broadway's best music. From the classic team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to the newer dynamic duo of Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, the words and music of Broadway have become part of our American Identity. They have also acted as powerful tools for shaping hearts and minds.

Two Of A Kind: The Death And Life Of Patricia And Joan Miller, Monica Spees

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Twin sisters, Patricia and Joan Miller, create an unusual story that few people know. In their youth, they had fairly successful singing and performing careers, but they became reclusive as they got older and continued their lives only with each other. No one knew much about or heard much from them for about 40 years. Then police found them dead in their South Lake Tahoe, Calif., home in February 2012. Autopsy reports showed they died within hours of each other several weeks before police found them.

I intend to investigate the lives of the two sisters and their devotion to …

"Women In The House Y'All:" She Should Run, Post-Feminism, And Women's Representation In Politics, Amy Gooch

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project investigates “She Should Run,” a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of women in public leadership by attempting to eliminate barriers to success. The project argues “She Should Run” addresses the lack of women’s representation in government, but does so by mobilizing problematic essentialist rhetoric and post-feminist constructions. Drawing on second wave feminist scholarship, this rhetorical analysis examines the cultural conditions that mediate women’s role in politics as well as their willingness to participate. This project claims that the organization ultimately reestablishes existing essentialist notions of women’s identities and uses post-feminist rhetoric to delegitimize the aims of …

A Divine Inequality: Contextualizing Gender And Authority In Contemporary Mormon Feminism, Taylee Robinson Pardi

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project traces the decline of authority for Mormon women coupled with the rise of defined gender roles within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in order to contextualize contemporary Mormon feminism. Using a radical feminist analysis, this project will explore how contemporary Mormon women relate to their early Mormon sisters and the ways in which the culture and doctrine of Mormonism often converge, lending itself to a unique feminist perspective. This project argues that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as currently practiced, is not just inherently patriarchal, but un-egalitarian, and that contemporary …

Reused Refuse: Freeganism And The Shifting Hegemonies Of Consumption And Waste, Jamie Corliss

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

Freeganism is a counter-culture practice, lifestyle, and philosophy that resists the waste and exploitation inherent to capitalism. By examining freegan practices and philosophies, specifically dumpster diving, this project reveals how these actions help make apparent and shift dominant ideologies about waste and consumption by re-injecting value into wasted items. The project argues that the waste that freegans live on has the semiotic power to shift dominant attitudes about waste and gives freegans the means to survive with limited participation in the economy, but this waste is a byproduct of capitalist production, not a cause of it. Freegans are conceptually paving …

When Ana Becomes The Protagonist: Eating Disorder Narratives, The Pursuit Of Thinness And Social Resistance On The Internet, Nadezh Mulholland

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

There is media concern that books about eating disorders are harmful to young readers. However, there is little research on how readers interpret the content of novels and memoirs featuring characters with eating disorders. This project considers the thinspiration images used as motivation to lose weight on so-called pro-ana and pro-mia social networks for people with eating disorders, and draws parallels between thinspiration and images used on the covers of eating disorder books. This paper uses a Gramscian lens to dismantle media claims by analyzing the interactions between members of eating disorder social networks, showing that website users tum to …

Your Faith Has Saved You: A Literary Understanding Of The Relationship Between Physical Healings, Faith, And Salvation In Luke-Acts, James Benjamin Hussung

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The two-volume first-century work, Luke-Acts, presumably written by Paul’s sometime companion, Luke the physician, follows the story of Jesus’s birth, earthly ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension in the first volume and then the spread of Christianity from Jerusalem to Rome by the apostles in the second. Within this story lies a recurring motif of physical healings from various diseases and even death. These healings are predominantly performed by Jesus; however, in Acts especially, the apostles also perform healings similar to those of Jesus. Often, these physical healings are accompanied by faith, forgiveness of sins, and salvation. This thesis has two …

Where's Jonesville? How The Destruction Of Jonesville Left A Legacy Of Housing Discrimination In Bowling Green, Ky, George Carpenter

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Jonesville was a small tight-knit African-American community in Bowling Green, Kentucky with a unique cultural identity. Family-oriented and extremely self-sufficient, Jonesville thrived as a prime example of southern black culture in the mid 20^th century. However, Jonesville did not stand a chance placed against a powerful local institution. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the community was destroyed to create space for an expanding Western Kentucky University. Fueled by the entirely unjust urban renewal legislation, Kentucky Project R-31, Jonesville was wiped from the Bowling Green map. Due to locally sanctioned discriminatory action, the displaced citizens of Jonesville were …

Understanding The Mystery: Weighing Cessationist And Continuationist Debate Of Prophecy In The Pauline Epistles, Nicholas Bratcher

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

The use of spiritual gifts such as tongues and prophecy has been a major source of controversy within Christianity over the past century. As its use flourishes in Africa, Asia and South America, many in the Western Church remain skeptical of its use, some even questioning the true conversion of these "charismatic" Christians. This thesis seeks to weigh the relevance of this cessationist debate with what Paul’s true concerns are in his letters. As such, it both praises and critiques cessationist and continuationist argument using modern scholarship to determine Paul’s actual, intended meaning of his words. It weighs the text …

Make 'Em Laugh: Examining The Role Of Humor In Dance, Jordan Jones

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

As a dancer, choreographer, and naturally sarcastic person, humor has always been a tool that I recognize and appreciate. I was specifically drawn to the role of humor in dance choreography and performance when I was responsible for creating my own dance works, and I realized the complexity behind making even the simplest joke in dance. This thesis explores humor, from its biological and psychological origins in our brains, to an evaluation of what constitutes “humor” (in past and present American society), to a discussion on how to create humor within dance using the traditionally defined elements of choreography. Contained …

Lawrence And Desegregation In Bowling Green, Robert Rabold

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

To gain a deeper understanding of the historical context and development of the Civil Rights Movement nationwide, this project analyzes the desegregation of the City of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas declared segregation deprived minority groups of equality in 1954, and the first implementation of the ruling in the United States followed with Willis v. Walker out of Adair County, Kentucky in 1955. The desegregation of Bowling Green schools, however, did not come until 1963 with Willie Larry Lawrence, et al. v. Bowling Green, Kentucky Board of Education et al.. The analyzation of relevant …

The Wizarding Words Of J. K. Rowling: Literary Merit In The Harry Potter Series, Brenna Sherrill

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Since hitting bookshelves in 1997, the Harry Potter series has taken the popular culture world by storm in an unprecedented way, breaking sales records for both books and films, and dramatically increasing readership among young readers. Despite its immense and unique success, this series, like many other examples of pop culture, doesn’t often receive the credit it deserves with respect to its literary merits. However, it is undeniable that the Potter books reflect many of the traits found in all great works of literature, including complex character development and abundant literary devices that elevate the intellectual level of the series. …