Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Leon Fleischer: Baker Guest Artist Piano Master Class, Leon Fleischer

Setnor School of Music - Performance Programs

No abstract provided.

Tribute To Rich Devos, Delivered On September 30, 2015, Arend D. Lubbers

Presidential Speeches

Tribute to Rich DeVos, delivered on September 30, 2015 by Arend D. Lubbers, who served as President of Grand Valley from 1969-2001.

Serving The Story, Howard Schaap

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The kinds of stories we tell about ourselves matter, and the story patterns that control and direct our lives are powerful forces."

Posting about using our life stories for service to the church from In All Things - an online hub committed to the claim that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has implications for the entire world.

http://inallthings.org/serving-the-story/

Cuckolds And Codpieces: Early Modern Anxieties In Male Potency, Doris Barkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation is an exploration of male potency through a close examination of the tropes of the cuckold and the codpiece as presented in English dramatic works of the early modern period: I examine codpiece and cuckoldry discourses side by side, to see how one informs the other, and to perceive to what extent masculinity is affected and communicated by these discourses. My purpose here is to explore early modern views of masculinity, marriage, and sexuality through various theoretical frameworks, from Freud to Foucault.

My study argues that while the codpiece may emphasize or articulate sexual power and virility, that …

Reconsidering Organicism In Milton Babbitt's Music And Thought, Zachary Bernstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation makes two related but distinct claims. The first explores the influence of organicism, particularly in the hierarchical formulation developed by Heinrich Schenker, on Milton Babbitt's thought. This influence is shown to inform Babbitt's writings on a range of issues, guiding his analyses, his view of music cognition, and his understanding of the tonal and twelve-tone systems, including his own compositional twelve-tone techniques. Analysis of Babbitt's compositions, however, reveals several complications with the organicist model: there are a number of pieces and situations that conflict with the expectations of hierarchical organicism. As a result, this dissertation advocates for a …

American Dreamer: First-Time Homeownership And The Affective Geographies Of Dwelling, Stephen Boatright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research examines the experiences novice homebuyers in New York City and Oakland, CA have during the home search and decision-making processes. Using a mixed-method approach that combines ethnography with critical discourse analysis and non-representational theory, this work examines the ideology of homeownership as well as the tensions that stem from its emotional affordances. It addresses a lacuna in the housing literature regarding the turbulent everyday emotional tensions that buyers confront as they navigate the highly professionalized real estate industry. Homeownership is lauded for being a relatively low-risk tool for highly leveraged investment; however, using data drawn from a series …

The Symbiosis Between Villa-Lobos's Carnaval Das Crianças And Momoprecoce: A Comparative Study, Vanessa Rodrigues Cunha

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), one the most important figures in Brazilian music, played a crucial role in establishing nationalism in Brazil through musical explorations of the unique character of Brazilian culture. This culture, a cacophonous mix of European lineage and African and indigenous influences, is exemplified in the country's most popular and authentic celebration: the carnival. This dissertation explores Villa-Lobos's musical portrait of the carnival through analysis of Carnaval das Crianças for piano, and that work's reconfiguration as the piano fantasy Momoprecoce, focusing on a comparison of the two works to illuminate how Villa-Lobos kept the core of the original …

Essays In The Theory And Practice Of The Suzuki Method, Kara Eubanks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation speaks to an audience of string pedagogues inside and outside the Suzuki community to offer a richer understanding of how the Suzuki Method fits into American educational and string-pedagogical practice.

The first chapter presents a history of the Suzuki Method and the current global state of Suzuki theory and practice. This introductory chapter frames the two chapters that follow; it provides the background information necessary to understand them. The second and third chapters each address an aspect of the Suzuki Method that is widely misunderstood by the string-pedagogy community, including the Suzuki community itself. While chapters 2 and …

Carl Schmitt And Political Catholicism: Friend Or Foe?, Brian J. Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The scholarship on controversial German constitutional lawyer and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) has long accepted what can be called a "standard narrative" as regards his intellectual development. This narrative treats Schmitt as, on the whole, a "Catholic" intellectual and "political theologian" until the mid-1920s when he turns decidedly towards a secular decisionism. Commentators frequently point to Schmitt's non-canonical second marriage in 1926 as the biographically salient factor in dating a turn from an early association with political Catholicism to his later nationalist authoritarianism. This later approach to politics led Schmitt to promote plebiscitary dictatorship in the last years of …

A Man To Preserve Or Reform The Nation: Masculinity As Political Rhetoric In English Novels During The Revolution Controversy, Janne Burger Gillespie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The English literary responses to the French Revolution have been given thorough critical attention as has the Revolution's impact on women writers and femininity. However, the Revolution's impact on and engagement with standards of manliness have been left relatively unexplored. This dissertation examines how a critique of masculinity is positioned in the space of contemporary political considerations in the quarter-century following the French Revolution. Thus, this dissertation argues that there is a dialectical engagement between masculinity and political views in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century English novels such as Maria Edgeworth's Belinda and Leonora, Charlotte Smith's Emmeline and Desmond …

Social Epistemology And The Project Of Mapping Science, Kamili Posey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One area of debate in naturalized epistemology is how to best interpret the relationship between naturalism and traditional analytic epistemology. This is particularly the case for epistemologists who commit to methodological forms of naturalism:

First, I contend that methodological naturalists must commit, at minimum, to the idea that the best methods of knowledge-production in science ought to determine the best methods of knowledge-production full stop. I also contend that the best methods of knowledge-production in science are determined by and performed within scientific communities. Thus a methodological naturalist, to minimally call herself such, ought to consider knowledge-production within 'communities of …

Blazing New Paths From Ancient Footprints: Enactment Of Mexican Traditional Dance And Music (Folklórico) In A New York Urban Community Of Early Childhood Learners, Pamela Proscia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The research undertaken for this study centers on outside-of-school teaching and learning through the practice of traditional Mexican music and dance (folkloric musical culture or folklórico) as transmitted to children of early childhood age in a New York urban ethnocultural dance community. The study focuses on the ways in which the traditional Mexican music and dance community, as cultural producers, pass along knowledge and inherent values of Mexican heritage and on how the process of acculturation includes changes imparted through progressive western approaches to teaching movement.

The study incorporates a long-term sociohistorical perspective in order to contextualize the place …

Creando Barrios. Vecindarios, Cine Y Poesia. La Concepcion Del Espacio Urbano En Espana. 1970-1985., Magdalena Romero Cordoba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on how urban spaces were imagined and questioned in Spanish neighborhoods and in poetry and cinema during the Transition. I explore how urban spaces are not so much physical entities but lived spaces, with the potentials of reconceptualizing human practices in today's artistic creations. My point of departure studies how different grassroots associations were able to introduce significant changes in the cultural values imposed by the Franco dictatorship while challenged their limitations through alternative practices of the everyday life. I analyze how the changes introduced in the morphology of the neighborhood questioned the success of urban-focused modernization …

The Three-Quarter House: A Product Of The Neoliberal City, Paulette Soltani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Thousands of the most impoverished New Yorkers have found shelter in the unlicensed, unregulated, for-profit housing market known as the three-quarter house industry. The houses -- scattered throughout the city -- shelter individuals coming from a host of difficult circumstances: people who are formerly incarcerated, chronically homeless, and struggling with drug and alcohol dependency, unemployment, mental health conditions, and medical issues. Once there, residents are faced with rampant violations of their rights, dangerous physical housing conditions, and obstructions to recovery and reintegration. Through a historical lens, this paper argues that decades of neoliberal policies helped develop the three-quarter house industry …

Swedish Intervention And Conduct In The Thirty Years’ War, Marc C. Dubuis

Grand Valley Journal of History

This paper presents a theoretical explanation for Sweden’s intervention and behavior in the Thirty Years’ War. It echoes the contributions of scholars like Barkin (2003) by applying both realism and constructivism to achieve a more accurate depiction of empirical reality. Given Sweden’s disadvantageous strategic position, its decision to intervene in this conflict is an important subject for empirical and theoretical investigation. Realism provides an accurate explanation of Sweden’s national interests and its decision to intervene to reinstate the status quo. Constructivism also contributes to a more nuanced understanding of this conflict, since Sweden clearly recognized the existence of a broader …

Confronting Moral And Literary Perspectives In 'La Fuerza De La Sangre', José Nayar Rivera Méndez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aim of this thesis is to argue that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra used literary and artistic models to create the hybrid novella "La fuerza de la sangre" (The force of blood) in order to deal with moral and legal issues related to the representation of rape and subsequent marriage of the victim to the rapist. An explicit aim of Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares is to mix the useful to the entertaining, and he intended to elaborate forms of fiction that could transcend moral dilemmas. The legal and moral implications of marriage as the best restitution after a rape, and the …

Imperial Priests And Martyrs: Pretexts For State Violence And Religious Change In France, 1848-1871, Benjamin Tyner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the lives and political significance of five French Catholic priests who were murdered between 1848 and 1871. Using French newspapers, printed religious texts and pamphlets, hagiographic biographies and other sources, I show the many ways in which French priests were wittingly and unwittingly used by the French Second Republic (1848-52), Second Empire (1852-70) and the Paris Commune (1871) and Third Republic (1870-1940). Archbishop of Paris Denis Auguste Affre (1848), Saint Augustin Schoeffler (1851), Archbishop of Paris Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour (1857), Saint Théophane Vénard (1861), and Archbishop of Paris Georges Darboy (1871) were all killed more for their relationship …

Gender, Money, And The Charity Organization Society: 1900-1919, Sarah H. Arnold

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project looks at the work of the Charity Organization Society of New York from 1900 until 1919. Using reports, case histories, meeting minutes, and fundraising material, it concentrates on the ways in which the performance of gender intersected with definitions of expertise and access to money in the lives of both the social workers themselves and their clients. It begins with an overview of the Charity Organization Society's evolution from a largely volunteer charity organization focused on the morality of the poor to an organization that would become key to the development of social work as a profession. Then …

The Problem Of Tonal Disunity In Sergeĭ Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, Op. 37, Olga Ellen Bakulina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent English-language scholarship has given considerable attention to the issue of tonal disunity, particularly the concepts of tonal pairing, directional tonality, and double-tonic complex. Relatively little attention, however, has been given to Russian music, specifically liturgical repertoires, where tonal centricity has historically been weaker than in most tonal music. This dissertation investigates tonal disunity in Russian sacred works, with special emphasis on Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil (1915). This work, though in many ways tonal, relies largely on the structural principles of Russian sacred repertoire, a reliance that is especially evident in movements that challenge traditional Western norms of monotonality.

The order …

Revisting The Domestic Labor Debate: Toward A Critique Of Workerist Feminism, Alice Feng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The extremely high presence of housewives in Italy during the 'miracle years,' of 1950-1963, seemingly suggested that an unprecedented number of women were unemployed after their expulsion from large-scale industry. This phenomenon inspired debate among feminists on questions such as the contribution of housewives to the reproduction of labor-power, the character of reproductive labor and the relation between the participation of women in waged labor and unwaged domestic labor. In revisiting this phenomenon, this thesis argues that, contrary to the appearance of women being unemployed, a significant number of women, along with children, were irregularly engaged in undeclared forms of …

Beauty Practices Among Latinas: The Impact Of Acculturation, Skin Color And Sex Roles, Angelica Flores

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study sought to explore if and how Latinas use of beauty products (cosmetics) was influenced by their degree of acculturation to U.S. American culture, their phenotype (skin color and facial features) and sex role orientation. While beauty practices are often regarded as trivial, they are important because they reflect women's internalization of societal values and speak to the importance placed on impression management. Although it can be easily observed that people go to great lengths to decorate their exteriors in order to manage others perceptions of them, very few studies look at variables that influence these behaviors. Also, while …

Persons As Self-Consciously Concerned Beings, Benjamin Abelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an analysis of the concept of a person. According to this analysis, persons are beings capable of being responsible for their actions, which requires possession of the capacities for self-consciousness, in the sense of critical awareness of one's first-order desires and beliefs and concern, meaning emotional investment in the satisfaction of one's desires and truth of one's beliefs. The persistence of a person over time requires uninterrupted maintenance of those capacities. This view is in conflict with the more popular account of persistence in terms of the continuity of distinctive psychological states. Furthermore, this account of personhood …

Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature: Mapping New Italian Voices, Anita Pinzi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work thematically analyzes literary texts written in the Italian language by Albanian migrants in the last three decades. This recent body of works is here defined as Contemporary Albanian-Italian Literature. It is analyzed in its literary and theoretic specificities, while being placed in the larger contexts of both Italian Migration Literature and Italian Literature. Four major themes -- namely memory, borders, language, and body -- are analyzed through relevant critical theory in the areas of autobiography, post-colonial studies, Mediterranean studies, gender studies, and translation studies to show how Albanian-Italian literature lives at the intersection of multiple literary and theoretical …

Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards A Social Ecocriticism, Matthew Rowney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reframing Romantic Nature: Towards a Social Ecocriticism is an attempt to offer a new way of thinking about ecological approaches to literature. Rather than separate ecology from the movement of history, or support an anthropocentric historicism, my approach aims to merge the interests of both environmental and historical criticism in order to provide a more interdisciplinary view of conceptions of the natural and the social. The process of history owes much more to the non-human than has been generally allowed, especially in the face of contemporary ecocrisis.

In the more than two hundred years since the advent of Romanticism in …

Problems, Puzzles, And Paradoxes For A Moral Psychology Of Fiction, Katherine Tullmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of my dissertation is to provide a comprehensive account of our psychological engagements with fiction. While many aestheticians have written on issues concerning art and ethics, only a few have addressed the ways in which works of fiction offer problems for general accounts of morality, let alone how we go about making moral judgments about fictions in the first place. My dissertation fills that gap. I argue that the first challenge in explaining our interactions with fiction arises from functional and inferential arguments that entail that our mental states about fictional entities are non-genuine. This means that our …

A Critique Of Western Liberalism, Siddhant Issar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis I draw attention to the connections between Western liberalism, particularly exemplified by the idea of liberal freedom, and (in)visible modalities of oppression. In chapter 1, I examine how the philosophical basis of liberalism allows it to serve as a mediator of oppression. In chapter 2, through a genealogical analysis, I trace out the link between liberalism and political economy. Here I focus on the imbrication between (neo-)liberalism, capitalism, and the production of subjectivity. My analysis aims at revealing the specific form of subjectivity engendered under the sign of liberal freedom. In chapter 3, I take up post …

Labor Market Trajectories Of Black Women In The United States, 1980 To 2010, Danielle Jackson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In light of several trends among Black women in the U.S., including rising levels of college degree attainment, immigration, and household headship, scholars have begun to more thoroughly explore the factors impacting Black women's labor market outcomes (e.g., employment status, earnings, and occupational prestige). Focusing on the 30-year period of 1980 to 2010, this dissertation applies theories of social and cultural capital, intersectionality, and social mobility to the examination of Black women's labor market trajectories according to their nativity (U.S.- vs. foreign-born status) and level of educational attainment (college-educated vs. non-college-educated). Additionally, this dissertation examines recent national data to determine …

Musical Regularity And Rhythmic Patterns: A Quantitative Analysis Of Birdsong Structure, Eathan Ezra Janney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Birdsong is a complex, learned behavior that, like music, has meaningful units at multiple timescales. Birds perform by constructing extended presentations of their phrase repertoire. Each bird's repertoire is built from small units, such as syllables, or groups of syllables with characteristic pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Like a musician each bird has its unique structure of performance that communicates its individual identity. Also contained within a bird's performance, is information about its group identity and species identity. Like a musician's performance, a bird's singing affects the behavioral state of listeners'birds perform to attract mates and defend territory.

Subjectively, many can …

The Impact Of French Opera In Nineteenth-Century New York: The New Orleans French Opera Company, 1827–1845, Jennifer C. H. Jones Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the influence of French opera through the touring New Orleans French Opera Company’s summer seasons in early nineteenth-century New York City. In that burgeoning operatic environment, I provide an account of the company’s interaction with both resident and traveling opera companies, beginning with the visit of Manuel García’s company in 1825–26. The French Opera Company, which performed in 1827–33, 1843, and 1845, brought new approaches in performance practice and current opera repertoire to the New World. While Italian opera companies were sought after, I demonstrate that the works coming from Paris—either in French or in English translation—were …

Olfaction As The Paradigm For Perceptual Philosophy, Andreas Keller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Plato wrote that smell is of a "half-formed nature" and that not much can be said about it, and Kant identified smell as the "most ungrateful" and "most dispensable" of the senses. Because contemporary philosophers share this distaste for smell perception, olfaction is often dismissed or ignored in philosophical accounts of perception. Instead, contemporary philosophy of perception is based almost exclusively on visual perception. The goal of this dissertation is to show that this focus on a single modality distorts our understanding of what perception is.

I am not the first to realize the potential of opening up perceptual philosophy …