Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Connect: Translating Complexity Through Visual Simplification, Ilhee Park

Masters Theses

CONNECT: Translating Complexity through Visual Simplification brings complex data into concise visual systems that encourage ease of access. With a background in Human Factors Engineering, user engagement remains a central focus in my design. Whether reducing barriers to scientific information or untangling deeply complex data, design must contain intuitive concepts without the need for extended explanation. Using bold color and geometric shapes as the core design language to render pictorial narratives, this thesis maps my development as an information designer through modes of gathering, deciphering, and interpreting.

Technologies Of Territoriality: Indigeneity, Surveillance, And The State, Elspeth Iralu

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines the global spatial surveillance of Indigenous peoples, nations, and territories in the twenty-first century through a multi-site relational analysis of colonial surveillance and Indigenous cartography in the United States, India, and Palestine. Analyzing Indigenous graphic novels, video games, virtual reality, performance protests, and visual art, I demonstrate how air and the aerial perspective actively shape what happens on and below the ground. I argue that Indigenous experiences of and responses to colonial and counterinsurgent surveillance are not limited by the geographic and legal bounds of nation-states but are rather linked through global histories of militarization and colonialism. …

Tuberculosis: Illegal Immigrants And Deadly Spread, Abigail Foust

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It most commonly affects the lungs, but it can develop elsewhere in the body. Untreated, tuberculosis usually leads to death. If tuberculosis is treated but consumption of the proper medicine is terminated prematurely, the bacteria can mutate into multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). In the United States, the largest percentage of people with tuberculosis are foreign-born individuals. This is due to a number of factors, including cultural stigmas associated with tuberculosis and a hesitancy to get treatment. This is an especially prevalent issue in the case of illegal immigrants. First of all, …

The Demise Of The Beef Industry, Natalie Powers

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) is a neurological disorder commonly found in cows. The hypothesis for the causation of BSE surrounds a protein known as the prion protein. For the most part, prion proteins are not harmful to cattle. Yet, when it mutates, the protein begins attacking the central nervous system. The protein causes the infected cattle to lose coordination and become violent. This is where it gets its nickname, mad cow disease. The research in this project explores the economic impact of mad cow disease. The reactions from consumers surrounding BSE started the downfall of the economy. It also almost …

Respiratory Diseases: Results Of 9/11 Rescue And Recovery Effort, Isabel Schnittker

Undergraduate Research Symposium

After the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001, first responders assisted rescue and recovery efforts. While clearing debris and searching for survivors at Ground Zero, first responders inhaled particulate matter (PM). PM included pulverized cement, glass fibers, asbestos, and lead. Although first responders had respiratory protective equipment (RPE), the organizations that oversaw the rescue and recovery efforts emphasized neither the necessity of wearing respirators nor the threat of toxins in the air. As a result, many first responders developed respiratory diseases, such as gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and asthma. For instance, James Zadroga was …

Jesse James' Hideout Or Civil War Midden?, Steven Meyer, Tim Evers, Ben Ebert

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Whether the infamous outlaw Jesse James (1847-1882) ever lived in Iron County Missouri during his post-Civil War crime spree is a highly debated issue shrouded in legend and myth. A plot of land called “The Hideout” in Southern Iron County is a prime source for these legends to be tested. Archaeologists Benjamin Ebert, Steven Meyer, and Tim Evers will attempt to answer the question “Could Jesse James have stayed at the Hideout?” Iron County is steeped in rich history dating back to the Civil War, and other historic landmarks add credence to the legends
and help push tourism and preservation …

A New Life For Umsl’S African Instrument Collection, Brandon Elliott, Shane Devine, Kieth Stephens

Undergraduate Research Symposium

How should a collection of West African musical instruments - currently in the possession of an eliminated Anthropology department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL) - be properly conserved, repaired if needed, and should they be displayed, stored, or donated to another home? The collection, located in the entry foyer of 501 Clark Hall on the UMSL campus, consists of eleven West African drums, three stringed instruments, and one lamellophone. Our team seeks to answer this question to preserve the musical culture of the peoples associated with these instruments. It is important to protect these instruments from degradation or …

Leprosy: How It Defined A King, Paul Sanders

Undergraduate Research Symposium

This project is looking at King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and his successes despite contracting leprosy at an early age. There was a general mistrust in Europe against lepers because of what the majority of Christians thought leprosy was caused by. King Baldwin had many military and political victories while dealing with the physical effects of leprosy and the stigma surrounding it at the time.

Asthma In St. Louis: A Crisis Of Equity, Ashley Maempa

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Asthma is a common disease that causes airways to become inflamed and swell, which leads to difficulty breathing, wheezing, coughing, and asthma attacks. Asthma can be triggered by things such as dust, pollen, colds, pollutants, and household pests. In St. Louis, asthma is highly prevalent, with both cases and hospitalizations well above state and national averages. The asthma problem also reveals stark health disparities between St. Louis’s white and African American populations, with African American children comprising a disproportionate majority of asthma hospitalizations and emergency department visits. This project is concerned with investigating the underlying causes behind St. Louis’ asthma …

Malaria: Existence Perpetuated By A Counterfeit Drug Industry, Nicholas Black

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that has plagued society for thousands of years. Malaria is often overlooked from the perspective of wealthier industrialized countries due to prevention efforts largely eliminating malaria from these locations. However, overlooking malaria’s continued global relevance is misinformed to the fact that nearly half the global population lives in regions at risk of malarial transmission. According to the CDC and WHO, such a high number of people at risk has subsequently led to an estimated 241 million cases and over 627 thousand deaths in 2020 alone. The purpose for the present research is to examine the …

Gender Dysphoria: The Widespread "Social" Disease Of The 21st Century, Aria Spencer

Undergraduate Research Symposium

There has been a supposed increase in the cases of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) in the past 10 years. The term ‘ROGD’ is a non medical phrase that has been widely adopted by members of anti transgender groups. This harmful classification has been the baseline for many anti transgender youth legislature that have been introduced in Americans states as recently as February of 2022. Gender dysphoria has been discredited as a ‘social media’ disease, and the fear of having LBGTQ+ people in communities has caused the harm and mistreatment of both the transgender youth and adults in America. Gender …

The Role Of Omission In Self-Deception, Natalie Bishop

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Whether or not a self-deceiver has the intention of deceiving themselves is a highly debated topic. According to intentionalist theories, the individual does intend to deceive themselves; according to revisionist theories, they deceive themselves without the direct intention to do so. Kevin Lynch provides a non-intentionalist, revisionist account of self-deception which holds that self-deception is due to biased systematic processing. What this amounts to is that, according to Lynch, self-deception occurs because the self-deceiver intentionally seeks favorable evidence and critically scrutinizes unfavorable evidence while at the same time they unintentionally omit to scrutinize favorable evidence and seek unfavorable evidence, forming …

Cinema Exhibition In St. Louis, 1920: A Thriving Business, Sarah E. Boslaugh

Undergraduate Research Symposium

In 1920, St. Louis was the 6th largest city in the United States, with a population of 772,897, and density of 11,684/square mile (twice today's density). The population was primarily (90.9%) white, with 14.7% of the white population foreign born. The city had a dense trolley network, while private ownership of automobiles was relatively rare (15.8 residents per car). Cinema exhibition was a thriving business in the city, with 120 cinemas and 29 film exchanges (as compared to, for instance, 12 live theatres in the same year).

Cinemas were located throughout the city, primarily on or near trolley lines. This …

Mythos Modernized: Echoes Of The Literary Past In Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse (2019), Kayla Burrows

Undergraduate Research Symposium

During a 2020 interview, Robert Eggers’ mentions his film The Lighthouse (2019) was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s unfinished short story of the same name. Although the critical reception of The Lighthouse was primarily positive, critics struggled to categorize this film about two lightkeepers stationed on a remote New England island in the 1890s within a specific genre. Indeed, the film consistently slips between reality and dream, and the mounting tension throughout the film culminates in a final haunting vision that is never explained. This paper explores Eggers’ literary inspirations for The Lighthouse, not only examining the obvious influences …

The Diversification Of The Anti-Vietnam War Movement: An Analysis Of The St. Louis Peace Information Center Files, Reagan Elkhashab

Undergraduate Research Symposium

The St. Louis Peace Information Center (STLPIC) was founded in 1967 as part of an outreach effort of the St. Louis chapter's Vietnam Summer opinion poll. The center in St. Louis was founded to coordinate anti-Vietnam War groups based nationally and locally, as well as to inform the public about its anti-war mission and activities. The archives of the Peace Center were donated to the State Historical Society of Missouri by former member, secretary, and board director Yvonne Logan. The records contain administrative records, flyers, newsletters, event advertisements, and more pertaining to the organizations the STLPIC partnered with throughout its …

Vasily Grossman And Ilya Ehrenburg: Soviet Jews On The Nazis And Soviets, Joshua Heisel

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg were both significantly influential writers in the Soviet Union during and after World War II. Grossman and Ehrenburg were both Jewish war correspondents and witnessed Nazi war crimes. Prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trial used The Hell of Treblinka, written by Grossman, as evidence. Following the war, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union began to implement increasingly anti-Semitic policies. Jewish citizens faced discrimination, the Soviet state opposed “dividing the dead” of World War II, and it culminated in the Jewish Doctors Plot in 1953. Both writers covered extensively the Holocaust and how to treat Germany after …

Putin's Russia: Lineage Of Totalitarianism, Micah Hillier

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Vladimir Putin is the current president of Russia and has taken many leadership cues from his country’s totalitarian past. Does Putin fit the mold of a classic 20^th century totalitarian when one looks at examples like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or the Kim dynasty? In what ways does Putin exhibit the telltale personality traits of these dictatorships? How does the current Russian administration’s policies, both foreign and domestic, mirror those of other authoritarian and totalitarian regimes?

The presentation will be a panel style discussion where these questions will be discussed and debated with research backed conclusions. Using historical examples of …

Totalitarian Tendencies Of Orbán’S Hungary, Rachel Reiss

Undergraduate Research Symposium

In 2015, Hungary garnered worldwide attention after subjecting its refugees to tear gas and metal pens. Since then, the dire state of Hungary and its democracy have become clear. Viktor Orbán, the country’s prime minister and leader of the Fidesz party, transformed Hungary into a state that undermines democracy, stresses Christianity, and uses this religious ideology to rally its people against refugees and other groups. In many ways, this newly reformed Hungarian state is reminiscent of totalitarian dictatorships. This project aims to investigate the totalitarian tendencies exemplified by Orbán’s Hungary: a Hungary where democracy is dead.

Review Of William Faulkner And Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, By Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, Pp. Xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (Hardback), Isbn: 9780367501327., Marietta Kosma

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Book review of William Faulkner and Mortality; A Fine Dead Sound, by Ahmed Honeini, Routledge, 2021, pp. xi+ 194, $ 96,00 (hardback), ISBN: 9780367501327.

Identity In The 21st Century Nigerian Fiction: A Case Study Of Blackass By Igoni A. Barrett., Ogochukwu B. Ossai

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

This paper attempts to examine the allegorical narrative strategies and politics of identity—race, and gender, using postcolonial and racial frameworks. The novel, Blackass written by a Nigerian writer is a 21st century fierce comic satirical adaptation of Metamorphosis, a novella by Franz Kafka. The intricacies and culture within a society and ethnicity in a nation such as patriarchy are explored through the language, characters, and development of the plot in Nigerian literature. For this essay, I enter into the discourse of race by analyzing the social and cultural phenomena that occur throughout the structure of the fictional work.

“An Eternity Or Two Later”: Family Of Choice In Elaine Castillo’S America Is Not The Heart, Caroliena E. Cabada

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Many of the challenges faced by environmental activists are issues of scale. How can vital changes be enacted and sustained over the necessarily long time scales of environmental restoration? Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart (2018) illuminates a possible avenue for activists engaged in environmental justice work. Parts of the book contains extensive flashbacks to Hero’s, the protagonist’s, time as part of a cadre of the New People’s Army in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. Though the NPA is not strictly an environmental activist group, the organization takes their cues from queer ecofeminist frameworks and the intersections between …

Teaching Activism: The Feminist Pedagogical Possibilities Of Why We Fly, Miranda M. Findlay

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Young adult fiction possesses the pedagogical power to educate young readers about activism, and more recently, authors of the genre have answered the call from young aspiring activists to deliver narratives that are reflective of and relevant to their own lives and communities. Published in October of 2021, the novel Why We Fly illustrates the complexities of participating in social justice activism while also providing entertaining and inspiring characters. In honor of Colin Kaepernick, authors Kimberly Jones and Gilly Segal craft the fictional hero Cody Knight who encourages the text’s young protagonists to look at the world around them to …

A New Politics Of Black Regality: Zora Neale Hurston And Alice Walker’S Monarchical Method, William Martin

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Literary critics conducting a comparative study of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple diligently tend to the relationship between the two women, particularly at an intertextual level. This paper sheds light on an important third member of this relationship: Black women readers. An articulation of Black regality, which involves the incorporation of monarchical symbols and titles in characterizations of Black people, provides these readers with political tools poised to liberate Black women from hegemonic male authority and control. Examining the significance of adornment for the self exclusively to combat invisibility, the power …

The Souls Of Black Women: Reimagining Futurities Beyond The Veil, Kevin A. Blanks

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Now more than ever, communities of color are rendered more vulnerable to state violence and unjust policing; and a global pandemic has exacerbated the ways that the marginalized, the poor, and the disabled are devastated more disproportionately into precarious spaces. Thus, this anti-black world isn’t sustainable for us, and futurity has always felt elusive and just out of reach for marginalized bodies. This world-making project seeks to reimagine an alternative world, an otherwise, an elsewhere where life can be breathed back into our bodies, where we can be whole and free. Through an examination of DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk …

Fantasizing A Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels And Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow, Wynter Lastarria

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

“Fantasizing a Free Black History: Post-Black Arts Movement Novels and Plays Re-Imagining Jim Crow” closely reads one novel and one play written in the early twenty-first century and set in the Jim Crow period. Analyzing how Toni Morrison’s novel Love (2005) and Lynn Nottage’s drama By the Way, Meet Vera Stark (2011) take up Jim Crow era Black history together, I find that both works intentionally offer incomplete, subjective and fictive narrations of black life during Jim Crow to deny readers a sense of realism. In doing so, these authors represent a group of African American novelists and playwrights that …

Office Files, 1923-1992, Office Of The President

University Archives Finding Aids

No abstract provided.

Mother Mary E. "Love" Caldwell

African American Funeral Programs

Mother_Mary_E--Love--Caldwell.pdf - Funeral program for Mary Caldwell

Limp Wrists, Clenched Fists: An Analysis Of Queer Performance Art As A Tool For Political Resistance, Neha Verma

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

This paper explores the use of queer performance art as a tool for community mobilization and resistance to socio-legal oppressions. This essay is grounded in movements for queer liberation in the Global South, racialized working-class queer communities, and queer disability justice. As queer culture and aesthetics are often misappropriated for wider cisheteronormative audiences, this work reminds the revolutionary nature of queer performance art.

Wagon Tracks Volume 36, Issue 3 (May 2022)

Wagon Tracks

Contents

2 On the Cover: Santa Fe Traders at Bent's Fort by Kim Mackey

4 Insights from your President

5 Joanne’s Jottings

6-7 Trail News

8 Call for Papers

9-17 How We've Changed

18-23 Newcomer Women in Las Vegas and San Miguel County, New Mexico, 1846-1850 by Doyle Daves

24-27 Music on the Plains by Rex Rideout

28 Chapter Reports

29 Membership Form

32 Calendar

Wagon Tracks Volume 36, Issue 3 (February 2022)

Wagon Tracks

Contents

2 On the Cover: Hermit Peak y Dennis Maloney

4 Insights from your President

5 Joanne’s Jottings

2. 6-9. 18 Trail News

10-18 Very Little System or Con-sistency: Making Sense of Contraband Cases in the Late 1820s and their Disappearance by Matthew Saionz

19-23 Hell on Wheels Railhead Towns: Kit Carson and Granada by Dr. Michael Olsen

24-26 Lessons Learned on "The Road to Santa Fe" by Dave Kendall

27 Book Review: The Santa Fe Trail: A Twentieth Century Excursion, by Margaret Scholz Sears, reviewed by Mary Burchill.

Book Launch: Santa Fe’s Fonda, The Story of the Old Inn …