Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Reviving The Golden Age: Exploring Will Eisner's Legacy Through The Creation Of A Multiversal Sequential Art Story, Levi Atkins

Theses

Levi Atkins’ thesis explores the legacy of Will Eisner, a foundational figure in comic book history, through the creation of a multiversal sequential art story. The project combines a seven-page black-and-white comic with a scholarly analysis of Eisner’s storytelling techniques, focusing on his public domain characters from the Golden Age of Comics. Atkins examines how Eisner’s innovations—such as dynamic panel design, cinematic pacing, and genre blending—can inspire modern narratives. By reimagining characters like The Flame and Dollman within a multiverse framework, the thesis both honors Eisner’s legacy and demonstrates how historical comic forms can evolve to engage contemporary readers.

The 2024 Whippoorwill Award: Gathering Stories Of Indigeneity, Connection, And Belonging, Erika L. Bass, Michael J. Young, Alan Hoffman, Jacqueline Yahn, Monica Roe, Devon Brenner, Chea Parton

The Rural Educator

No abstract provided.

Making Magic While The Sun Hides, Emma J. Vitallo

Graduate Artistry Projects and Performances

Making Magic While the Sun Hides, Emma Vitallo's MFA Thesis project, examines the intersections of memory, transformation, and the psychological construction of home through photography, handcrafted elements, and stop-motion animation. Centered around a childhood dollhouse built by the artist’s grandfather, the work reimagines this artifact as a surrogate for a demolished family home, using miniature stages populated with toy horses and unicorns to explore themes of familial bonds, nostalgia, and loss. Drawing on influences from Odette England’s archive-based photographic practice, Laurie Simmons’ staged domestic imagery, and Surrealist strategies of the uncanny, the project challenges traditional notions of memory as stable …

Response To Michael Conway’S Review Of Maurice Blondel On The Supernatural In Human Action: Sacrament And Superstition (Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2017) By Cathal Doherty Sj., Cathal Doherty

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

This is a brief response (1000 words) to Michael A. Conway’s lengthy book review in Irish Theological Quarterly, Vol. 84, No. 2 (May 2019): 212–218.

Poured Out On Your Sons And Daughters: Pneumatologically Shaped Pedagogical Practices For Engaging Children In Congregational Worship, Angela Perigo, Jeremy Perigo

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

From young children to elders in the community, the Holy Spirit’s empowering presence is indiscriminate of age, ability, gender, culture, or status. Many communities continue to wrestle with the pastoral and practical implications of welcoming children into worship as full, distinct participants, yet within the biblical narrative, children are included as full participants in experiencing the Spirit’s gifts and empowerment and encountering God’s dynamic presence. Emerging from the discipline of practical theology and a review of New Testament pneumatology from Acts 2 and 1 Corinthians 12, this paper argues for the full inclusion of children within the church’s worship life …

Climate Change Is A Threat Multiplier Of Gender Inequality, Mia Kei Cheng, Special Collections, Fleet Library

12th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2026

Entry for the 12th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening reception and award ceremony Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 6:30pm, Fleet Library, 1st Floor Main Reading Room. Juror: Gabrielle Reed.

Impressions, Mckenzie Chase, Special Collections, Fleet Library

12th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2026

Entry for the 12th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening reception and award ceremony Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 6:30pm, Fleet Library, 1st Floor Main Reading Room. Juror: Gabrielle Reed.

The Walk Of The Creature, Manuela Guzman, Special Collections, Fleet Library

12th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2026

Entry for the 12th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening reception and award ceremony Wednesday, February 25, 2026 at 6:30pm, Fleet Library, 1st Floor Main Reading Room. Juror: Gabrielle Reed.

Sex-Specific And Regional Analysis Of Heart Disease Prediction Using Machine Learning Algorithms: Insights From The Uc Irvine Public Heart Disease Datasets (Cleveland And Long Beach), Jonathan Asanjarani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For this capstone project, I investigated how well machine learning models can predict heart disease, while also studying how the patient’s gender affects these predictions, as well as determining how well the same model performs across different regions. This project utilizes two clinical datasets from the publicly accessible UCI Machine Learning Repository under the collection "Heart Disease." This repository is composed of data from patients across four distinct locations, capturing varying levels of heart disease severity. These datasets are part of a collection of databases, open to the public, and can be used by anyone looking to conduct empirical analysis. …

Destabilizing The Nuyorican: Rivera’S Women And Nuyorican Cinema, Judith R. Escalona

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rivera’s Women, the Capstone, is a TV segment I produced for the CUNY-TV show Latinas that first aired June 27, 2023 (Pride). It grew out of an hour-long interview I conducted with playwright and screenwriter José Rivera as part of my research on Nuyorican Cinema, the films of the Puerto Rican Diaspora.

An unknown part of U.S. independent cinema, these diasporic films destabilize the way independent films continue to be categorized through gender, race, ethnicity, and language. Using the Capstone as a guide, I examine two of Rivera’s recent screen works that situate him within Nuyorican Cinema because of his …

Lishmah: An Exploration Of Syntactic Ambiguity And Biblical Exegesis Through The Jewish Calendar Year, Shani Tzoref

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lishmah (Hebrew, meaning “for its own sake”) is a digital resource for exploring syntactic ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible and traditional Jewish biblical interpretation. Hosted on CUNY Manifold, it currently features twelve curated cases of syntactic ambiguity, each linked to a month of the Hebrew calendar, accompanied by annotated medieval Jewish commentaries.

The project employs digital tools for data compilation, presentation, and user interaction. While in its early stages, Lishmah aims to contribute to digital humanities by bridging traditional close reading with computational approaches and highlighting discourse analysis in biblical studies.
Future plans include developing Lishmah into a collaborative research …

A Benjaminian Rumination Of Grasses And Tomatoes In Contemporary Anatolian Film, Ceren Izci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis interprets the intersection of history, ecology, and politics through two contemporary Anatolian films: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses and Murat Fıratoğlu’s One of These Days When Hemme Dies. We focus on the films’ portrayal of social relations and relationships to other living beings through interpreting the temporal layers and historical tensions present in the plots of the films. We introduce the paper by pondering over the question of whether these films are political. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concepts of “first nature” and “second nature”, the first chapter introduces the philosophical framework for understanding the connection between …

Back To The Margins: The Re-Marginalization Of Feedback Research In Composition And Rhetoric, Robert A. Greco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation applies content analysis, both quantitative and thematic, to publications exploring feedback on student writing by analyzing two corpora of texts published from 2000 to 2019: a systematic sample of 114 articles from 5 journals and excerpts from 5 guides for new instructors. For the journals’ corpus, the most significant emergent themes included error; affect, both instructors’ and students’; and technology. In the guides’ corpus, this study focused on guides’ assumptions about their audiences and discussed the “cycle of correction”—a pattern where guides have focused on cultivating and reinforcing core field values about feedback established between the mid-1980s and …

Decades Of Division: Analyzing Hate Crimes In The Usa (1991–2022), Sangeeth Sajan Baby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project comprehensively analyses hate crime data in the United States, leveraging advanced data analysis and visualization techniques to unmask patterns and insights. By utilizing datasets of criminal offenses reported by law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, this study explores the dynamics of hate crimes across racial, religious, gender, and sexual orientation groups. The analysis reveals key findings, including the disproportionate targeting of African Americans and LGBTQ+ individuals, the prevalence of hate crimes in specific locations like residences and educational institutions, and the consistent patterns of attack types and locations across different racial groups. Analysis of crime data over …

3bb: Loss And Remembrance In The Anthropocene, Amanda J. Woolsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Undisputedly, we are living in a time of tremendous and unprecedented ecological loss. Various forms of life on earth are disappearing at a rate unheard of in human history, with a growing amount of evidence suggesting that we are in a period of mass biodiversity loss and extinction. This extinction event is marked by a series of environmental catastrophes that vary in acceleration, intensity, and impact, such as climate-change driven weather events wiping out an endemic island species, to habitat loss and fragmentation leading to the slow death of a once-common species. One such piece of supporting evidence is Rosenberg …

Los Intelectuales, Las Palabras Y El Poder Presidencial: Descolonización, Nacionalismo Y Cholificación En Las Izquierdas Contemporáneas De Bolivia, Perú Y México, Cesar Augusto Coca Vargas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Los fenómenos históricos del indianismo, el nacionalismo y la cholificación, son interpretaciones intelectuales que se suceden durante todo el siglo pasado. Son explicaciones o razonamientos provenientes de círculos intelectuales que pretendieron comprender las nuevas identidades nacionales. Son también —y continúan vigentes— discursos empleados por figuras políticas que provienen de o enuncian por capas populares, con el objetivo de llevar a cabo proyectos políticos. Son también ideologías de ruptura o de gesto descolonizador, respecto de otras manifestaciones conservadoras o reaccionarias. En buena cuenta, las tres ideas centrales de esta tesis son horizontes, a la vez, teóricos y pragmáticos, que canalizan preocupaciones …

Guaqueras And Campesinas In Western Boyacá, Colombia, María F. Buitrago

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Guaqueras and Campesinas in Western Boyacá (https://mariabuitsan.github.io/guaqueras-ycampesinas/) is a digital memory project chronicling the lives and labors of women residing in the emerald-producing municipalities of Colombia. The project explores women’s remarkable resilience amidst a historically extractive and patriarchal emerald economy by co-creating an online collection enriched with various sources such as interviews, photos of artifacts, and audio from fieldwork. The collection uses Dédalo, a free and open-source Cultural Heritage and Management System, to store, digitize, and index all the unedited material and presents a selection of these resources through a static website. The collection intends to illuminate and honor the …

Struggles Around Transgenderism In Hungarian Feminism: An Autoethnographic Account, Dalma Feró

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

In this autoethnography, I am using my personal experiences as data to examine the inextricable personal, political, social, and cultural aspects of one of the most decisive ruptures in Hungarian “progressive” activism of the second half of the 2010s. In the mid-2010s, I was part of an informal collective of women that started to outline a feminist approach critical of mainstream individualistic renditions of women’s rights as social progress, thereby diverging fundamentally from the country’s institutionalised feminism. As I and the circle of women I worked with focused on women’s reproductive autonomy, we encountered central feminist questions about sex and …

A Reconstruction Of Gender: Implications Of Social Construct And Gender Structure Theories, Bethany Rozario Steinhagen

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

The relationship between gender and social construction has long been discussed in feminist and gender studies scholarship. However, the current discussion on gender has run up against a blockage of misapplication of social construct theory. To untangle this blockage, my analysis applies the philosophy of social construction as explained by Ian Hacking in his 1999 book The Social Construction of What? and the framework of gender as a social structure as put forth by feminist sociologist Barbara Risman since the early 2000s. I apply these frameworks to elucidate better the logical implications that follow from a social construct thesis about …

Creating School: Writing And Reading Texts For Children, Carlyn Kolker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Children can come to understand themselves and their lived experience through fiction. Yet writing, reading, and interpreting fiction for children are all projects that challenge society’s commonly-understood beliefs about childhood, literature, and even the category of children’s literature itself.

This capstone project uses a cross-disciplinary approach to examine the notion of what it means to write fictional texts directed at children, and in particular, how fiction presents the deeply-contested American institution of school and the school environment. This project consists of two parts. The first is a critical consideration of how contemporary literary texts directed at children portray conditions of …

Cueing Motions In A String Quartet, An Exploratory Study Of Motion Trajectories, Maren Rothfritz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A string quartet performance involves an array of different body movements which serve many functions, including sound production, expression, and communication. This dissertation examines the ways string quartet players execute specific communicative body motions called cues, which are anticipatory gestures meant to communicate tempo and timing as well as the musical intentions such as dynamics, articulation, and character to the co-performers. Some scholarly research exists on cueing, but a formalized description of the cueing motions involved has not yet been developed. This dissertation serves as an exploratory study examining the motion trajectories of cueing motions employed by the Argus Quartet, …

Raíces Salvadoreñas, Sueños Americanos (Salvadoran Roots, American Dreams), Katherine Y. Posada

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Raíces Salvadoreñas, Sueños Americanos (Salvadoran Roots, American Dreams) is an interdisciplinary body of work that navigates the common threads between identity, memory, and heritage through an intimate and layered approach. Rooted in personal experience, the work is deeply informed by my identity as the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, shaped equally by the cultural richness of El Salvador and the complexities of growing up in the United States. Through ceramics, installation, found objects, and video, I translate familial stories and cultural practices into tangible forms objects and environments that embody both vulnerability and resilience.

This work is an homage to the …

Review Of Carolyn Sharp, Jeremiah 26-52. (Kohlhammer: Stuttgart, Germany, 2021), Oliver Glanz

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Religion: Evolutionary Foundation For, Nicole Fellice Ko, Norman P. Li

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Religion refers to a structured set of spiritual beliefs and rituals. Evolution refers to the process by which living organisms transform and develop over time. Religion—the belief in spiritual beings—influences nearly every aspect of life, making it challenging to understand many phenomena without considering its influence (Bloom, 2012). About two-thirds of the world’s population is religious (Kramer & Tong, 2024); 70% of Americans consider themselves spiritual, and 83% believe they have a spirit separate from their bodies (PEW Research Center, 2023). Throughout history, religion has played a significant role in conflicts like war and continues to influence contemporary issues such …

Good Practice For All Sentence Frames To Support Multingual Students In The Ela Classroom, Genevieve Palestino

The Utah English Journal

The struggle to meet student needs is an ever- present concern for all teachers. Besides English 9, I teach English Language Development (ELD), and I frequently find myself in conversations with other teachers about how to support our school’s multilingual (ML) population. One thing I try to emphasize in my conversations with teachers is that most “extra steps” for MLs are best-practice strategies that will benefit all students. A strategy that can be especially beneficial for students is leveled sentence frames.

Thinking And Writing With Ai As A Dialogue Partner, Jon Ostenson, Johnny Allred

The Utah English Journal

When generative AI burst onto the public stage in late 2022, it took many of us by surprise. After we had time to see what chatbots like ChatGPT were capable of, they filled many writing teachers with a sense of dread. Some of us realized that assignments we had relied on for years would no longer work because they could easily be completed by a chatbot. All of us worried about how this new technology would influence our students’ writing and the way we taught writing.

Me Between The Lines: An Intertextual Search For Self, Jamie Jo Porter

The Utah English Journal

In the winter of 2023, I noticed a general struggle among my AP Literature students to connect and identify with characters and events we were reading about in class. Upon further investigation, I realized that this wasn’t because my students weren’t reading relatable texts, but more because they were still developing a sense of self; in their search for identity, they were not seeing pieces of themselves reflected in the world around them. As a teacher, it pained me to realize that my students weren’t even anticipating that there were things out there in the world that they could relate …

“Charles? We Don’T Have Any Charles In The Kindergarten”: Our Professional Responsibility To Compassionate Self-Reflection, Ben Inouye

The Utah English Journal

Shirley Jackson’s immortal “Charles” recounts the mischievous deeds of Charles, a character created by the equally naughty Laurie. His mother, the narrator, blames her son’s poor behavior on Charles’ influence. She is blissfully unaware that her son is the reason for the kindergarten chaos; she is all too quick to begin searching for the most “haggard” face in the PTA crowd–unable to fathom that she might be the mother responsible for Charles. Such delusion!

As I was pondering the narrator’s lack of self-awareness, I found myself thinking: Oh crap, is that me? Am I the teacher who can’t be honest …

Full Issue

Swiss American Historical Society Review

No abstract provided.

From Sonvilier To Canada To Illinois: A Remarkable Swiss Emigration Story, Jeanette Bowman Borich

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Author and genealogist Laurence Overmire stated, “History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.”¹ His words resonate as we consider the 1821 Swiss emigration to the Red River Settlement (in today’s Manitoba, Canada) followed by their subsequent emigration to the Galena, Illinois, area. Three recently published books on the history of Galena’s earliest days as a city² make no mention of the Swiss Red River families as early pioneers.³ A fourth book,⁴ Le Canada et les Suisses by E. H. Bovay, also relatively recently written, tells a different story. Genealogical research about one’s ancestors and …