Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Context And The Commissioner: The Effect Of Milwaukee’S Health Commissioners’ Social, Cultural, And Historical Understanding Of Milwaukee’S People During The Last Five Pandemics, Madeline O'Dea Fruehe

Theses and Dissertations

Resistance to pandemic response policies was observed globally throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This resistance has been linked by researchers to the prolonged duration and higher mortality rate of COVID-19 compared to previous pandemics, despite advancements in modern medicine, extensive surveillance networks and record vaccine production. However, the strategies implemented by public health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic closely mirrored those successful in mitigating past pandemics. To elucidate this disparity, a historical analysis encompassing the 1918, 1957, 1968, 2009, and Covid-19 pandemics was conducted within the city of Milwaukee. By examining archival documents and over 800 newspaper articles, this research found …

Off The Press: Exploring Reproducible War Art, Emily Rose Hankins

Theses and Dissertations

Aspects of modernity, such as the news cycle and ever-changing technologies, have played large roles in the construction of the history of wars through the power of reproducible war art imagery as seen in various public spheres and contexts. These include engravings and photographs of the war in news publications, propaganda posters promoting patriotism, protest posters pleading for peace, and prints and books made by artists for display in galleries. The inundation of these images become ubiquitous with the conflict, and the artists who have a hand in creating these images also have the power to construct and reconstruct histories, …

Historical Dissidence: The Temporalities And Radical Possibilities Of American Comics, Jeremy M. Carnes

Theses and Dissertations

Formal criticism of comics has often focused on the importance of sequence and the filling of gutters with causative logics. Practitioner-theorists like Will Eisner and Scott McCloud have focused on “sequentiality” and “closure” to conceive of how readers connect the disparate panels of a given comic. More contemporary scholars of the form have followed Eisner and McCloud, foregrounding the causative logics that create narrative progression in the comics form. Yet, these approaches implicitly rely on dominant, western logics of temporality in the construction of narrative in comics.

This project considers how comics form actually relies on various temporalities and thus …

Challenging The Architecture: A Critical History Of The Wisconsin Prison System, Jacob Glicklich

Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation I explore the history of the Wisconsin prison system, with an emphasis on 1970 to 2019, Waupun Correctional Institution and Taycheedah Correctional Institution. From this study, I explore the nature of the Wisconsin system and how it has developed. Across this work I argue that the core priority for the WI Department of Corrections has been to maintain and expand its bureaucratic infrastructure, imposing limited recourse on prisoners, and maximizing its own disciplinary flexibility. There have been significant human costs to this system, and my work helps to document these costs, contextualize why they happened, and look …

American Beauty: Nineteenth-Century Landscapes, Katherine Gelshenen Rafferty

Theses and Dissertations

Using Thomas Cole’s 1836 “Essay on American Scenery” as a touchstone, “American Beauty” argues that Cole’s influence on American landscape painting goes well past the second generation of Hudson River artists, to include painters such as George Inness, Alexander Wyant, Edmund Darch Lewis and other late nineteenth-century artists. These artists had different life experiences, different technique and for the most part a different spiritual outlook. Yet the fundamental message of Cole’s essay—that citizens and artists should value American scenery for its pristine wildness—carries through to the end of the century and is evident in their art. Cole’s “Essay” is visionary …

Reflections On A Collection: Revisiting The Uwm Icons Fifty Years Later, Laura Jean Louise Sims

Theses and Dissertations

The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee Art Collection is home to a sizable donation of Byzantine and post-medieval icons and liturgical objects. Central to this thesis exhibition catalogue are the thirty-two Greek and Russian icons from this collection and their history with collector Charles Bolles Bolles-Rogers. Reflections on a Collection: Revisiting the UWM Icons Collection Fifty Years Later contextualizes the history of icon collecting in the United States and examines the collecting history of these icons.

By first focusing on icon collecting and scholarship in Greece and Russia towards the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, this catalogue traces …

Recombinant, Ching-In Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The hybrid texts (poems and prose) in the following dissertation investigate female and genderqueer lineage in the context of labor smuggling and trafficking. In this book-length project, I examine the challenges of communal memory by juxtaposing voices from Asian, African and indigenous communities in the Americas. Set in a speculative future, these voices simultaneously inhabit their own spaces and share pathways, a theme developed through manipulation of white space on the page. The narrative speculates about the origins of M. Lao, a snakehead matriarch who has created a business empire from a fictional edu-tainment park, CoolieWorld, which traffics in the …

The Highland Clearances And The Politics Of Memory, Daniel Guy Brown

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that the Highland Clearances of Scotland have entered into public consciousness through primary and secondary sources. My dissertation argues first that the Highland Clearances fall within the sphere of colonial intervention, and secondly that there exists a robust body of cultural production that reflects the postcolonial nature of the Highlands. This cultural production is the subject of my dissertation, which examines primary and secondary histories, historical novels, drama and public memorials that preserve and reconstruct the memory of the Clearances. The first chapter examines a number of primary and secondary histories of the Highland Clearances. …

Anabaptist Masculinity In Reformation Europe, Adam Michael Bonikowske

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis studies the connections between the Anabaptist movement during the Protestant Reformation and the alternative masculinities that developed during sixteenth-century Europe. It argues that Anabaptist men challenged traditional gender norms of European society, and through their unique understanding of the Reformation's message of salvation, these men constructed new ideas about masculinity that were at odds with Protestant and Catholic culture. Anabaptist men placed piety and ethics at the center of reform, and argued for the moral improvement of Christians. In separation from Catholics and mainstream Protestants, Anabaptists created a new culture that exhibited behavior often viewed as dangerous. The …