Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Deposition, Conjecture, And The Word Of Nod, Victor Vaughn

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis involved mixed medium drawings based on written colonial papers regarding the beginning of a border war between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania. To fill in the fragmented historical information, the project incorporated period artifacts as merged and manipulated by contemporary technology and the internet’s ethos.

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 …

The Lonely Empire, Andrew Valencia

Theses and Dissertations

This creative manuscript contains ten original short stories dealing with themes of alienation, imperialism, and cultural intersectionality. Though they are all influenced, in one way or another, by ideas of cultural and sociopolitical relevance, they are to be read and viewed primarily as stories, i.e., as self-contained exercises in character, plot, and language that can be appreciated for their artistic merits as well as their academic contributions. The diverse settings of the stories, ranging from Ancient Greece to Central California and from Asia to Latin America, are a reflection of the author‘s own diverse cultural experiences. In one story, a …

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 Integration History Of Kuwaiti Television From 1957-1990: An Audience-Generated Oral Narrative On The Arrival And Integration Of The Device In The City, Ahmad Hamada

Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to compose an account of television history in Kuwait, one that focuses on its integration into society and is told from the audience's perspective and experience. This study represents a cultural alternative to the overwhelmingly national, institutional, and biographical focus that accompanies television history works in Kuwait and the Arab world.

The narrative is gathered and generated through the individual oral stories of 25 Kuwaitis over the age of 50, who generally represent the six geographical districts of Kuwait. Through their oral stories, the narrators examine the different areas in which television has integrated itself into society …

Crabgrass Piety: The Rise Of Megachurches And The Suburban Social Religion, 1960-2000, Nathan Joseph Saunders

Theses and Dissertations

Although there were less than twenty megachurches (churches averaging over two thousand in weekly attendance) in the United States before 1960, by 2010 there were approximately fifteen hundred. Megachurches are not a homogenous group, but they exist in all parts of the country and they have enough in common to warrant their identification as part of a coherent trend in American evangelical culture. Specifically, most megachurches appeal to an ethos that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s known as the suburban social religion. The suburban social religion combined to differing degrees the American civil religion described by Robert Bellah, meritocratic …