Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Locke’S Rebellious Progeny: Phenomenology And Ethics Of Leopardi’S A-Dialectical Materialism, Paolo Pellecchia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With this study I reconstruct a genealogy of the a-dialectic materialism that defines the production of 19^th-century Italian author Giacomo Leopardi and with which he criticizes canonical metaphysical stances. In this regard, I consider John Locke as the first instance of a philosophical outlook that stands as an alternative to the anthropocentrism demanded by traditional metaphysics. By focusing on An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its significant influence on Leopardi’s philosophical and aesthetic work, I emphasize how Locke’s system finds a synthetic formulation in the hypothesis, at the time highly contested yet groundbreaking, that matter might be endowed …

The Art Of Opacity: Guy De Cointet In L.A., Media Farzin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides the first detailed study of the work of French artist Guy de Cointet (1934–1983), specifically the books, objects, and performances he produced in Los Angeles between 1971 and 1983. Much of this work mined pop-cultural sources—genre fiction, magazine advertising, and television serials—for texts, which he reused in deliberately obfuscated ways: in pseudonymous publications written in code or invented languages, as well as in sigil-like paintings that doubled as props for performances in which actors delivered contradictory interpretations of the encoded objects. I argue that Cointet’s appropriations of the visual and narrative logics of postwar culture provide a …

Wrongful Conviction Documentaries: Influences Of Crime Media Exposure On Mock Juror Decision-Making, Patricia Y. Sanchez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychology and law researchers have urged colleagues to collaborate with the makers of popular media, such as documentary filmmakers, in efforts to educate the general public about wrongful convictions (Kassin, 2017; Wells et al., 2000). Recently, programs depicting wrongful convictions, such as Making a Murderer (Demos & Ricciardi, 2015) and When They See Us (DuVernay, 2019) have garnered substantial viewership. Research on general and case-specific pretrial publicity (Daftary-Kapur et al., 2014; Kovera, 2002) and the effects of crime media (Baskin & Sommers, 2010; Schweitzer & Saks, 2007) demonstrate that although consuming crime-related media and being exposed to information about a …

Oceanic Groundings: Maritime Geographies And Black Internationalism In The Early Twentieth Century, Maegan A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the shipboard writings, transnational solidarities and vernacular cultures, and spaces of social reproduction among Black and other subaltern seafarers and maritime travelers in the first decades of the twentieth century. I draw upon oral histories, literature, poetry, memoirs, and the archives of leftist political organizations and British colonial officials. Through a practice of close reading across textual genres and transnational spaces, my dissertation develops oceanic groundings as: (1) a constellation of iterative and intentional acts of political learning through the movements of ordinary people, (2) a pedagogical project of listening to and learning from the shifting grounds …

The Modes Of Intervention In Alvin Lucier’S I Am Sitting In A Room, Daniel Fox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969) is an icon of experimental music and sound art. The sizable literature addressing the aesthetic and philosophical implications of this piece rarely discusses the performance practice beyond what is indicated in the score itself. This is problematic for two reasons: 1) The meaning that is derived from the piece often hinges not just on what sounds are obtained, but on how they are obtained. 2) Over the past 50 years, changes in the performance practice have altered what constitutes the work: magnetic tape was used until 2000 when it was replaced …

Reframing The Family Portrait: The Surrogate Mother In U.S. Theatre And Film 1939–1963, Alison Walls

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reframing the Family Portrait: The Surrogate Mother in U.S. Theatre and Film, 1939–1963 investigates the U.S. plays, films, and musicals of this period that abound with heroines who mother children to whom they are not genetically tied. This dissertation asks why such a figure was so resonant in this era between the beginning of World War II and the emergence of more radical 1960s politics. Newly in the spotlight as a romantic protagonist, the “surrogate mother,” as I have chosen to call her, re-envisions the archetypal mother through a contemporizing lens, distinctive in her mother/not-mother status. Critical analysis of Penny …

Describing The Dress Of Women: Author’S Notes On The Development Of Gender, Cassandra B. Tan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an examination of how authors of the late Victorian and early Twentieth Century describe the embodied and mental effects of the nature of women’s clothing through works of fiction and nonfiction. Through this analysis, I argue that clothing serves as a mechanism to oppress women by eliminating concrete and philosophical access to wealth and necessities as well as by instigating acts of violence upon a developing body through stricture and hygiene. I examine the ways that feminine dress, from youth through adulthood, shapes the way women view themselves, and in turn has a reciprocal effect on how …

Rewriting The Oeuvre: Raymond Queneau And The Art Of Translation, Christopher Clarke

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the literary oeuvre of French author Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) has been extensively studied, his work as a literary translator has been largely overlooked. Queneau was a prominent member of the French literary avant-garde, but also a literary translator for two decades (1934-1953), and his writing was greatly influenced and impacted by his readings and translations of Anglophone writers. This dissertation provides insight into the role of translation in his conception of writing and language, and the inseparability of the different facets of his career as a writer, literary translator, and publisher. I examine his personal linguistic and literary history …

Landscape And Lore: River Acheron And The Oracle Of The Dead, Lashante St. Fleur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In order to explore the cultural relationships between people, landscape, memory and ritual, this master’s thesis focuses on the Acheron River in Epirus, Greece, long believed to harbor an entrance into Hades, the Greek underworld. Various entrances into the chthonic, or subterranean land of the dead, are peppered throughout Greece, with each tied to their own local myths, legends, folklore and cults. According to those traditions, Hades could be accessed from several terrestrial rivers thought to be connected to Oceanus, the primordial world-encompassing river surrounding all of creation. Flowing forth from River Ocean were all above- and underground rivers and …

Freedom, Markets, And Equality In Eighteenth Century Philosophy, Nicole Whalen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how eighteenth century thinkers Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant defended the value of free markets. It reconstructs their defense of liberal economic reforms, including free trade (domestic and foreign) and the deregulation of markets in labor and land. Through this reconstruction, I demonstrate how the normative foundations of early free market thought were contested throughout the period. Pro-market thinkers (e.g. Turgot, Smith, and Kant) viewed economic liberalization as a mechanism that increased the economic freedoms of individuals, whereas critics of the market, including Richard Price and other “agrarian republican” thinkers, concluded that liberal …

Staging The Modern, Building The Nation: Exhibiting Israeli Art, 1939–1965, Chelsea Haines

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the role Israeli art exhibitions played in nation-building from 1939 to 1965. During this formative period, Israeli artists, curators, and government officials established new art institutions in the country and participated in a growing roster of international exhibitions overseas. Together, the art and architecture of these exhibitions helped to produce a concept of both modern Israeli art and Israel itself as a modern nation. As much as the project of Zionism rested on the creation of a homogenous Hebrew culture, the formation of “Israeli art” in these exhibitions relied on postwar European claims for visual art as …

An Empire Among Empires: America's Relationship To "The Other" In The Historiography Of Empire, Lynne C. Goldhammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper outlines two different threads in the historiography of empires regarding their treatment of “the other.” The first thread begins with the early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, which used diplomacy and tributes as well as repression to incorporate “others” under their imperial umbrellas. This thread was then picked up and modified later by the Mongols and Mughals, both of which showed a fair amount of flexibility and openness towards cultural difference. The second thread begins with the Romans (the Republic and Empire), who were largely flexible and inclusive towards “others” until the late Empire, when Christianity took …

The Political Aesthetic Of Hannah Arendt: Modernity, Judgment, And Culture, Quixote R. Vassilakis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The plan of this thesis is, first, to interpret Arendt’s critique of the modern age. Next, this paper outlines Arendt’s reconceptualization of Kant’s theory of judgment as the basis for a novel model of the public sphere in light of the conditions of modernity. Finally, this paper explores Arendt’s poetics as a means of activating the faculty of judgment in order to reconcile with the modern world. In order to address the political crises of modernity, Arendt develops a political aesthetic alive to the role of narrative and culture in reconstituting political communities. I argue that Hannah Arendt develops a …

All Day In The Trey-Fold: Sound, Objecthood, And Place In The Mixtapes Of Dj Screw, Matthew K. Carter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the impact of the mixtapes of DJ Screw on the emergence of Houston hip hop culture in the 1990s. The relationship between these “screwtapes” and local culture resists demonstration through conventional modes of representational analyses, due in part to the screwtape’s preponderant use of hip hop tracks that originally represent other places. I suggest that representation itself is the result of the structuring tension emerging from a threefold field of representation of sound, objecthood, and place, and that when a hip hop artist or critic or fan claims to "represent" Houston (or any other constituted and constituting …

Occitan Musicians, Immigration, And Postcolonial Regionalism In Southern France, Sarah E. Trouslard

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in southern France, this dissertation analyzes contemporary Occitan musical expression in relation to postcolonial immigration. “Occitan” refers to a group of linguistic practices found in the south of France, including Provençal and Languedocien. Throughout this study, I discuss commonalities between postcolonial and regionalist history and theory, shedding light on notions of cultural citizenship that have defined French sociopolitics in recent decades. The historian Herman Lebovics (2004) coined the term “postcolonial regionalism” in reference to the impact of decolonization on regional protest movements in France during the 1970s. During that time, singer/songwriters of the nòva cançon …

Inspirations For Awake: Expressions Of Trauma Through Fiction And Autoethnographic Literature, Sophia Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Awake is a novella based on true events in my own life. This capstone project addresses my own experiences with intimate partner violence. While it is inspired by my life, I chose to write a fictional narrative rather than a strictly biographical piece of nonfiction. Instead, this novella illustrates a few of the traumas that I went through from within the lens of a fictional narrative. This enabled me to tell about my experiences by crafting my memories into a story, without the pressure of submitting an accounting of them. Writing Awake has been helpful to me in that it …

Acquisition Orders And Instructional Sequences: A Case Study Of Russian Textbooks, Olga Ozhiganova

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research on English as a second language has established the linguistic phenomenon of the natural order of morpheme acquisition in which grammatical features are acquired by learners in a specific order. The acquisition of Russian morphosyntax as an L2 had not been established until Gor’s (2019) research. The present study employs Gor’s (2019) findings to examine whether the order in which five Russian morphosyntactic features—case, impersonal sentences, location-direction, aspect, verbs of motion (VoM)—are acquired is reflected in second-year Russian instructional materials by investigating three commonly used textbooks. The results reveal that (1) the documented order in which Russian morphosyntactic …

The Twilight Of The Absolute: Russian Symbolism And The Romantic Project, Evgeniya A. Koroleva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation project, The Twilight of the Absolute: Russian Symbolism and the Romantic Project, scrutinizes and interrogates the premises of so called “influence studies” by examining one tangled instance of cultural interaction—the relation between early German Romanticism (the brothers Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich Schelling) and the second wave of Russian Symbolism (Andrei Belyi, Aleksandr Blok, and Viacheslav Ivanov). In the scarce secondary literature that touches upon this complex literary-historical problem, Russian Symbolists are often unproblematically represented as proud “neo-Romantics,” passive recipients of the Romantic intellectual legacy. The major claim I advance in my thesis is that Jena Romanticism, …

Representations Of Hustling Women: The Figure Of The Black Sex Worker In Ann Petry’S The Street And Louise Meriwether’S Daddy Was A Number Runner, Deborah L. Uzurin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis provides a close reading of Ann Petry’s The Street (1946) and Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970) by analyzing how these two black women authors wrote about sex work and black women sex workers in their novels. Black women writers in the mid-twentieth century were reluctant to write about black women’s sexuality as a result of discourses of racial uplift that rejected the white supremacist stereotype of the hypersexual black woman. While not the focus of their novels, the inclusion of sex workers in their fictional narratives provide a complicated representation of a particular form of …

Ujamaa Policies And Women Gender Issues Of Land Tenure In Tanzania, Nasa S. Edgar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

History has shown us that women always have a part to play in society and that they have fought to receive equal opportunity with their male counterparts. In the United States in the late 1800s and early twentieth century, this movement by women became known as the women’s suffrage movement. It paved the way to women fighting for equal opportunity including for the right to vote and equal pay. In Tanzania, women fought and continue to fight against customary practices that are discriminatory against them. In this thesis I make three arguments: 1. I argue that the history of the …

Reflections On The Eating Of Bologna Sandwiches: A Memoir, Benjamin M. Raphael

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reflections on the Eating of Bologna Sandwiches is a memoir project intended to give light to my experiences teaching in a small public school located in the South Bronx. These experiences are directed to a general “second” person who takes the form of “you” and is intended to act as a general stand-in for the student population of this school, similar to the “you” used by James Baldwin in his seminal work “My Dungeon Shook”. This “you” is meant to breakdown the wall between the reader and the student population, allowing one to occupy another and in the process develop …

Emotion In Mind, Kathryn E. Pendoley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Emotions consume our thoughts and drive our actions. If you had different emotions, or no emotions at all, the way you move in the world and understand your place in it would be completely different. We need a satisfactory theory of emotion for a complete science of the mind. In this dissertation, I consider two of the most compelling theories of emotion: broad perceptualism – the view that emotions either are themselves perceptual or include a perceptual aspect as at least a part – and constructionism – the theory that emotions are self-interpretive thoughts. I find that perceptualist thinking fails …

Martial Caillebotte’S Mélodies And Scènes Lyriques: Analytical Essays And Performance Guide, Dominique Mccormick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Composer, pianist and photographer, Martial Caillebotte (1853–1910) was the unknown younger brother of famous Impressionist painter, Gustave Caillebotte. Martial studied piano and harmony at the Paris Conservatory from 1870–1874. Martial created a substantial number of musical compositions including mélodies, scènes lyriques, operas, symphonic poems, as well as sacred choral and symphonic works. Born into a wealthy Parisian family, he did not need to work for a living and did not self-promote, therefore his pieces were rarely performed and after his death, most of his compositions were left in family archives. In the late 1990’s a rebirth of interest in the …

The Women That No One Wanted To See: The Duality Of The Women Within The Holocaust, Valerie Cabezas-Iacono

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper is a brief historiography of the complexities of unraveling how gender constructs inform how society perceives both female perpetrators of the Third Reich and victims of sexual assault during the Holocaust. The women within these categories experienced vastly different power dynamics from 1939-1945 with the implementation of anti-Semitic ideology that would go on to forge the genocidal policies of the Nazi State. Seemingly, Aryan and Jewish women had no traits that linked them besides their biological sex, and this one factor determined how their experiences would translate within the male-centered discourse of the Holocaust. The framework of Holocaust …

Thoughts Of Becoming: Negotiating Modernity And Identity In Bangladesh, Humayun Kabir

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation constructs a history and conducts an analysis of Bangladeshi political thought with the aim to better understand the thought-world and political subjectivities in Bangladesh. The dissertation argues that political thought in Bangladesh has been profoundly structured by colonial and other encounters with modernity and by concerns about constructing a national identity. Negotiations between the incomplete and continuous projects of modernization and identity formation have produced certain anxieties about becoming that permeates political consciousness and ideas in the country. Though such anxieties of becoming are also shared by other postcolonial countries, the specific, though not necessarily exclusive, character of …

Mashing Through The Conventions: Convergence Of Popular And Classical Music In The Works Of The Piano Guys, Alina Kiryayeva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is dedicated to examining the symbiosis between popular music and Western classical music in classical/popular mashups––a new style within the classical crossover genre. The research features the works of The Piano Guys, a contemporary ensemble that combines classical crossover characteristics and the techniques from modern sample-based styles to reconceptualize and reuse classical and popular works. This fusion demonstrates a new approach to presenting multi-genre works, forming a separate musical and cultural niche for this creative practice.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter is further divided into two thematic discourses: genre and authorship. The research draws …

Eating The Heart Of Weetigo World: Decolonial Imaginaries In The Stories Of Louise Erdrich And Tomson Highway, Rebecca Lynne Fullan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation asks what the decolonial possibilities of fiction are in the context of the settler colonial imaginaries particular to the United States and Canada. The ongoing process of settler colonialism demands various forms of conversion from Indigenous people: ecological/land based, religious, educational, legal, familial, but the construct of “conversion” obscures Indigenous worldviews, and indeed worlds, which function according to different principles. I interpret Erdrich and Highway's work in the context of Anishinaabe and Cree narratives and story-structures. These offer examples of what can constitute broader decolonial imaginaries, through which perception and creation of other, more liveable worlds is possible. …

Beast-Gods, Bandits, And Beggar-Kings: The Traveler In Political Thought, Nader Sadre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I use texts by Plato, Locke, Homer, and Gandhi to explore the political dimension of travel. I argue that travel is a proxy for practices and conditions that exceed “normal” politics. In this capacity, travel reveals what normal politics is, or is assumed to be. Travel marks a boundary of the political realm in a double sense: it may conceal or point to a pre-political source of authority; and it may provide an intimation of new political modes and orders. My analyses suggest that there is no single or consistent relationship between travel and politics. Rather, the …

Traditions And Transformations In The Work Of Adál: Surrealism, El Sainete, And Spanglish, Margarita J. Aguilar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Nuyorican movement was a cultural and intellectual movement beginning in the late 1960s through the 1970s that coincided with the era of civil rights struggle in the United States. The artists, writers, poets, and others in the movement were of Puerto Rican descent and resided in New York neighborhoods such as El barrio or Spanish Harlem, Loisaida or the Lower East Side and the South Bronx. The term “Nuyorican” was embraced as a badge of honor and pride by New York’s Puerto Rican community. It was during this time that cultural-specific institutions such El Museo del Barrio, Taller Boricua, …

“An Instrument In The Shape / Of A Woman”: Reading As Re-Vision In Adrienne Rich, William J. Camponovo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This single-author-oriented dissertation on the work of Adrienne Rich looks at her extensive body of work both in poetry, and in prose. This project considers how Rich re-visited and re-read her work over the course of her career, often making new discoveries and observations in quasi-autobiographical prose. This dissertation interrogates the ways in which these framing efforts may be in tension with both academic and journalistic narratives of her career arc. In looking at Rich’s own writing that, at times, attempts to re-contextualizes her work, even for herself, this project aims to chart out an oeuvre that functions as a …