Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From The Dean

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No abstract provided.

From The Editor

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Timeless Review Of Into The Woods And The Perks Of Being A Wallflower, Anjali Shah

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This essay is a review of the musical, Into the Woods, and the book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This personal reflection is an overview of how both works of art navigate the theme of "the web of life."

Burnout, Amanda Almeida

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I loved writing since I was 12. I learned putting words on paper solidifies the human experience, whether it be through poetry, music, stories, or simply free-writing one's thoughts. Attending medical school has broadened my experience with other realities to an unexpected degree. I realize that wanting to save lives through healthcare comes at a great cost to the person pursuing a career in medicine. Writing about the intensity of medical school helped me cope and I hope that my future patients will come to understand, sometimes, the only way out is through, and coping by using the things we …

Turning The Bend: A Poem For My Mother And Those Grieving Loved Ones, Leah Simon

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From Didactic To Healing Hands, Jashkumar Choudhari

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As the creator of the poem "From Didactic to Healing Hands," I am delighted to share my perspective on the inspiration and intent behind this piece.

The poem serves as a heartfelt exploration of the evolution that occurs as we transition from the theoretical world of classrooms and lectures to the practical, human-centered realm of healthcare. It's a journey that demands not only the accumulation of knowledge but the nurturing of empathy, compassion, and the courage to step into the role of healing with confidence.

I wanted to convey the interconnectedness of science and the art of medicine, emphasizing that …

Our Web, Alia Abdullah

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Alia would like to acknowledge Ingmar Bergman's film, Through a Glass Darkly.

Reclaimation Of Self, Sophia Hernandez

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My inspiration for this piece comes from contemplation about the expression of self and the ways in which traditional institutions can limit complete creative control. The allusions to Earth's creations are used to create a comparison to the divine right to imagine spontaneously. When I create art, it is my goal to inspire others to do the same.

To Which We Return, Marianne Koleng

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This work is an attempt to reconcile the vibrance of life as evidenced by the colorful collage and bismuth crystal with death, which is portrayed by a somber skull emerging from an aorta and ventricles of a human heart. Understanding the temporal nature of our existence is key to subtle references to beauty and imperfection latent in the background of this image to cue the idea of beauty in life and death to the viewer.

Going Under, Marianne Koleng

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This paper is a meditation on a journey through the humanities and the pages of the works of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the eventual conclusion to a pursuit of a medical career. It identifies that while not all paths to a similar endpoint are identical, but each has its own rich merits, twists, and turns.

Transcending Fear: The Power Of Mindful Affirmations And Purposeful Action, Andrew Bouras

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My work explores themes of fear, an unavoidable emotion that confronts us all throughout our respective journeys. Inspired by many, my writing reflects my personal journey up until this point. I believe that we are all going to achieve that which we are meant to achieve, and I will continue to share that vision with audiences as opportunities arise.

Engineering-Enhanced Theatre: How Engineering Involvement Can Aid Regional Theatres, Albert M. Le

Architectural Engineering

Engineering and theatre are disciplines not often associated with each other within regional and small theatre companies in the United States. The distinction between the two fields of study is not simply from the fundamental differences between how each field is taught and practiced, but also the difficulties encountered within a scope of theatre often constrained with limited budget and time for each production. However, when beginning to explore the intersection between engineering and theatre, it is found that the empirical nature of current theatrical practices can be countered, and scenic design and construction can be re-envisioned with engineering involvement …

Unity In The Church Across Traditions: How Abraham Kuyper's Ecclesiology Helps Further Contemporary Ecumenical Engagement Between Protestants And Catholics, Vincent Keane

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A Reformed Psychology Of Human Relations In Business, John A. Van Til

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No abstract provided.

Our Need For A Quiet Place, Calvin Vander Meyden

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No abstract provided.

David Lloyd George: The Politics Of Religious Conviction (Book Review), Keith C. Sewell

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Reviewed Title: David Lloyd George: The Politics of Religious Conviction by Jerry L. Gaw. University of Tennessee Press, 2023. 405 pp. ISBN: 9781621907640.

Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal (Book Review), Benjamin Gibson

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Reviewed Title: Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal by Matthew Martens. Crossway, 2023. 416 pp. ISBN: 9781433581823.

Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy Course: Exploring Ai’S History, Mechanics, Influence, Pamela Jean Stemberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy course is designed to equip students and educators with the tools to engage with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies critically. Initially conceived as a syllabus for the course Critical Approaches to Education Technology in the Digital Humanities Department of the Graduate Center, the project evolved into a comprehensive, modular program addressing the historical, technical, ethical, and societal dimensions of AI.

This course encourages a multidisciplinary approach by integrating perspectives from various fields, such as history, philosophy, ethics, technology, law, and social sciences. The design process draws from foundational courses like Digital Pedagogy and Methods, Theory, Design, …

“As Blind Men Learn The Sun”: Towards A Poetics Of Queer Mysticism In American Literature, 1860-1960, Bradley M. Nelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation seeks to play with the similarity between the queer and the mystical, and in the process, defines something I call “queer mysticism.” I include four cardinal figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Robert Duncan. Beginning with Walt Whitman, I show how each of these poets bear witness to an experience of the divine that is both immanent and immanently queer. Through historical and biographical research, I uncover their poetic inspiration in popular modes of expression and in the esoteric and arcane. By establishing a connection with a few Catholic mystics …

Complicity, Eliana Luxemburg-Peck

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What does it mean to be complicit in diffuse collective wrongs like structural racism, gender-based oppression, or environmental damage, and what responsibilities are entailed by complicity? Moral philosophers have often understood complicity to consist in some degree of inherited culpability, arising from knowing or intentional contributions to the bad acts of a primary wrongdoer. But these theories fail to explain complicity in the foregoing contexts, and cannot justify needed efforts to hold individuals accountable for unwitting contributions to systemic wrongs and injustices. In response to this gap, my dissertation defends a novel reconceptualization of complicity as participation in collectively perpetrated …

Féminas Speaking Up: Three Papers On Feminine Transgender Identities, Gender Identity Activism, And Language Reform In Lima, Peru, Ernesto Cuba

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this three-paper dissertation, I explore the linguistic and discursive practices of Féminas, a leading transgender rights activist organization based in Lima, Peru. Building on scholarship on language ideologies (Irvine & Gal, 2000), queer linguistics (Motschenbacher, 2011), and socio-onomastics (Ainiala & Östman, 2017), I analyze the role that language beliefs and language-in-use plays in performing local (trans)gender identities and shaping grassroots politics within this specific community of practice (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992). Based on an extensive corpus of semi-structured interviews and ethnographic material gathered during my long-term investigation with Féminas, I present three studies exploring distinct –though related– ideologically-driven sociolinguistic …

The Intellectual Roots Of Hindutva: Influences From Early German Romantics And Mahatma Gandhi, Johannes Scheuer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The economic and political ascent under the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Narendra Modi has not only increased interest in Indian politics but also highlighted the dominance of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) as a political ideology in contemporary India. Many scholars and journalists have drawn parallels between European fascist movements of the past and reactionary movements in today's political landscape to understand the rise and dominance of Hindutva. However, this paper takes a different approach by tracing the intellectual roots of Hindutva through the political philosophy of the Early German Romantics, particularly Johann Gottfried Herder, and the philosophy …

A Mute Pleasure: Novelistic Poetics In The Nineteenth-Century, Ryan Everitt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through special attention to the non-narrative, descriptive, lyrical, or even boring passages that interrupt the story, this dissertation explores what happens when the nineteenth-century British novel envelops experiences that were traditionally (or since Romanticism) in the domain of poetry: longings for escape, exhilarating affects of freedom, opaque moments of revelation. In most cases, I characterize the novel discourse as representing a prosaic consciousness that wrestles with its more visceral yet vital “other,” poetic consciousness. To articulate how poetry survives within novelistic discourse, this dissertation is organized around sets of opposing terms, whose unresolved tension becomes the basis of my analysis …

Intuitionism, Justification Logic, And Doxastic Reasoning, Vincent A. Peluce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this Dissertation, we examine a handful of related themes in the philosophy of logic and mathematics. We take as a starting point the deeply philosophical, and—as we argue, deeply Kantian—views of L.E.J. Brouwer, the founder of intuitionism. We examine his famous first act of intuitionism. Therein, he put forth both a critical and a constructive idea. This critical idea involved digging a philosophical rift between what he thought of himself as doing and what he thought of his contemporaries, specifically Hilbert, as doing. He sought to completely separate mathematics from mathematical language, and thereby logic. In chapter 3, we …

Building Networks, Producing Spaces For Play: Local Geographies And National Organizing In The History Of Adventure Playgrounds In The United States, 1949-1999, Reilly B. Wilson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides an historical analysis of repurposed material adventure playgrounds in the United States between 1949 and 1999. Three microhistories of adventure playgrounds (The Yard, in Minneapolis, M.N., and several playgrounds in New York City, N.Y., and Houston, T.X.) are framed against the wider socio-economic changes that shaped more than thirty-five adventure playgrounds in the United States over the period of study. By focusing on the relationships mobilized by adventure playground advocates at different scales and across different points of view, and how these networks shaped the local production of spaces for play, this dissertation's method underlines the importance …

Moving Pictures Of The Past: Nostalgia For Classical Hollywood In The Broadway Musical, 1960–1990, Curtis Russell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I examine how Broadway staged classical Hollywood between 1960 and 1990 amid social, artistic, and industrial upheaval. While upheaval and experimentation are constants even during epochs of apparent stability, the story my dissertation tells is of an industry facing the perils of obsolescence by looking backward and westward to understand how its larger and more powerful culture industry sibling navigated similar moments of disruption. Building on Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “nostalgia film,” I contend that between 1960 and 1990 the nine “nostalgia musicals” under consideration served the same function for the Broadway musical that the nostalgia …

Liberal Attitude Reports, Tomasz Zyglewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Attitude reports are sentences such as “Tomasz thinks the Earth is flat” or “Susan wantsvice cream.” It is commonly assumed that the main reason people use them is to make sense of the reportee’s behavior: to explain their past actions, or predict future ones. To play this role effectively, attitude reports have to accurately describe what is going on in the reportee’s head. Let’s call attitue reports that do not meet this condition “Liberal attitude reports.” For example: Alice is a vegan doctor who thinks that every vegan should take a B12 supplements. It is felicitous to say to your …

Building Black Manhattan: Architecture, Art, And The Politics Of Respectability, 1857–1914, Jessica Larson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Building Black Manhattan” is the first study to examine the architectural contributions of Black women reformers to the urban development of New York City between the Civil War and the Great Migration. Through the construction of charitable and reform institutions throughout Manhattan, they articulated a strategy of racial uplift through deliberate spatial construction.

As reform work was one of the very few arenas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which women had a significant public voice, the buildings constructed to facilitate reformers’ work encoded the social, racial, and gendered demands of women into their designs. These institutions included …

Bodies That Traverse: Colonial Fantasies Of Oriental Incorporations In Late Medieval England, Soojung Choe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Bodies that Traverse: Colonial Fantasies of Oriental Incorporations in Late Medieval England” shows how a picture of a proto-colonialist England arises from popular romances of the period, particularly those featuring the Crusades and the “Orient,” or the fictional Near East, as its central narrative locus. While the historical Crusades to the Holy Land mainly took place between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, English fictional writing on the Crusades flourished in the “post-crusade” period of 1200–1450. My project argues that the Orient in these writings, especially popular vernacular romances, serves as a colonial ‘contact zone,’ a fetishized site for England to …

Historiography Of The Body And Corporeality In Indonesian Theatre: The Search For Decolonial Aesthetics, Mohamad Ugoran Prasad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A study on Indonesian theatre historiography, this dissertation explores how and why the body and corporeality serve as the dominant means of theatre-making in Indonesia. Tracing and locating the bodily practice in theatre and performance from Indonesian independence until the turn of the twenty-first century, it locates the frictional relationship between the body and corporeality with modernity and the coloniality of language. That friction occurs in the process of adapting and translating modern theatre in the 1950s as much as during the heyday of folk popular theatre in the 1960s, preferring the body and corporeality as a refuge from ideological, …