Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Multilayered Harmonic Structure In Elliott Carter’S Clarinet Quintet, Xiangyu Zhou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation provides a comprehensive account of Elliott Carter’s Clarinet Quintet through analyzing his usage of core harmonies, derived core harmonies and aggregate completion. In this dissertation, Carter’s core harmonies are expanded from the original three, the two all-interval tetrachords, 4-Z15 (0146) and 4-Z29 (0137), and the all-trichord hexachord 6-Z17 (012478) through the addition of 6-Z43 (012568), the complementary hexachord to the all-trichord hexachord. A derived core harmony is generated by combining any of the two core harmonies into a larger set. This dissertation also suggests the expansion of derived core harmonies to include nonachords due to their important harmonic …

Dante’S Volgare And The Pastoral Presence: An Analysis Of The Concept Of Language In The Divina Commedia, Paola M. Rodriguez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dante’s conception of the Italian vernacular, the “volgare illustre”, is a central concern of his work and one which catalyses and nurtures, both overtly and covertly, his creation of the Commedia. Although Dante positions himself in his writings as the continual defender and most prolific poet of the vernacular, isolating a specific linguistic use and structure, a coherent definition of what vernacular Dante privileges or what appropriate usage he adheres to, is a difficult and often confusing task. The existence of two eclogues, the only works by Dante to have been written after the majority of the Commedia had been …

“Hattak Vpi Homma” Mvt Miha Nanta Fehna? What Does “Native American” Really Mean?, Alex R. Steers-Mccrum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Indigenous identities in North America are much more complex than generally assumed. No single definition of “Native (American),” “(American) Indian,” or related terms provides a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that accurately or usefully describe all and only the right individuals and communities. I argue that understanding Native identities in the contemporary context requires examining multiple interconnected dimensions of Nativeness, articulated here as Enrollment and Recognition, Tribal Ethnicities, Native Race, Indian Panethnicity, and Indigenous Nationhood.

In the U.S., Indigenous identities are usually oversimplified as either Enrollment in a Recognized Tribe or as Native Race. While both of these aspects …

The Truth And Other Fictions: The Nuance Of Truth In Medieval Literature, Mark-Allan Donaldson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, “The Truth and Other Fictions,” is an exploration of the functional relationship between fiction and truth. It discusses truth as a type of nuanced information which may exist in a variety of forms (i.e., objective truth, narrative truth, emotional truth, cultural truth, etc.) and explores how these truths may be created or communicated through the medium of literature. The dissertation also explores how fiction, either narrative or structural, assists in said creation and communication of truth and in some cases is the necessary component to these processes. The Middle Ages and its literature provide the ideal staging ground …

Reviving Hysteria: The Nineteenth Century At The End Of The Twentieth, Christina Quintana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores popular and medical representations of female madness in two time periods: the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. I argue that 1990s American culture produced an abundance of texts, images, and narratives that revitalized the iconography and medical discourses of late nineteenth-century hysteria. Analyzing popular texts, films, and cultural touchstones of the 1990s, I explore how Victorian ideas about women’s minds—such as the inherent feebleness of the female brain and nervous system; the fatalistic, life-altering effects of female puberty; the association between hysteria and deviant female sexuality; and the implicit racialization of hysteria and female madness more …

Henry James And The Act Of Speech From Drama To Dictation, Mary Claire Brunelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the idea of speech as an act in the writings of Henry James for the purpose of analyzing the author’s relationship to drama and how it influenced his practice of typewriter dictation. It traces the intersections of biography and bibliography within James’s notebooks, letters, and fiction produced during the years between his dismissal of playwriting after the public rejection of Guy Domville in January 1895 and his adoption of dictation due to writer’s cramp in the fall of 1896, as he worked on What Maisie Knew. In advancing an affective methodology to discover the embodied reality …

Black Horror Film And The Role Of Mood In Race Perception, Nicholas P. Whittaker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary discussions of black or antiracist art are often haunted by an air of pessimism. This pessimism rests on the intuition that art cannot change the political realities of antiblackness and/or our relationships with blackness. In this dissertation, I resist this hegemonic view by arguing that black horror films generate a particular, politically-valuable aesthetic experience. Specifically, they allow us to experience blackness and black people as unintelligible. This, I argue, runs counter to everyday experience of blackness; when blackness appears unintelligible, we lose the sense of satisfied comprehension that characterizes our everyday experiences of it. I argue that these films …

Prurient Nature: Sex Work And Ethics At The Margins Of Finance, Esra S. Padgett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an ethnographic and semiotic examination of the relationship between payment processing, transactional technologies, and the US adult industry. Based on twenty-four months of fieldwork in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Miami, and Washington D.C., the dissertation demonstrates that transactional infrastructures, including payment processors, credit card systems, financial institutions like banks, as well as novel technologies like cryptocurrency, have become a key site for an ongoing ethical war around the politics of sex and sex work in the United States. On one hand, ethical fears around sex work have become qualifications for economic exclusion by financial institutions and private …

Singing Petrarch In The Cinquecento: Embodied Reading And The Italian Madrigal, Thomas A. Hedrick Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how composers of sixteenth-century Italian madrigals highlighted poetic line rhythm, repeated vowel sounds (or assonance), and word repetition in figures of speech—all elements of the verse that have been previously overlooked by scholars, who have traditionally focused on musical depictions of the text’s semantics. The analysis in chapters 2, 3, and 4 shows that composers used a consistent set of techniques from the madrigals of Arcadelt to those of Monteverdi, and musical examples draw from large collection of madrigals on Petrarch sonnets. The analytical methodology is built on the premise that Cinquecento encounters with poetry can be …

String Quartet, Scott A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This quartet begins by providing glimpses of three distinct musical ideas. Although they seem totally unrelated, the music seeks to confound this initial expectation. Related textural contrasts are developed between dialogical textures and the quartet speaking as one voice. The pitch material combines just intonation with twelve tone equal temperament.

Ordinary Care: Affective Politics Of Migration And The Everyday Lives Of Syrian Refugees In Istanbul, Yasemin Ozer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation makes two significant interventions into the literature on Syrian refugees in Turkey and the anthropology of migration and refugee studies more broadly. First, it focuses on the everyday lives of working-class urban refugees and argues that “ordinary care” is a crucial means by which they build sustainable and dignified lives while living in precarity in an often hostile environment in the aftermath of war and displacement. Ordinary care, as I theorize in this ethnography, includes sharing of resources, information, and advice as well as the formation of mutual relationships between kin, neighbors, and friends. Compared to the more …

"White Slaves Of California": Race, Religion, And The Railroad In Maria Amparo Ruiz De Burton's The Squatter And The Don, Katie Buonanno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In The Squatter and the Don (1885), Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton depicts the decline of the Alamars, a patrician Californio family, in the years after California was annexed by the United States. This thesis explores the different rhetorical maneuvers Ruiz de Burton makes to place the Californios in a broad, enfranchising Anglo-American national paradigm. The novel negotiates the messy, competing histories of Spanish, Mexican, and American colonialism, ultimately making the case for the enduring presence of Spanish missionization in the region, as well as the cultural assimilability of the Californio population. While the novel has frequently been read as …

Timbres Oubliés: The Forgotten Sounds Of Loeffler's Octet, Graeme Steele Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Modern musicians play a lot of old music and a lot of new music, but not so much “new old music.” This study—with its accompanying critical edition score, world-premiere recording and first present-day performances—represents, at long last, the deliverance of one such work from the ashes of history to the ears of the present: Charles Martin Loeffler’s forgotten Octet for Two Clarinets, Harp, Two Violins, Viola, Cello and Double Bass, a piece that was left unpublished, unrecorded and unheard since 1897.

This paper documents my efforts to finally reintroduce the Octet to the repertoire. By cross-referencing the autograph manuscript score …

Assessing The Influence Of Llms On Online Review: Identifying And Addressing The Rise Of Convincing Fake Reviews, Zico Abhi Dey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable advancements, reaching a level where they can generate outputs that compete with human writing. LLM's sophisticated features, however, make it hard for us to spot the difference between human-written and AI-generated text. LLMs have several weaknesses since they are susceptible to hallucinations and outputting factually incorrect information. Additionally, they may be used maliciously to promote deception and instigate fraud, such as fake reviews generation, which rapidly appear on the internet while posing a challenge for consumers who want to place their faith in online reviews. To maintain trust in the online information system, …

Strategies And Tools For Teaching Music Learners About Citations, Z. Sylvia Yang, Jessica M. Abbazio

Library Faculty publications

Formatting citations is a task faced by students across all disciplines and at all stages of their academic careers, and the wide variety of content types and formats used in music-related research means that this work can be especially complex for students in music classes. How can library staff teach music students about footnotes and bibliography entries without spending entire sessions pointing out the positions of commas and parentheses, thereby leaving limited time to discuss the relationship of citations to knowledge production? The authors introduce a range of methods for providing instruction on formatting citations, including the implementation of a …

Dissenting Authority, Guyora Binder

Journal Articles

This essay explicates J.B. White’s rhetorical conception of authority as a potentially collaborative achievement and contrasts it with the conception of authority as surrender of judgment prevailing in legal philosophy. On White’s view, authority is not an instrument held and deployed, but is conferred, like respect. This conception of authority illuminates three puzzles concerning the relationship between dissent and legal authority. First, Legal Positivism’s purportedly descriptive account of law insists it must claim an authority to govern independent of justice and assent. Yet law’s language is replete with justice-based appeals for popular assent. White’s reading of the practice of legal …

Maternal Subjectivities In The 18th And 19th Century British Novel, Anastasia Vahaviolos Valassis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How is the maternal subjectivity narrated in the pages of the 18th and 19th century British novel? This dissertation examines this question. The novel’s close connection to the child’s subjectivity and perspective is something woven into its very fabric, and so the mother is often a side character, an object in the story. She is an obstacle to be overcome, a distant idea, an absent figure, or even someone too perfect to be represented on the page. The novel often reflects or mirrors this culturally and psychologically accepted way of viewing the mother. The tracing of the narratives in which …

A Multilevel Approach To The Analysis And Visualization Of Timbral Brightness In Post-Tonal Music, Stephen Spencer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation develops a method for the analysis and visualization of timbral brightness in post-tonal music. Brightness, a salient timbral attribute correlated with the prominence of high frequencies in the sound spectrum, is crucial for distinguishing sounds and discerning how they fit together in music. The dissertation employs a multilevel analytical approach, measuring differences in brightness at multiple “textural levels” and temporal scales. The analytical utility of the approach is demonstrated through four case studies, each one closely examining the score and audio of a piece of instrumental music written in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Chapter …

Perceptual Expectation, Rebecca Keller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

You are currently seeing many things, and, hopefully, you are currently about to see many other things. Many of the things that you are about to see will not be surprising, because you expect to see them. Sometimes, though, when you expect to see one thing and are faced with another, that thing will look like the thing you expected it to be, and not like the thing it actually is. This dissertation is an attempt to get a handle on what is happening in the visual system in these instances. In particular, I am trying to figure out what …

The Film, The Stadium And The Jail: The Post-Industrial Transformation Of Downtown Durham, Seth Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

By the late 1980s, Durham, North Carolina’s downtown-based industrial economy had been replaced by a powerful knowledge economy in the city’s peripheries. Downtown Durham’s vast array of tobacco and textiles manufacturing buildings stood empty, along with most of its commercial spaces, offices and sidewalks. This thesis argues that the local development of two major public works, a baseball stadium (the Durham Bulls Athletic Park) and a jail (the Durham County Detention Center), conceived and constructed on similar timelines in close physical proximity, was indicative of how—and for whom—city and county officials envisioned a revitalized downtown. The first chapter examines the …

Winning The War While Losing Their Souls: The Crisis Of Honor And Discipline Within The French Army In Algeria, Thomas A. Schellhammer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From 1939 to 1962, the French military fought in continuous conflicts. In 1961, in the midst of the Algerian War, these wars would result in military coup attempts and mutiny, as well as the formation of a breakaway terrorist group of army officers known as the Organisation de l’Armée Secrete (OAS), dedicated to the political overthrow and assassination of President of France Charles de Gaulle. While both the insurrectionists and the OAS and its adherents were ultimately unsuccessful, for members of a stable, functioning military to even contemplate such dire political action, these events illustrated a profound breach of military …

Slo Children’S Museum Music Education Exhibit, Charles Coffen, Madeline Carleton-Sniff, Yael Castillo, Anthony Ramos

Mechanical Engineering

The Children’s Museum in San Luis Obispo is a non-profit facility providing education to young children through interactive exhibits. The proposed project would address a basic introduction to musical theory through mechanical engineering principles. The target audience for this musical art installation would be young children, aged 5-10, who would be regularly interacting with this exhibit, as well as their parents, and the employees of the museum. The installation will educate children in basic musical understanding through interaction while still being engaging enough to hold their attention. This document describes the final concept design and various methods of verification in …

Frontmatter (Volume 44, Issue 7), Paul B. Mojzes

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.

Lived Experiences And Perceptions Of Social Media Impact On The Well-Being And Mental Health Of African American Women, Shamenese Monique Robinson

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In this qualitative study, I investigated African American women's lived experiences and perspectives regarding their use of social media and its impact on their mental health and well-being. While social media serves as a powerful tool for communication and connection, it is also known to have adverse effects on mental health. This research specifically addressed the potential negative impact of social media on the mental health of African American women, who represent a significant consumer group of social media in the United States. Grounded in Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory, this study focused on African American women aged 24–39 through open-ended interviews. …

Technical Study And Conservation Treatment Of A Victorian-Era Taxidermy Bird Group, Daisy Greenwell

Art Conservation Master's Projects

During the Victorian era, taxidermy objects played the roles of educational tools, decoration, and personal adornment. The object at the center of this paper falls into the second category: decoration. It is a taxidermy bird life group, made up of six bird specimens, papier mâché rockwork, and dried plant material mounted on and around a faux tree armature. Owned by the Buffalo Museum of Science, it came to the Garman Art Conservation Department at Buffalo State University with no provenance record or attributions to a known maker. Two goals were developed at the onset of this project: to flesh out …

“Der Niagara”: Research, Analysis, And Treatment Of A 19th-Century Etching On A Strawboard Support, Jenni Krchak

Art Conservation Master's Projects

“Der Niagara”, an 1850’s etching of Niagara Falls on incredibly thin paper with an un-inked print address, was brought in by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library (BECPL) for treatment in 2018 to the Garman Art Conservation Department. The print was adhered overall around the perimeter to an unstable strawboard support. Treatment was undertaken to remove the print from the strawboard, address discoloration, planar distortions, tears and losses, and rehouse the print in an appropriate enclosure. Research, visual analysis, and comparison to other copies was used to date the piece and establish it as a proof print. Multimodal imaging …

Zombies Don’T Fall In Love, Marie You, Special Collections, Fleet Library

11th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2025

Entry for the 11th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening reception and award ceremony Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 6:30pm, Fleet Library, Main Reading Room. Juror: Roger S. Williams.

Musical Semiotics In Kate Soper’S Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016), Scott A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the six parts of Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016). While individual parts have received some music theoretical attention, this is the first analysis of the entire Pulitzer Prize-nominated work. Ambiguity and contingency are major themes of Ipsa Dixit, and by treating each part independently and in combination, I hope to honor Ipsa’s contingent status as a unified work comprised of six complete works. Soper’s libretto unifies an assemblage of texts with adaptations of Aristotle to investigate the intersections of language and music with authority, veracity, and (un)intelligibility.

I theorize that Soper’s “philosophy-opera” dramatizes the formation of …

Careful Compositions And Careless Constructions, Timothy Dalton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation uses digital methods to analyze a digitized archive of life writing by disabled Civil War veterans through lenses of care ethics and rhetorical genre theory. Autobiographical letters by more than 370 disabled men respond to a contest prompt open to Union veterans injured in their right arms who had to relearn penmanship. This dissertation introduces the hybrid genre of “specimens of left-hand penmanship” through several critical lenses. It critiques the rhetoric of vocational rehabilitation and examines this archive as a site for early examples of concepts from contemporary disability studies. Finally, it turns explicitly to care ethics, and …

Pigments: The Bridge Of Disciplines, Candace Gwyther

Postgraduate

This practice-based research explores the intersection of oil painting and ceramics, highlighting the shared techniques and methods that bridge these two disciplines. By using common pigments and integrating cross-disciplinary approaches, this study demonstrates how each discipline can inform and enhance the other, leading to the creation of an innovative and adaptable medium that seamlessly functions within both ceramics and painting. This interdisciplinary approach challenges traditional boundaries, opening new pathways for creative expression where technical material manipulation intersects with the broader narrative of my artistic practice. Grounded in foundational theories such as path making, meshwork, play, and bricolage, the research culminates …