Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Narratives In, On, And Around Contemporary Queer Film: A Study Of Adam And Its Paratexts, Jeremy Stoller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Film’s ability to present and inspire desire, and to realize alternate worlds, render it a uniquely potent medium for expressing queerness. Because of this potency, and because films are among the most prominent ways that LGBTQ+ people are represented in society, queer film can feel both deeply personal and highly political for LGBTQ+ identifying audiences. But movies do not merely offer statements about political systems, they are also made within and reflective of those systems.

Scholars have thoroughly investigated films and our relationships to them for productive ways of seeing gender, sexuality, desire, and oppression. But the conversations about how …

Staging Nature: Performing Environmental Crises In War, Housing, And Labor, 1935–1990, Erik Barrett Wallenberg

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Staging Nature” examines how theater was used as a means for expressing environmental concerns in moments of environmental crisis in the United States. I begin with The Federal Theatre Project’s national tour of a performance addressing the metabolic rift in the divide between the city and country with a focus on the devastation of farmland in the Dust Bowl in the late 1930s. At the heart of the dissertation are three theater groups that start in the 1960s during the rise of the modern environmental movement. Chapters on Bread and Puppet Theater show that they make a name for themselves …

Ejercicios De Sí: Escritura, Cuerpo Y Deporte En El Cono Sur (1964–2019), Pablo Yankelevich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation studies the work of three performative figures from Latin America for whom physical practice is a fundamental issue of their artistic inquiries. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which writers and athletes Leonor Silvestri (Argentina), Héctor Benjamín Viel Temperley (Argentina), and Paulo Leminski (Brazil) problematize the body as the site of social and political experimentation over the last fifty years. By examining how these figures challenged liberal and neoliberal normative dictums about the place of the body, particularly in times of political repression, my research reflects on unauthorized exercises of bodily freedom and considers sport and physical …

Marriage Stories: Legal Reform And The Novel In France And Britain, 1780–1860, Tatiana Nunez-Bright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Marriage Stories” analyzes connections between novelistic form, marriage law reform, and portrayals of virtue in texts by, among others, Stéphanie de Genlis, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie Cottin, Claire de Duras, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Sophie Doin, George Sand, Anne Brontë, and Gustave Flaubert. I argue that the novel was less concerned with abolishing or even critiquing marriage than it was with delineating “good” from “bad” unions, which in turn reflects contemporary discussions about marriage’s role in response to burgeoning social movements. My first chapter considers the epistolary novel in relation to the idea of spouses existing as “one body” culturally …

Extraction, Property, And Rights In Southeastern Arabian Seascapes C.1820–Present, Scott Erich

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic examination of fish, pearl, sponge, and oil extraction in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. These waters, which were fished and labored upon in much of the same way for millennia, have, in the last two centuries, undergone a sea change. Regimes of property and rights have transformed the ocean from a wild and undifferentiated space into a place which is enclosed, privatized, industrially fished, drilled, and otherwise despoiled. This dissertation, building on recent works in environmental history, Indian Ocean studies, and legal and economic anthropology, probes the many cultural, religious, social, …

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

Form In Hip-Hop Music: Sections, Songs, And History, Stephen M. Gomez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores musical form in recorded hip-hop music from 1979–present. Form, defined as the large-scale organization of songs, is a parameter that artists consider in the creative process and fans experience while listening. Hip-hop’s historical foundation as a live, improvised, party-oriented genre influenced formal functions and patterning from the earliest days of its popular recorded life, beginning with the Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. While many of the section and song form labels used by scholars of pop-rock music are transferable to the analysis of hip-hop, the latter genre conveys a unique sense of time rooted in …

Completive 'Todo': Implications For Possessives, Existentials, And Locative Expressions, Carolina Fraga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL’). In this work I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g., Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There’s water over the whole bathroom floor’). I argue that the syntax and the …

Theorizing Racial Democracy, Teófilo De Souza Carmo Reis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The critical philosophy of race has shown recent growth, but it tends to focus too much on the United States. This leaves many race-related concepts and phenomena from other parts of the world underexplored. I help to fill this gap by exploring the idea of "racial democracy" in Brazil, which is a form of racial ignorance that is prevalent in that country. Specifically, I am interested in the epistemic aspects of this mechanism of creating and propagating racial ignorance.

To achieve this goal, I begin by introducing Charles Mills' concept of white ignorance and other influential works in social epistemology. …

Icons In Lyari: Resonance, Visibility, And Global Blackness In An Indian Ocean Port Town, Zehra Husain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral dissertation studies the resonances of boxing, football, and rap music in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood located in Pakistan’s commercial port city Karachi. Based on 12 months of in-person and remote ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation traces the circulation of iconographies of Blackness and global sports as they sediment in a port town on the Indian Ocean. Lyari has long been in the news for gang violence and urban strife, but is also noted for its talented boxers, footballers and more recently rap musicians, some of whom are of Afro-Baluch descent. These “two faces” of Lyari Town informs its …

Somos Boricuas Y Estamos Despertando: Decolonial Education, Collective Identity, And The Struggle For Puerto Rican Studies, Ricardo Gabriel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Student movements have been and continue to be major catalysts for social change. The Puerto Rican student movement at The City University of New York (CUNY) during the late 1960s and early 1970s played a central role in desegregating CUNY—the largest urban university system in the United States—and establishing Black and Puerto Rican studies departments throughout the CUNY system. Student-activists also agitated for participatory democracy and community control of university institutions. Despite the movement’s intellectual contributions and its impact on higher education, it has received little scholarly attention. This study helps fill that gap by exploring the movement’s origins and …

Memory, Violence, And Detours: Strategies Of Resistance To Epidermal Invisibility Within The French Republic, Claudine E. David

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The subjection of black citizens in France and their invisibility in the (post)colonial space has been marked by segregation in peripheral urban zones, with a hardening of policing methods and controls based on racial appearanc. I argue that monumental representation in public space is not neutral but participates in the promotion of a specific ideology. I show thé ellipses in French patrimonial monumental glorification, including the appropriation of the memory of revolutionary heroes such as Louis Delgrès and Toussaint Louverture, concomitant with the occultation of many other black figures. I argue that representation matters, that France must repair this asymmetrical …

Demarcating Psychopathologies: Nosology, Validity, And The Taxonomic Problem In Psychiatric Medicine, Julia Zentz Kolak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I argue that the discussion surrounding the role of values in the conceptualization of mental disorders is reproduced in critical debates surrounding the issue of reliability and validity in a psychiatric nosology. In so doing, I oppose the conventional separation of the demarcation problem and the crisis of validity in psychiatric classification, arguing instead that they are inextricably linked. After drawing out the intersection between these literatures in the conceptual history of the DSM and its much-maligned transition to an etiologically neutral taxonomy of mental disorders, I consider Carl Hempel’s proposed conciliation between descriptive and theoretical systematization …

New York City Yoga Studios Archive (Nycysa), Allison Daugila

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

NYC Yoga Studios Archive is a digital archive meant to preserve the histories of yoga workers participating in the NYC Yoga industry in the years before, during, and following the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2020–July 2023). In March 2020, the World Health Organization commissioned that gathering in groups in indoor settings was one of the highest risk activities anyone could participate in, which almost immediately cast fitness venues as a COVID-19 hotspot. The circumstance of New York City being the United States’ most populous city per square mile meant that most yoga establishments in the five boroughs remained closed for in-person …

Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities In Works By Helmut Lachenmann, Simon Steen-Andersen, And Johan Svensson, John Popham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Sonorous Movement: Cellistic Corporealities in Works by Lachenmann, Steen-Andersen, and Svensson, I analyze three compositions that foreground the cellist-body, its physical gestures, and instrumental interactions: Helmut Lachemann’s Pression für einen Cellisten (1969/2010), Simon Steen-Andersen’s Study for String Instrument #3 (2011), and Johan Svensson’s marionette for string instrument, electro-mechanical devices and lights (2018). These works center sound production and the performing body as sites of ontological and creative exploration. Their physical gestures serve multiple sensorial functions, heightening the visual and kinesthetic dimensions of a traditionally aurally oriented practice. For each work, I develop a corresponding analytical method based on …

Flamboyant Abundance: Performing Queer Maximalism, 1960–1990, Jack Owen Crawford

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation theorizes “queer maximalism” as an aesthetic of unmitigated flamboyance and voracious drag that appears in a constellation of performance-based artistic practices in the postwar United States. Queer maximalism brings together a historically grounded group of performers primarily based in New York City who have been variously described as theatrical, baroque, and Ridiculous and repositions them within an art-historical frame. Identifying drag and pastiche as central to queer maximalism, I show how artists salvage, assemble, and re-signify pop-cultural imagery, inflecting it with camp in order to fashion intimate community and openly flout societal norms of gender, race, and sexuality. …

Ways Of Silence And Other Absences In The Music Of George Crumb, Jean-Patrick Besingrand

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) is undeniably singular in the musical landscape. His aesthetic is often characterized by his exploration of timbre, his graphic scores, his use of quotation, his theatricality, and his interest in unusual instruments. This study proposes to take a different approach to Crumb’s aesthetic through the spectrum of silences and other absences. The concept of silence will be broken down and reconstructed through the Japanese concept of ma (間) and of empty spaces. Multiple types of silences and absences will be considered throughout this dissertation, expanding thus the concept of silence not only …

Who Is The “Superior Man”? The Ideal Of Junzi In The Analects Of Confucius, Elijah Vincent, Tyler Colopy, Stephen Hall

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

One of the central concepts in The Analects is junzi or "superior man,” namely a person who possesses moral and ethical qualities such as wisdom, integrity, and courage. The essays in this group aim to explore the authentic meaning of junzi and its modern relevance.

‘Following The Line Of Least Resistance’: African American Women In Domestic Work, 1899–1940, Taylor Simsovic

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

This paper examines the challenges faced by African American women employed in domestic service between 1899 and 1940, with a focus on how race, class, and gender intersected to shape their experiences. Specifically, the study investigates how these women continued to perform reproductive labor as they migrated from the South to Northern states during the Great Migration. Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, the analysis argues that Black women's persistent employment in undervalued labor within white American homes was driven by the mutually constitutive systems of capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. These systems channeled Black women into …

The Technical Study And Conservation Of A Multiplex Hologram, Lindsay Cross

Art Conservation Master's Projects

“The Kiss II” is a Multiplex hologram created by Lloyd Cross in 1975. Conservation treatment was sought out to address condition concerns that included instability and dust and dirt accumulation. In addition to completing conservation treatment, this project aims to improve upon the imaging and preventive protocol for Multiplex holograms. Although there is much research available on the technology of holograms, there is very little information available on conservation treatment of Multiplex holograms. The steps taken throughout the course of this project have been thoroughly documented to lay the groundwork for a potential protocol for documenting and treating Multiplex holograms.

Treatment Of A German Cuckoo Clock, Maeve E R O'Shea

Art Conservation Master's Projects

A German cuckoo clock was treated during this project. The history and context of the clock are discussed and ethical issues regarding functional objects are considered. The clock’s primary condition issue was the deterioration of the leather bellows material, causing the clock to no longer whistle. New bellows were fabricated, using the surviving top and bottom blocks, and a variety of replacement bellows materials were tested and considered. The clock was reassembled and returned to working order, and aesthetic losses were addressed.

Technical Analysis And Treatment Of A Folk Art Portrait Of A Boy, Khanh P. Nguyen

Art Conservation Master's Projects

This Master’s Project is a multidisciplinary technical study and conservation treatment of Portrait of a Boy, a 19th century oil painting on canvas and thought to be an example of the American Folk Art movement. Research into Folk Art traditions was executed to inform the context of the artwork. Comprehensive imaging and scientific analyses provided additional historical and material context for the painting. The painting was imaged with the following techniques: visible illumination, ultraviolet (UV) reflectography, ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence, infrared reflectography, visible-induced infrared (IR) luminescence, x-radiography, and multispectral imaging (MSI). Scientific and materials analyses included: optical microscopy of fiber …

Drselects: Tincuta Heinzel On Textiles, Material Experiences, Design And Philosophy And Open Design, Tincuta Heinzel

DRSelects

No abstract provided.

Shared Cinematic Experience And Emerging Technologies: Integrating Mixed-Reality Components For The Future Of Cinema, James Hutson

Faculty Scholarship

The enduring appeal of traditional cinema viewing in the face of alternative experiences, including streaming services and emerging technologies, such as extended reality, is rooted in its esthetic, cultural, and social significance. While the psychological appeal of shared cinematic experiences has gained attention in scholarship, there is a need to further explore the potential enhancement of these experiences through the integration of immersive technologies. The communal nature of cinema fosters social connection, especially in a post-pandemic context marked by widespread social isolation. This study highlights the psychological benefits of shared cinematic experiences and emphasizes the next phase of cinematic evolution, …

0883: John O'Brien Collection, 1547-2017, Marshall University Special Collections

Guides to Manuscript Collections

This collection of O’Brien materials includes a large number of CDV, stereo card, and photograph images of prominent individuals from the nineteenth century, various locations in the United States and Europe, and Confederate military and political leaders. Other items include wartime and postwar broadsides, election tickets, pamphlets, and newspapers. There are two photographs signed by Jefferson Davis and letters from Shelby Foote and Douglas Southall Freeman. In addition to the manuscript and photograph materials, the collection includes a number of rare books, with the earliest published in 1546.

Music Reviews, Volume 80, No. 1, Kathleen Roland-Silverstein

Voice - All Scholarship

Contains reviews of Walker, Gwyneth (b. 1947.) No Ordinary Woman!; Piesni zebrane na glos i fortepian (Collected Songs for voice and piano); OperAria: Das Repertoire für all Stimmgattungen in 16 Bänden, Volume I: Tenor Lyrisch.

Faith-Based Fissures Take Many Forms, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In a commentary, SMU President Professor Lily Kong discussed why religion continues to be a source of contestation over space the world over. She noted that it is important to recognise that conflicts and contestations do not just occur between religions, or between the religious and the secular, but within religions as well, and called for religious leaders to be mindful of the dynamics within their organisations and to consider how to manage potential tensions and conflicts.

Princely Adventures In The Sulalat Al-Salatin (The Genealogy Of Kings), Emily Soon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

Reformed Worship (Rw) 149 - Advent / Christmas (September 2023), Reformed Worship Editors

Reformed Worship Magazine

Editorial: Advent Begins in the Dark by Joyce Borger....2

Worship Series: "O Come, Emmanuel!" by Fred N. Seay....3

Emanu-El: God With Us by Wayland Jackson....14

Songs for the Season by Paul Neeley....15

John Calvin on the Magnificat by Yudha Thianto....19

The Names of Jesus by Roberta Vriesema....22

Ashamed of a Blatantly Supernatural Gospel? by Cornelius Plantinga....28

The Four Last Things by Joyce Borger....33

A Light to My Path by Cassie Lokker....39

For Pastors: Is Christmas Necessary? by Scott Hoezee....41

The Unexpected Gift by Rebecca Tellinghuisen....43

Q&A: How to Sing …