Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Mainstream Radicalism : Labor Organizing In Schenectady 1886-1906, Catherine M. Haag

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation examines the roots of radicalism among workers in Schenectady, New York, from 1886 to the 1906 sit-down strike organized by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). As early as the 1880s, the city’s workers embraced the inclusive industrial union methods of the Knights of Labor. After the decline of the Knights, Schenectady’s workers joined the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) yet showed their support for radical direct action methods within the AFL. The roots of Schenectady’s active and militant labor community stretched back to the days before Thomas Edison established the foundations of General Electric …

Examining Colonial Impact On Beothuk Technological Traditions On The Island Of Newfoundland, Amanda G. Samuels

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Indigenous technological production and use of tools is often influenced by several cultural factors including, functionality, environment, and cosmological and ideological beliefs. Projectile points are no exception, and they are often imbued with rich, symbolic meaning. While projectile points across North America have been extensively studied using various methods, there are some Indigenous groups and environments that are often excluded from academic, archaeological research, such as the Beothuk of Newfoundland. Since the Beothuk have seldom been the focus of archaeological research, their lithic and iron technology has not yet been analyzed thoroughly. I have conducted a systematic comparative analysis of …

Human Creationism And Experimentation In Science-Fiction: A Case Study Of Frankenstein And Flowers For Algernon, Taylor Casey

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

As a genre, science-fiction has the ability to operate within historical and scientific contexts in order to present stories that include speculative elements of reality, while still maintaining an aspect of empiricism. Science-fiction allows for the exploration of themes and concepts that are unknown to the current epoch of knowledge and provides an inquisitive look on the human condition. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of human creationism and experimentation within two science-fiction texts. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, two texts that were written in different scientific eras, both provide similar tales …

Black Migrants In Harlem, 1900-1942: West Indian Migrants And The Ideologies That Helped Shape Garveyism And Black Politics In New York City's Interwar Period And Harlem Renaissance, Aminah Zanette Wallace

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

ABSTRACT This dissertation tells a new story of Harlem black radicalism by inserting four West Indian migrants' experiences in advancing and enriching conversations on Harlem’s black radicalism, on Garveyism and on black politics during the interwar period and Harlem Renaissance era in Harlem. These four men include Hubert Harrison of St. Croix, Wilfred A. Domingo and Marcus Garvey of Jamaica and Cyril Briggs of Nevis of St. Kitts-Nevis. It writes a new history of Harlem black radicalism that inserts these four West Indian thinkers into the conversation and brings all these thinkers together under one history. This dissertation makes a …

Salt City : The Albany Stories, Chris Evans

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Salt City is a multigenerational novel spanning nearly two centuries in a small Kansas town. The story follows the family of Patrick Holland, who emigrates from Ireland in the mid-19th century, and continues through to the end of the family line in the mid-21st. Told through multiple points of view and more than a half-dozen narrators, Salt City’s style runs the gamut from prairie literature to the postmodern, with influences ranging from John Steinbeck to Sylvia Plath and Junot Diaz to Jennifer Egan. In Salt City, Chris Evans seeks to tell the American story from the perspectives of the working …

Encajar From The Margins: Drop-Out And Undocumented Latinx Youth Negotiating Deservingness And Spaces Of Belonging, Eric J. Macias

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Encajar from the Margins is a timely and important ethnographic project that contributes to existing literature on issues related to immigrant youth’s navigation of “illegality,” deservingness, and belonging. It examines the layers of challenges faced by undocumented youth who drop-out of high school. More specifically, this research centers the counter-narratives of undocumented youth that challenge many stigmatizing labels they have socially acquired. This dissertation focuses on an understudied population of young people who do not qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) or any other immigration protections after they migrated to the United States. This study provides important insight …

Abandoned Form : Secularity & Religion In The Eighteenth-Century British Novel, Kasey Waite

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abandoned Form rereads the theory of the novel from a post-secular perspective. Since the early 1980’s, theorists such as Nancy Armstrong, Michael McKeon, and Ian Watt have argued that the novel mimics Western civilization’s journey from irrationality to rationality by embracing secular ideologies and abandoning religious ones. Conversely, Abandoned Form contends that the eighteenth-century novel form depends on an inseparable relationship between the religious and the secular. Rather than being independent of religious influence, the eighteenth-century novel utilizes a dialectical engagement of secular and religious forces to create its formal structures. Focusing on the form of the novel, rather than …

Between Person And Place : Modernist Ecopoetics In The Work Of Muriel Rukeyser And H.D, William F. Pattee

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This project examines ecopoetics as a means of decentering the industrial and urban tropes so heavily focused on in modernist studies. Through the ecopoetics of Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) and H.D. (1886-1961), the natural world and its influence on human subjects prove to be as emblematic of modern literature as artificial places and spaces are. While ecocritical theorists like Scott Knickerbocker and Andreas Weber point to the natural world as a paramount guide to navigating social and cultural dynamics, the presence of ecopoetics in modernism is a particularly significant field. Rukeyser’s long poem, The Book of the Dead (1936) puts ecopoetics …

The Gratitude Trap, Sean Chung

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This paper explores the concept of gratitude and the many physical and psychological benefits. However, these benefits have caused us to overlook a trap that is associated with gratitude. Specifically, the paper focuses on two types of gratitude: propositional gratitude, which involves feeling grateful towards a generalized group or concept, and targeted gratitude, which is directed towards specific individuals or entities. The paper argues that there is a trap associated with both types of gratitude and can be invoked maliciously. This paper examines several examples of the trap and how it has been used maliciously in the past as well …

Dominican Women Experiencing Violence: Transnationalism, Gender, And The Search For Social Justice, Anyeline Mejia-Mcdonald

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

My dissertation contributes to the study of feminicide and violence against women through a unique analysis of what Cecilia Menjívar calls “multisided forms of violence”, to which I add the transnational experience. Focused on the Dominican Republic, this dissertation asks what are women’s experiences of multisided violence; how do they respond, react, and resist; and what effect does transnationalism play? Informed by 16 months of ethnography, utilizing participant observation, content analysis, and 50 semi-structured interviews, my findings demonstrate that, due to the failure of bureaucratic policies and mechanisms to guarantee women’s safety, survivors are forced to negotiate social, political, and …

Selections From Jars Of Wilda Point, Christian H. O'Callaghan-Leue

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

My creative thesis is titled Selections from Jars of Wilda Point. It consists of five short stories from a larger linked collection. These stories are linked through the theme of what and why the character keep what they do in jars or bottles and by the fictitious town in Coastal Maine called Wilda Point. The five stories are titled by what is in the jar and the year it’s taking place, “Keys, Year 1984” “Ghosts, Year 2008,” “Cross Words, Year 1951,” “Jude’s Life, Year 2014,” and “Crosswords, Year 2016.” They are character-driven, and each reflects the larger project for their …

Disjointed Cynicism, Jay Armstrong

Theses

Like most students, I started this writing MA program to become a better writer, which would be a tremendous benefit to me both personally and professionally. Put simply, I want to write books I would enjoy reading. While I have enjoyed a few of the short stories that I have written so far, my work is nowhere near the level of the action-lacked novels I love to read for leisure. I feel my biggest shortcoming is in framing up multiple storylines to make a well-paced novel, which is my long-term goal. My writing usually has a lot of action and …

What Could Jesus Do?, Harriet Baber

Philosophy: Faculty Scholarship

According to many orthodox Christian theologies Jesus is not merely sinless but impeccable: he not only did not sin but could not. This is puzzling because one can only sin by doing something else and, prima face, Jesus can do actions that you or I could do by which we would sin. I suggest that appearances to the contrary, Jesus cannot do a variety of actions that a merely human duplicate could do. His doing sinful actions is compossible with a range of empirical facts about his physical abilities and circumstances of the sort we ordinarily take into account in …

Connatural Knowledge Of The Natural Law, Turner C. Nevitt

Philosophy: Faculty Scholarship

This paper traces the basic contours of Aquinas’s account of connatural knowledge in order to see what role (if any) connaturality might play in our knowledge of the precepts of the natural law. It engages a dispute between Maritain and Doolan on this topic. After considering what Aquinas means by “connaturality” in general the paper examines the main elements of his view of knowledge by connaturality in particular. I argue that the true doctrine of Aquinas probably lies between Maritain and Doolan’s opposed interpretations. Although it is not the only way of doing so, connaturality or inclination would still seem …

On Respect For Robots, Daniel Tigard

Philosophy: Faculty Scholarship

We spend a lot of time with robotic and artificially intelligent (AI) technologies today. At the same time, it appears that we are growing more accustomed to interacting with AI and robots as if they were fellow human beings. Such trends have aptly brought about increasing ethical discussions concerning how we should treat technological devices. Do we owe robots some degree of respect, and how could respecting robots be justified? With this article, I put forward a new way of answering these questions. I invoke a revisionist account of Kant’s ethics that amends the usual priority of dignity before respect …

Crossing The Borders And Challenging The Boundaries Of White Feminism In Italy: Situated Rearticulations Of Difference And The Impact Of Antiracist Feminisms, Loredana Di Martino

Italian and Italian Studies: Faculty Scholarship

This article investigates how some white Italian feminists have begun to reckon with the colorblindness and ethnocentrism of their theories and are contributing to the development of a critical white feminism. An examination of key feminist texts from the 1970s will be followed by an investigation into more recent iterations of difference feminism that have critically reengaged and redefined both Marxist theories of social reproduction and cultural practices of female intersubjectivity. In addition to addressing the existence of differently situated gender positionalities and their diverging struggles, this critical white Italian feminism is also attempting to meaningfully incorporate and center feminist …

The Bridge, Volume 20, 2023, Bridgewater State University

the bridge

Designers:

Marie Foscaldo

Carly C

Jack Hatfield

Nate Stephen

Alexandria Joyce

Editors-In-Chief:

Bethany Clemons

Joe Thorpe

Editors:

Brandon Gebhart

Abigail Murphy

Faculty Advisor:

Jessica Melendy

Design Advisor:

Professor Alain Blunt

A Dangerous Neutrality: Howard Campbell In Mother Night, Kathryn Alderman

Outstanding Gateway Papers

In this review of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night, the author determines whether the book should be required reading for English 101 classes. Students, in a generation of apolitical views and the common belonging in middle ground, are often assigned books that do not seem to grasp their attention needed to take anything away from the reading experience. Mother Night has many ways of grabbing and holding this attention while displaying the dangers of running away from history. The author concludes that Mother Night should be required for all English 101 classes.

The Manga Attack On Titan As A Literary Medium, Joseph Song

Outstanding Gateway Papers

Attack on Titan is a globally celebrated Japanese manga written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama. The manga has sold over 110 million copies worldwide, garnering several awards which have cemented its enormous success. The narrative is set in the early nineteenth century, when a small portion of humanity has been forced to live behind gigantic walls that protect them from enormous, human-like titans who feast on human flesh. It is through the events that take place in Attack on Titan that the reader can reflect critically on topics relevant today, such as racism, genocide, and revenge through the formal ways …

Overzealous: The Harm Caused By Parental And Administrative Censorship Of Books In An Intellectually Free Education, Tyler Engel

Outstanding Gateway Papers

Books and their ideas are such a fundamental part of our learning culture. Despite this fact, many books, some of our best books, have been banned in schools and communities across the world for the controversial, uncomfortable, necessary ideas they contain. Parents, school administration, and state legislatures often go to great lengths to police these ideas within the classroom, limiting what teachers can actually teach within their classrooms and the ideas that students come into contact with. This practice is harmful, and we as a country need to normalize the reading of banned books so that students can engage diverse …

“Fight Him With His Own Weapon”: The Fluctuating Role Of The Holmesian Detective, Abraham Bishop

Outstanding Gateway Papers

Adored the world over for his incredible abilities, Sherlock Holmes is a character who redefined what it means to be a detective. This paper examines the fluctuation of this role by looking at a Holmes story as well as a work inspired by the great detective in the context of Colonial and Post-Colonial India.

Wisdom From The Center Of The Heart: The Life And Work Of Pamela Ayo Yetunde So Far, Karma Lekshe Tsomo

Theology and Religious Studies: Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, Dr. Pamela Ayo Yetunde has emerged as a prominent figure in the Black, Buddhist, and queer communities. As I caught a glimpse of her amidst the excited crowds at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto in 2018, a gathering of 10,000 delegates from 80 countries and nearly 200 religious, spiritual, and Indigenous traditions, her humble free spirit immediately captured my attention. Unpretentious, unaffected by the grandeur of the immense gathering, and unfazed by the power and prestige of the luminary figures assembled there, she flowed through the hallowed halls with confidence and grace. In an …

Introducing A Discussion On Jean-Pierre Ruiz’S "Revelation In The Vernacular", Jacqueline Hidalgo

Theology and Religious Studies: Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Wisdom From A Reproductive Justice Framework, Emily Reimer-Barry

Theology and Religious Studies: Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Discussions And Creations: Experiences Of Black Music Therapy Graduate Students Building Community And Belonging, Rebekah Irene Spann

Theses and Dissertations--Music

There is currently a lack of racial diversity within the music therapy field and a lack of research on the experiences of Black music therapy graduate students wanting to build community and belonging. The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences of three Black graduate music therapy students at the University of Kentucky seeking to build community and belonging with their Black peers. To further understand the experiences of these Black graduate music therapy students, this study followed participatory action research (PAR) methodology. Throughout the research process, I worked with participants to shape the project in a way …

A History Of Educational Concerts Of The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Sean Radermacher

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This project illuminates the history of educational concerts of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) and reveals a legacy of performances for young audiences, today’s educational innovations, and the orchestra’s evolving mission to serve young people. Concerts for young people are an important facet of the history of American orchestras. Today, these concerts and other educational programs are essential to increase the accessibility of orchestral music.

The PSO’s history highlights the close relationship of American orchestras with an educational mission from their early years to the present. After an overview of the origins of permanent orchestras and the national context of …

The Establishment, Ownership, And Leadership Of Southwestern General Hospital In El Paso, Texas, 1905-2023, John Burton

Transcriptions & Other Documents

This detailed history of Southwestern General Hospital in El Paso, Texas is intended to present a factual chronology of an extraordinary institution that was part of the Southwest’s earliest healthcare system development and has served the region, in various capacities, under different owners, and under oftentimes difficult circumstances, for over 116 years.

Tracing the evolution of El Paso as a rapidly growing destination for the treatment of tuberculosis in the early 20^th century, the history follows the pioneers and administrators who built the required facilities, forged partnerships, adapted to ever-changing medical and economic developments, faced competition, changed business models, …

「格法」為骨，「虛境」解意——論戴君恩《讀風臆評》的兩個特點, Aifan Zhan

Dissertations from all years

明代約兩百七十年(1368-1644年)，期間詩經研究專著多達六百餘種1，但後人對明代解《詩》(即《詩經》下同)法的研究與重視卻不足。傳統詩經學把《詩經》當作經典，對其解讀注重考據，講求據典，強調經世治用，令《詩》作為文學本身的特點，以及解讀者的主觀感受遭到忽視。在明代中後期陽明心學影響下，出現了一批將詩經當作文學研究的解《詩》家，使詩經學走下經學研究的樊籬，戴君恩便是其中之一。

有關戴君恩生平、師承和其著作《讀風臆評》的記載寥寥，且其中許多細節已難以進一步考證。在戴氏生平背景無從稽考，而「臆評」本身又具有主觀性的情況下，文本便是最好的工具。從《臆評》序言中發現，戴氏解《詩》受到孟子「以意逆志」和陽明心學的影響，形成基於自己的理解與感受，基本不刻意參照前人解讀的基本解《詩》原則。文章還通過對《臆評》文本細讀，從章法結構、詩意詩境兩個方面總結出戴氏「臆想式解詩」兩個特點即：運用「格法」對《詩》的章法結構進行點評以及以「虛境」輔助詩意的解讀，並簡要總結「臆想式解詩」的文學性風格，以此補充目前戴君恩《讀風臆評》的研究。

淺析九把刀的愛情小說——以《那些年，我們追過的女孩》《等一個人的咖啡》《月老》為例, Hei Yi Fung

Dissertations from all years

台灣網絡文學隨着踏入九十年代末而逐漸興起以及發展，其中網絡愛情小說始於蔡智恆所創作的《第一次的親密接觸》。九把刀作為九十年代至今深受讀者歡迎的作家之一，其創作所涉及的題材非常寬廣，其中又以情愛書寫小說作品最受重視，例如是《那些年，我們一起追的女孩》被改編成電影後，在兩岸三地帶來放映的熱潮。在眾多愛情小說作家中，筆者欲淺析九把刀在「愛系列」中三部被改編成為電影的愛情小說。

本論文根據九把刀愛系列中的《月老》、《等一個人咖啡》以及《那些年，我們一起追的女孩》這三部小說為文本來進行分析。本論文共分為六個章節來探討九把刀的情愛小說作品：第一章〈緒論〉，提及本論文的研究範圍與目的，作者九把刀簡介及研究回顧以及三部愛情小說簡介。第二章〈九把刀的興起〉則提及台灣網絡愛情小說的發展及九把刀與其他愛情小說作家之異同。第三章〈九把刀愛情小說書寫的改變〉將會從空間以及重覆書寫兩個角度分析其變化。第四章 〈九把刀愛情小說的通俗小說特色〉中會從轉折點、副線情節發展以及智慧老人功能角色的體現三方面，探討其如何呈現通俗小說的特色。第五章〈九把刀的創作特色〉將從敘事風格幽默、後現代特質之體現以及品牌及行銷手法三個角度進行分析。第六章〈結語〉則總結本論文之研究。

(2023) Alexander Von Humboldt: Explorer, Naturalist, And Environmental Pioneer (2019) By Danica Novgorodoff, Peter Shea

Collected Papers of Peter Shea

As a young boy, Alexander Von Humboldt came up with divergent questions about the birds and mountains and animals he saw, and brought all those questions together under two big questions that stayed important for him over a long life: “How are these things different?” and “How are they nevertheless connected?” As the reader watches Humboldt looking at a hawk and a mouse, volcanoes and farmland, palm trees and pine trees, Europe and Ecuador, Europeans and Indigenous people, one comes to expect what he will say: “They are different, and yet they are connected.” This idea is much bigger than …