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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Where Doubts Fade And Stars Glow: A Costume Designer’S Journey In Silent Sky By Lauren Gunderson, Randy Tabiliran Olarte May 2026

Where Doubts Fade And Stars Glow: A Costume Designer’S Journey In Silent Sky By Lauren Gunderson, Randy Tabiliran Olarte

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study employs a practice-based design methodology grounded in historical research, visual analysis, material experimentation, and collaborative production processes. This thesis, Where Doubts and Stars Glow: A Costume Designer’s Journey for Silent Sky by Lauren Gunderson, explores the process of design and creation of costumes for the production of Silent Sky at the University of Arkansas. Silent Sky portrays an astronomer whose work in the early 1900s profoundly impacted the study of photographic plates for mapping stars. Specifically, the astronomer closely analyzes Cepheid variable stars, discovering that their consistent brightness fluctuations aid in determining stellar distances and the universe's size. …

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“Thou Shalt Not Die”: The Evolution Of Vampires From Medieval Europe To The 21st Century, Maryn A. Tucker May 2026

“Thou Shalt Not Die”: The Evolution Of Vampires From Medieval Europe To The 21st Century, Maryn A. Tucker

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Medieval ideas about vampires continue to influence portrayals of them in modern media. Although modern vampires are portrayed with more powers and abilities than their medieval counterparts, the categories of traits remain consistent. This paper makes these points by using five characteristics (creation, physical characteristics, relationship to blood, social life, and death/weakness) to examine the evolution of vampires from Medieval European lore to modern day media. The sources examined range from the 13th century to 2017. From the Medieval era through 1897, vampire characteristics changed little. Bram Stoker’s Dracula marks the first major change in vampire characteristics and provides …

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Performing The American Dream: Passing And Identity In The Great Gatsby (1925) And Passing (1929), Olivia O'Sullivan May 2026

Performing The American Dream: Passing And Identity In The Great Gatsby (1925) And Passing (1929), Olivia O'Sullivan

Master's Theses

In this thesis, I explore how Jay Gatsby, protagonist in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Clare Kendry, protagonist in Nella Larsen’s Passing, pass in order to achieve their American Dream. Both characters rely on carefully crafted identities to gain social mobility and access to worlds that would otherwise be out of their reach through the people they surround themselves with, their clothing, their mannerism, and even their intimate relationships. Throughout my close reading and analysis, I determine that Jay Gatsby and Clare Kendry’s attempts to pass to achieve the American Dream are futile, which demonstrates the idea that …

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Let The Mystery Be: Meditations On Process, Wildness, And Collaboration In The Creation Of The Play Camp Wyldwood, Basilton Parnell May 2026

Let The Mystery Be: Meditations On Process, Wildness, And Collaboration In The Creation Of The Play Camp Wyldwood, Basilton Parnell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a mix of personal reflection and examination of my time in graduate school and the creation, development, and subsequent production of my full-length play, Camp Wyldwood. Camp Wyldwood was performed as a part of the spring 2026 ArkType New Works Festival at the University of Arkansas.

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Reframing Little Women: Renovating A Classic For Modern Audiences, Claire Wewers May 2026

Reframing Little Women: Renovating A Classic For Modern Audiences, Claire Wewers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis serves as the documentation of the director’s process in creating a production of Little Women: The Broadway Musical for the Main Stage season at the University of Arkansas in the fall semester of 2025. This thesis will serve as in-depth record from the initial reading of the script through the opening of the project using the metaphor of the building of a house. In Chapter 1 “Introduction,” the document will provide context for the thesis. It presents several of the materials used in the creation of the thesis, discusses the methodology of the study which is mostly historical …

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"Ostracized As We Are With God": Mina Loy's Anti-Career And The Search For Originality, Peyton L. Phillips May 2026

"Ostracized As We Are With God": Mina Loy's Anti-Career And The Search For Originality, Peyton L. Phillips

Master's Theses

Among many modernist artists, Mina Loy remains one of the most complex and allusive. Recent posthumous exposure of Loy's life and work adds to this precarity. A significant piece of Loy's life that is especially complex to contemporaries is her time spent writing. By establishing Loy's subjective relationship with her Victorian upbringing, this paper seeks to show examples of its influence on her search for originality. Mainly, the paper examines Loy's concept of originality, where that concept may have come from, and how it is reflected in her literature. The paper analyzes three of Loy's literary works, her poems "Virgins …

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The Oncoming Light: An Experiential Approach To Psychological Exposition Through Dialogue-Driven Narrative, Benjamin G. Dewitt May 2026

The Oncoming Light: An Experiential Approach To Psychological Exposition Through Dialogue-Driven Narrative, Benjamin G. Dewitt

Honors Theses

Narrative is a lens through which we understand ourselves, our histories, our futures, and our ties to those around us. Narrative form has undergone vast transformations over time, and in the case of “postmodern” literature, pushes the boundaries of form into the experimental, questioning the truth of knowledge itself. While these experimental works can give rise to uniquely powerful emotional experiences, some components of narrative, when abandoned, may only hinder the immersion of the reader. This thesis evaluates several experimental, dialogue-driven narrative works against these components: linguistic, literal, emotional, and intellectual significance, in a hierarchy of importance as proposed by …

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“Who Are We?”: Exploring Adolescent Identity And Community Through Collaborative Mural Art, Rachel E. Stacy May 2026

“Who Are We?”: Exploring Adolescent Identity And Community Through Collaborative Mural Art, Rachel E. Stacy

Honors Theses

This thesis explores how participation in a high school mural club influences students’ sense of personal identity and community. By creating and leading a mural club, I guided students in designing and painting murals around their school and extending this work into the local community, all focused on how students defined themselves within the context of the school’s motto: “A Star is Rising”. I used qualitative methods including surveys, observational notes, artist statements, and visual documentation to examine and analyze how students experienced identity and collaboration throughout the process. The findings show that the creation of these murals provided students …

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Creative Nonfiction Essays, Colby S. Langley May 2026

Creative Nonfiction Essays, Colby S. Langley

Honors Theses

To write about the present with any authority requires a keen eye for the past. To write from our lives into meaningful creative nonfiction requires a firm understanding that experience is the composite of life experience blending into the current moment. The writing is then drawn irreversibly towards emotion: indulgent and oppressive. The extremity of emotion dictates the difficulty of transcribing the experience onto the page, and violence is a source of both extreme emotion and experience. It is important to note that I am primarily considering personal violence for this essay, while societal and institutional violence have their own …

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Emotional Detachment In A Second Language: Exploring Emotional Expression In Bilingual Adults, Daniela Salas Lopez May 2026

Emotional Detachment In A Second Language: Exploring Emotional Expression In Bilingual Adults, Daniela Salas Lopez

Honors Theses

This qualitative study explored how bilingual and multilingual adults experience emotional detachment when using a second language and how language shapes emotional expression. This study aimed to examine how bilingual individuals personally experience these emotional differences in everyday life. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with six bilingual or multilingual adults from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings revealed five major themes: emotional detachment in a second language, reduced emotional intensity and meaning, increased cognitive effort and emotional fatigue, authenticity and emotional comfort in the first language, and identity and personality shifts across languages. Participants consistently …

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Unraveling The Modernist Grid: An Exploration Of Femininity And Containment In Design History, Riley Hayes May 2026

Unraveling The Modernist Grid: An Exploration Of Femininity And Containment In Design History, Riley Hayes

Honors Theses

This paper examines the Swiss grid as both a foundational tool of modernist graphic design and a cultural system embedded with ideological assumptions about order, neutrality, and authority. While the Swiss design tradition is widely celebrated for its clarity, rationality, and universality, this study argues that such principles are not neutral but historically situated, shaping how postwar Western visual culture organizes information, bodies, and value systems. Focusing on the circulation of Swiss design principles through editorial and advertising media, the paper situates the grid as a structuring logic that extends beyond layout into the framing of identity and gender. This …

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Examining Dimensions And Patterns Of Arts Participation In Relation To Positive Youth Development Outcomes Across Socioeconomic Contexts, Yasmine Perry May 2026

Examining Dimensions And Patterns Of Arts Participation In Relation To Positive Youth Development Outcomes Across Socioeconomic Contexts, Yasmine Perry

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Grounded in the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory and the Positive Youth Development framework, the purpose of the current study was to examine how dimensions of arts participation, specifically breadth, intensity, and duration, relate to Positive Youth Development (PYD) outcomes and whether socioeconomic status (SES) moderates these associations over time. Data were drawn from three waves of the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development. The analytic sample included 747 adolescents aged 12 to 18, capturing a developmental period marked by identity exploration and increased engagement in organized activities. A combination of longitudinal, person-centered, and moderation analyses was used to …

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City, Janina Butz May 2026

City, Janina Butz

Theses and Dissertations

Janina Butz observes the improvised support structures holding New York City together at its edges. Looking at the found, cheap materials, spray painted, rusty, drilled, sawed, and haphazardly welded together on the sidewalk. The hard clashes of cheap material and expensive real estate lead Butz to draw a bigger picture of the fraud seams our society is tied together with.

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In Spite Of And Because, Katherine Raudenbush May 2026

In Spite Of And Because, Katherine Raudenbush

Theses and Dissertations

Photography collects in the home, in frames, photo albums, lockets, held up by magnets on the fridge, propped up on the desk. This thesis and accompanying photography and textile work addresses this accumulation of story and family connection, specifically multigenerational relationships between mothers and daughters.

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Ephemeral System, Shibo Chan May 2026

Ephemeral System, Shibo Chan

Theses and Dissertations

Ephemeral System examines systems, feedback, repetition, and material fragility through a kinetic wax sculpture repeatedly dragged across a wooden ramp. Drawing from cybernetics, absurdist waiting, and personal mourning, the work explores how bodies and systems wear themselves down through continuous operation.

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Tracings, Masie Sophia Love May 2026

Tracings, Masie Sophia Love

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, the artist wonders what it means to remember a time and place that she has not experienced- what would this look like visualized in a painting? Love studies the histories and similarities between cartography and quilting using the two as a kind of channel to understand, record, and remember land. She explores inherited memory and the clues left behind in the form of quilts made by ancestors to create abstracted landscapes and maps of Tennessee where they lived for generations.

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“Before Your Honour?”: Divine Morality And Women Reclaiming Power In Ben Jonson’S Volpone And William Shakespeare’S Measure For Measure, Delilah G. Fleming May 2026

“Before Your Honour?”: Divine Morality And Women Reclaiming Power In Ben Jonson’S Volpone And William Shakespeare’S Measure For Measure, Delilah G. Fleming

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores how the female protagonists in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Jonson’s Volpone navigate and combat corrupting patriarchal forces through moral religious speech. In both plays, the male characters have allowed false gods and hypocrisy to dictate and justify their corrupt behavior. By engaging with the historical significance of early modern female rhetoric this thesis examines Jonson’s Celia and Shakespeare’s Isabella, and how they operate in the interest of godly virtue rather than blind obedience to patriarchal figure heads.  Volpone’s Celia is a character largely neglected in the canon, and whose speech emphasizes the relationship between female agency …

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Memory Organs, Coco Ma May 2026

Memory Organs, Coco Ma

Theses and Dissertations

Working across architectural sculpture, sonic works, and monoprints, this thesis explores the body as a site where memory, materiality, and cultural history converge. Drawing from muscle memory, Chinese architectural thresholds, and female narratives, it traces a body that is simultaneously physical and psychological, personal and collective, constant yet always shifting.

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Initial Type Craft, Micah Angelus May 2026

Initial Type Craft, Micah Angelus

Theses and Dissertations

What kinds of objects can still think when the self-contained aesthetic object can no longer be taken for granted? The historical ruptures that have placed painting under crisis have also brought into view the fallacy of artistic autonomy, raising questions about how value, contemplation, and meaning persist under conditions of deconstruction.

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The Monsters We Make: Confronting Repression And Failure In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Ben Wilenski May 2026

The Monsters We Make: Confronting Repression And Failure In Mary Shelley’S Frankenstein, Ben Wilenski

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis builds upon psychoanalysis and Shelley’s biographical accounts to claim that, rather than creating fear through physical monstrosity, Frankenstein’s horror emerges from the return of repressed parental and social failures. While the novel never excuses its violence, it contextualizes the creature’s acts in ways that demand readers to confront complicity, neglect, and social shortcomings. The following section discusses general horror theory with a focus on notions of abjection and the synthesis of contrasting images and concepts. A baseline understanding of fear will be formed and referred to in each following segment. After establishing a basic understanding of horror vocabulary, …

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Catalyst, David Steck May 2026

Catalyst, David Steck

Theses and Dissertations

Catalyst is a short documentary that explores why Hip Hop happened much later in Chicago than in other cities. It focuses on the story of Duro Wicks, a young Black music lover who overcame the city’s segregation to launch the first weekly Hip Hop open mic night. At the weekly $3 Sunday Hip Hop Show held at the Lower Links, young people came together from across the divided city to create a community. Though more successful than anyone could have imagined, Wicks’ dream proved unsustainable. However, it forever transformed the lives of the people it touched and launched a sustainable …

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Living Doll: Puppetry, Performance, And The Art Of Greer Lankton, Madison Lee May 2026

Living Doll: Puppetry, Performance, And The Art Of Greer Lankton, Madison Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that puppetry is the animating logic of Greer Lankton's practice. Drawing on archival evidence—including letters, planners, and drawings—it recovers an engagement with puppetry spanning childhood through her final years, and applies puppet theory to argue that Lankton understood selfhood as something made, not given.

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Nhạc Vàng And Historical Consciousness: Affect, Memory, And The Vietnamese Diaspora, Bryan L. Le May 2026

Nhạc Vàng And Historical Consciousness: Affect, Memory, And The Vietnamese Diaspora, Bryan L. Le

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines nhạc vàng as a cultural form shaped by war, displacement, and diaspora. It analyzes how the music carries historical experience through lyrics and performance, and how its meanings shift across contexts. The study shows how music shapes memory, identity, and historical understanding beyond fixed political or archival frameworks.

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Running Around, Kian T. Mckeown May 2026

Running Around, Kian T. Mckeown

Theses and Dissertations

Running around reflects on how living in a large city can shape one’s art practice. Daydreaming, impulse, and the frustration of daily life are explored through drawing and sculpture. Divided into 10 sections, the artist creates an index of thoughts relating to his work and the world around him.

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The Earth Holds What I Cannot, Satabdi Tripathy May 2026

The Earth Holds What I Cannot, Satabdi Tripathy

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores memory, landscape, identity, and gendered silence through painting, video and film. Inspired by glaciers, volcanoes, and Arctic landscapes, my work transforms personal memory into environmental memory and investigates silence, trauma, and renewal.

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Wind In A Dry Glass, Khia Hong May 2026

Wind In A Dry Glass, Khia Hong

Theses and Dissertations

Khia Hong’s paper unfolds in five sections, tracing the ontological and epistemological inquiries behind her sculptures. When the sculptures stepped down from the pedestal and entered the plane of lived reality, the question “What is sculpture?” expanded into “What is sculpture, the self, and the world?” Through reflections on the self, Hong details how these questions emerge and are addressed in her material encounters.

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The Knock That Never Leaves, Alvin Seenauth May 2026

The Knock That Never Leaves, Alvin Seenauth

Theses and Dissertations

Peter Asan, a father and small business owner in New York, faces uncertainty after immigration agents arrived at his home in 2021. A decades-old conviction resurfaced, threatening his family life. The Knock That Never Leaves follows his daily routine as he lives between stability and the ongoing fear of deportation.

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“One Object Yields Both Grief And Joy”: Death In Elizabeth Cary’S The Tragedy Of Mariam (1613), Valeria Suprunova May 2026

“One Object Yields Both Grief And Joy”: Death In Elizabeth Cary’S The Tragedy Of Mariam (1613), Valeria Suprunova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the dialog between early ancient Roman and early modern English traditions of death and dying helps illuminate the complex relationship between tyranny and death in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (1613) and that death is an inextricable and dynamic element of the text.

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Beauty Over Perfection: The Idealization Of Drapery In Classical Greek Sculpture And The Stylistic Reinvention Of Roman “Copies”, Lauren M. Grover May 2026

Beauty Over Perfection: The Idealization Of Drapery In Classical Greek Sculpture And The Stylistic Reinvention Of Roman “Copies”, Lauren M. Grover

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores Margarete Bieber’s claim that the drapery of Greek sculpture accurately reflects ancient garments. I introduce a method of tracing drapery to capture the garment pattern of sculpted drapery and argue that the drapery of Greek originals and Roman “copies” is an idealized representation of ancient dress.

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Sentential Structures In Alexander Scriabin's Op. 8 Etudes, John Paul West May 2026

Sentential Structures In Alexander Scriabin's Op. 8 Etudes, John Paul West

Theses and Dissertations

Historically, the sentence has proven to be one of the most versatile and pervasive forms in music, appearing since the mid-sixteenth century with occurrences too frequent to quantify. Sentential musical phrases emerged from music and poetry during the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries with the same short-short-long rhythmic impulse, originating from poetic and sing-song texts. Although the sentence is most often tied to the Classical period, it is not associated with any single era. Patterns of sentential phrases were already apparent and plentiful before the late eighteenth century, and composers used it as a device to expand musical form throughout the …

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