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Angel Babies Ascending To Heaven A Family Saga Of Death Across Cultures, Heidi Riboldi

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis is a microhistory focused on infant death and burial practices in Spain and Argentina at the turn of the twentieth century. The study uses primary sources from biographical journal pages, vital records, and notarial documents. The biographical journal pages are eleven loose pages written by Pablo Montaña that provide information about his family's births, marriages, and deaths, for four generations. Vital records for birth, marriage, and death events were found in the local parish and municipal archives in Cañizo, Spain, and the Catholic Diocese Archive in Zamora, Spain, Archivo Histórico Diocesano de Zamora. Notarial records like wills …

Reading From Cutouts: The Aesthetics Of Alienation In The Photos Of Chinese Factory Workers, Heangjin Park

Asian and Asian American Studies Faculty Works

This essay explores the tensions, oppression, and alienation in factory workers’ relationship with their company and commodities registered in photographic aesthetics. Comparing product, portrait, and ID photos I took at a Chinese kimchi factory, I analyze how aesthetic dispositions in those photos were differentiated in the processes of preparation, review, editing, and publication. On the one hand, commodities are photographed to celebrate their virtues and value with the significant investment of time, resources, and attention to every detail. Their relationship with workers, who spend 14 hours a day making kimchi, is effectively effaced while the products are rendered appealing and …

Reading The Signs Of The Time: Three Voices In The Confessional Lutheran Church As They Relate To Segregation, Racism, And Apartheid In South Africa From 1900–1978, Christoph Dietrich Weber

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Weber, Christoph, Reading the signs of the time: “Three voices in the confessional Lutheran Church to segregation, racism, and apartheid in South Africa from 1900–1978.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2022. 425 pp.

According to August Vilmar, reading the signs of the times was an essential task of all pastors and theologians. It was a part of their prophetic task to interpret the world and its context with the word of God and to proclaim the voice of the church in law and gospel. The three theologians analyzed in this dissertation: Karl Meister, Hermann Sasse, and Friederich W. Hopf respected Vilmar …

Queering Pina Bausch: Tanztheater For Queer Bipoc Artists, Lu Chen

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater (“dance-theater” in English) revolutionized global dance theater performance. From a feminist perspective, Bausch mixed movement with theatrical design elements and film techniques to express emotions and sentiments of women-men relationships, and the boundary between performing and being displayed. Inspired by German Expressionist Dance and post-World-War-II avant-garde movements across Europe and the United States, her movement language and text were visceral in expressiveness through repetition, alienation, montage technique, and emotive gestures (Helden 134). In this essay I explore how Bausch’s approach to dance-theater can welcome dancers who stand outside of the German choreographer’s identity as a white European …

Let The People Speak: How Verbatim Theater Allows Historically Marginalized Groups Tell Their Stories, Kalala C. Kiwanuka-Woernle

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

motherhood: the good, bad, and ugly was born out of my research of Verbatim Theater, specifically the practices of Anna Deavere Smith, The Tectonic Theater Project, and Eve Ensler; and the lack of fully fleshed out mother characters represented in theatre. In my research, I focused on how these different playwrights crafted their plays, identified the topic or event they wanted to explore, and the selection of their subjects. During the pandemic, I had the idea to create a theater piece that would tell the good, the bad, and the ugly of motherhood because in the media especially in the …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

Poetic Self-Representation Among Russian And British Female Poets In The Late 18Th And Early 19Th Centuries, Ulyana Brewer

Theses and Dissertations

This study focuses on the development of self-representation by Russian women poets of the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century through comparison with the women poets in England of the same period. The comparative analysis of the works composed by Ekaterina Urusova, Aleksandra Murzina, Anna Bunina, Mary Julia Young, Mary Scott, Janet Little, and others provides insight into women poets’ practices of exceeding the boundaries of gender-defined art to inhabit literary discourse traditionally occupied by male poets and expose the artificiality of gender and literary genre relations and engage with a variety of political, …

Redistributing Cultural Capital: Graduate Programs In Wind Conducting At Historically Black Universities; Toward An Alternate Future, Jamaal William Nicholas

Theses and Dissertations

The visibility and popularity of marching bands at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) represents a multi-generational tradition of marching and musical excellence. With performances that reach national and international audiences through large viewership, HBCU marching band culture is elevated to artistic prominence with each major league sporting event performance, Presidential inaugural parade, and viral retweet of a performance by a recording artist. After decades of significant contribution to instrumental music education, however, HBCUs have been unilaterally unable to develop graduate programs in wind conducting. Using a qualitative study design, the goal of the current study was to identify challenges …

Screwball, Alexandra Mayer

Theses and Dissertations

This manuscript of poems explores Sephardi Jewish identity within the American diaspora. As the speaker attempts to make sense of herself and of her Jewishness in relation to her ancestry, she feels increasingly at odds with the Ashkenazi cultural practices picked up during her childhood in New York City. The poems grapple with questions such as: what Jewish culture belongs to whom? Who do bagels belong to? Who does Phillip Roth belong to? When Jewishness is not based in religious practice, what is it? Is it possible for a Sephardi Jew in America to disentangle themselves from Ashkenazi production? How …

Comfort Food For The Ears: Exploring Nostalgic Trends In Popular Music Of The Twenty-First Century, April K. Balay

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis will examine trends in twenty-first-century American popular music characterized by a sonority sometimes labeled “retro” or “vintage,” the production of which, I contend, often corresponds to periods of cultural upheaval, and social, political, and economic change. Engaging specifically with music produced during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the economic recession of 2008, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, my work will strive to update the dialogue between music in this century with the styles of the past that it recalls. By examining music beginning in the year 2001 and analyzing airplay charts and recording techniques, I …

“...Reveling In That Freedom”: Roxane Gay’S Hunger As 21st-Century Freedom Narrative, Kendra R. Parker

Literature: Faculty Publications

Work published in South Atlantic Review.

“Whenever We Crossed A Mountain / On This Earth, Yet Another One Appeared”: Circumstantial Poetry In ʿAbd Al-Ghanī Al-Nābulusī’S (D. 1143/1731) Travelogues, Tom J. Abi Samra

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay identifies an early modern aesthetic that mobilizes the mundane to make a point about the world or the grandiose. Through a close reading of the poetry in the travelogues of the 17th-century Ottoman Damascene scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731), this essay identifies, theorizes, and historicizes early modern Arabic circumstantial verse—what the 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé calls vers de circonstance. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the “chronotope,” this essay shows how the poetry in Nābulusī’s travelogues fits within, and sometimes advances, their linear narrative. If poetry is expected to transcend the chronotope in which …

Unended Middle Passage: The Exhausted Flesh Of A Resistant Enslaved Woman, Yipu Su

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

The supine position that characterized the existence of the captive Africans on the slave ship, “The Brookes,” haunted the two female autobiographers of the two mid-nineteenth-century slave narratives/autobiographies this essay discusses. Both Sojourner Truth and Harriet Jacobs voluntarily adopted the supine position as their status of living when resisting sexual violence in slavery, which nevertheless exhausted their flesh. This essay draws on Hortense Spillers’ theory of flesh/body antithesis and Saidiya V. Hartman’s theory of gender construction in slavery to discuss the nature of intended exhaustion. This essay examines to what extent was the strategy of intended exhaustion efficient for both …

“For Now We See In A Mirror, Dimly”: Dialectical Wholeness In Oshii Mamoru’S Ghost In The Shell, Mari Aida

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay argues that Oshii Mamoru's 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell, while indicating possible alliances with the political interests of cyberfeminism, ultimately advocates for the oppositional agenda of dialectical wholeness. Foundational texts of cyberfeminism, such as Donna J. Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," have criticized narratives of isolation and a return towards a primordial wholeness implicit in Euro-American scientific culture. In the context of these texts, the cyborg symbolizes a departure from such narratives and guides the political project of reimagining epistemological boundaries. However, despite its apparent alignment with such projects, Ghost in the Shell dramatizes and …

The Idyllic Houses Of Collective Trauma Reading Home And World War Ii In Ian Mcewan’S Atonement And Jenny Erpenbeck’S Heimsuchung, Victoria Wirtz

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay investigates the themes of home, homeland and belonging in Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung. Both works encourage critical reflection on the nostalgia for Home, in exposing that the idea of such is all too often based on an ideological concept and social exclusion. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the ‘Idyllic Chronotope', I identify the houses of both narratives as spaces that allow for the uncorrupted preservation of their families' values and traditions. However, as the concept of ‘home’ is embedded in their owners’ belief in national supremacy, their residencies are revealed as realms of collective, social …

Envy, Jinghan Cheng, Special Collections, Fleet Library

9th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2023

Entry for the 9th Annual Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening Reception Thursday, March 02, 2023, Fleet Library, Main Reading Room. Juror: Andre Lee Bassuet.

The Seven Sins As Told In Verses By Edmund Spencer, Shuyan Chen, Special Collections, Fleet Library

9th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2023

Entry for the 9th Annual Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening Reception Thursday, March 02, 2023, Fleet Library, Main Reading Room. Juror: Andre Lee Bassuet.

Pembangunan Model Perlindungan Hak-Hak Warga Emas Dari Pengabaian Menurut Perundangan Islam Di Malaysia, Hasiah Mat Salleh

Student Works (2020-2029)

Situasi pengurangan kadar kelahiran dan peningkatan tahap kesihatan penduduk merupakan antara faktor utama yang menjadikan Malaysia bakal menuju ke arah sebuah negara menua menjelang tahun 2035. Walau bagaimanapun, pelbagai isu berkaitan pengabaian dan penderaan warga emas kerap dihebahkan di media massa dan media cetak. Bagi mengatasi cabaran ini, kajian ini dijalankan untuk membina Model Perlindungan Hak-Hak Warga Emas dari Pengabaian Menurut Perundangan Islam di Malaysia (Model ERIsP). Pendekatan kajian reka bentuk dan pembangunan diterapkan dalam kajian ini. Berdasarkan pendekatan yang digunakan, kajian ini dikelaskan kepada tiga [3] fasa utama. Fasa pertama kajian ini merupakan analisis keperluan dengan melaksanakan pendekatan kajian …

Building Identity Through The Fantastic In “Pkhents” And Song Of Solomon, Veronica Yabloko , '22

Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards

No abstract provided.

The Illusion Of Agency In Human–Computer Interaction, Michael Madary

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

This article makes the case that our digital devices create illusions of agency. There are times when users feel as if they are in control when in fact they are merely responding to stimuli on the screen in predictable ways. After the introduction, the second section of the article offers examples of illusions of agency that do not involve human–computer interaction in order to show that such illusions are possible and not terribly uncommon. The third and fourth sections of the article cover relevant work from empirical psychology, including the cues that are known to generate the sense of agency. …

The Cornbread Country: Cornbread And The Development Of Southern Identity, Ashton Doar

Senior Theses

Following the chronological development of the American South from the pre-colonial era to the present day, this thesis analyzes the importance of cornbread in relation to historical circumstances. Native Americans, British settlers, early Americans, and self-identifying Southerners all related to the land and to its food in unique ways. Narrowing the scope of this broad topic to the specific point of cornbread allows for an analysis of the continuity and change of people's circumstances and life experience, as well as the ways in which people define themselves by their food.

The Impact Of Social Media Marketing On The Broadway Industry: A Study Of Hamilton: An American Musical, Jordan Pontelandolfo

Senior Theses

In recent years, social media has become an increasingly important part of the marketing strategies for many Broadway productions. Yet, many Broadway marketing teams do not take complete advantage of their social media channels, instead relying on traditional marketing methods to attract audiences. Hamilton: An American Musical is a recent Broadway production that has used an innovative social media marketing strategy to attract diverse audiences and create a dedicated fanbase. By analyzing the strategy across Hamilton’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, I determine what made its social media so successful and how other Broadway shows can learn from …

Directing With A Historical Perspective For The Current World, John Reynolds Jr.

Senior Theses

This paper charts the path of directing This Is Our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan, which ran from March 24-27. It will explore using the history of the play's setting, New York City in 1982, to keep the production relevant for today's audiences. It also details casting, collaboration with designers, and the rehearsal process. I also give a summary of feedback about keeping the overall environment positive. This experience showed that by leaning into the specific time of the play, the themes resonated strongly with the audiences. A positive environment was also essential to the success of the production.

We Are All Eve: Rescuing The Mother Of All Things From Patriarchal Interpretation And Its Implications For Modern Christian Women, Maeve Pioli

Senior Theses

For centuries, the traditional Christian understanding of the Genesis narrative has relied heavily on the patriarchal biases of historic church figures to enforce a gendered hierarchy where women are deprived of authority, voice, and agency. My thesis deconstructs these misogynistic interpretations to provide liberating, alternative readings for the Garden of Eden as well as New Testament verses that utilize Eve’s transgression to justify women’s secondary status. As a former Christian, I have witnessed the persistence of this oppressive theology, often repackaged as a “complementary” relationship between sexes where women must dutifully submit to the headship of men. Therefore, by building …

Monuments Of Folly: The Persistence Of He Lost Cause At The University Of South Carolina, Sean Dedmon

Senior Theses

The recent controversies surrounding the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments has sparked increased interest understanding why many people, particularly in the South, celebrate the Confederate States of America. This thesis seeks to better understand the motivations and emotions behind the persistence of the Lost Cause among students at the University of South Carolina. This study utilizes both deep textual readings and sentiment analysis to analyze student-published newspaper articles printed in The Gamecock from 1960-2006 and survey responses from current University of South Carolina students to capture the scope and history of belief in the Lost Cause at the University of …

Transdisciplinary Environmental Work: An Evaluation Of Transdisciplinarity In The Field Of Environmental Science And Its Relevance To South Carolina Conservation Efforts In Lake Wateree And The Catawba Indian Reservation, Olivia Mn Shugart

Senior Theses

Transdisciplinarity describes the integration of knowledge and exchange of ideas across diverse academic disciplines, public stakeholders, and decision-makers. In this paper, I discuss the relevance of transdisciplinarity to the environmental field and offer ways in which its principles could be employed to enhance current South Carolina conservation efforts. I advocate for transdisciplinary work through analyzing existing discourse on the value of transdisciplinary research to the environmental field, and I present some of the challenges associated with this mass integration of knowledge. Finally, I describe three models of transdisciplinary research that have been proposed by scholars to address some of these …

Debunking The Curse Of Ham And Its Generational Impact On The Black Race, Fraendy Clervaud

Masters Theses

The so-called curse of Ham became a major issue for Christian Theology and apologetics. The false interpretation claimed that the Black race were to be enslaved. Therefore, these individuals were subjected to inhuman treatment through the institution of slavery for generations. Many believed that those from Africa did not receive Christianity until after they were kidnapped from their homeland. The false narrative that slavery introduced them to Christ is disingenuous. That is because Christianity prevailed in Africa even before it did in Europe. Individuals from African contributed immensely to the history and theology of Christianity. Three of the major Christian …

German And Mexican Music In Central Texas: Historical Connections And Present Possibilities, Amy Aline Beckman

Masters Theses

German and Mexican music have a shared musical ancestry due to immigrants interacting since the late 1800s in central Texas. Comparing these genres reveals both commonalities and distinctions regarding style, orchestration, and thematic material. The differences between the genres create cultural boundaries reflecting nationalism that sometimes reinforces racial tension, while the commonalities are opportunities for empathy and open-mindedness through the globalization that occurs from shared musical experiences. While the historical connections between Germans and Mexicans in Central Texas are well-documented, the present-day status and effects of these connections have not been researched thoroughly. This project builds cultural profiles of both …

Peter, The Apostle To The Gentiles? First Peter’S New Covenant Missional Strategy To Bless The Nations, Cole Victor Laing

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to further develop the message of First Peter within the context of the Apostle Peter’s life and witness. The majority of modern scholars suggest that First Peter is written to a predominantly Gentile audience. This begs the question as to why the apostle to the circumcised (Gal. 2:7) writes to a group of Gentile believers. The study aims to show that Peter, in fact, played a significant role in the earliest church’s mission to the Gentiles. Peter’s exhortation in his first epistle is to a group of believers who are suffering because of their …

We Shall Overcome: Designing An American Popular Music Curriculum To Promote Racial Equality, Kathryn Eileen Stiadle

Masters Theses

There is a strong relationship between American popular music and the fight for racial equality. In the past, music has been used to promote justice throughout slavery, segregation, and the civil rights movement. Racism remains a problem in American society, however, and music is not currently used to teach students about tolerance. This paper presents the argument that anti-racism education can be taught using an American popular music curriculum. Initial research was conducted using existing literature to determine the historical aspect of the project as well as current and future concerns. The acquired information was used to design a curriculum …