From Street Life To Spiritual Leadership: Analyzing Transformation, Faith, And Identity In “New Muslim Cool”, Hatoumata Tunkara

Occasional Essays

Introduction:

New Muslim Cool begins with Hamza Pérez, a Puerto Rican Muslim revert, as he rebuilds his life through Islam while balancing faith, family, and community. The documentary follows his journey from being involved in street life to becoming a faith-driven community leader and rapper. Hamza uses hip-hop and religion to connect with young people and challenge stereotypes about Muslims in America. The film primarily takes place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and explores themes of identity, redemption, and the pursuit of peace in the post-9/11 world. It is directed by Jennifer Maytorena Taylor and was released in 2009.

Acculturation And Puerto Rican Muslim Reverts, Toni Akinbamowo

Occasional Essays

Introduction:

The documentary AmeRícan (n.d.) simultaneously covers the perspectives of two oft ignored groups of U.S. society–both Puerto Rican and Latino/e (both the gendered and gender neutral terms for individuals of Latin American heritage) Muslims. Bergenline Avenue, New Jersey has a heavy presence of Latino Muslims, especially those who are “Puerto Rican, Mexican, Dominican, Peruvian” ([00:00:49–00:00:50]). Latino Muslims in nearby neighborhoods have the privilege of having access to religious resources such as the North Hudson Islamic Education Center, “home to a large number of Latinx Muslims” ([01:23–01:25]).

“You’Re Getting A Little Big For This”: Fat Characters In Disney Animated Films, Rachel Casey, Grace Brenner

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

To further develop the literature regarding representations of larger bodies in popular culture, this quantitative content analysis describes demographic and stereotypic depictions of fat characters in all 54 Disney animated films theatrically released from 1937 to 2023. The 124 identified fat characters were most commonly depicted as sidekicks of the protagonist (n = 38, 30.65%), with only four (3.23%) depicted as protagonists. Demographically, fat characters were most frequently male (n = 95, 76.61%), white (n = 92, 74.19%), middle aged (n = 57, 46.00%), and of lower social class (n = 50, 40.32%). Compared to …

Book Review: Starry Field: A Memoir Of Lost History By Margaret Juhae Lee, Brook Mcclurg

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Full Circle, Full Century: An Interview With Mitsuye Yamada, Noelle Brada-Williams, Elizabeth J. Asborno

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Volume Thirteen: Teaching In Dangerous Times, Noelle Brada-Williams

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Aaldp Cover Volume 13, Derick Truong

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies

No abstract provided.

Representation Of Terrorism After 9/11 In Kathryn Bigelow And Mark Boal's Zero Dark Thirty Movie, Mela Maulina Putri, Bunyamin Faisal Syarifudin, Deni Suswanto

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Terrorism, as a global phenomenon, has been widely represented in various media, particularly in films. One of the films that represent terrorism is Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal. This research aims to discuss the representation of terrorism in Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's Zero Dark Thirty, employing a qualitative approach and an analytical descriptive method. To achieve the research objectives, the author employs John Fiske's Semiotics theory, which is divided into three levels: the reality level, the representation level, and the ideological level. The results and discussions in this study are presented through visual and …

The Extraction Unconscious: Solar-Powered Utopias In Catching The Sun (2015) And In The Name Of Lithium (2021), Isidora Cortés-Monroy

Critical Humanities

By comparing the depictions of future energy regimes in the two ecodocumentaries, Catching the Sun (2015) and In the Name of Lithium (2021), this article explores representations of post-carbon futures from the US and Argentina. Read closely alongside Frederic Jameson’s notions of utopias, the article delineates the extent to which a solar powered future challenges and reiterates current neocolonial extractivist structures. Basing myself on Patricia Yaeger’s concept of an “energy unconscious,” I argue that these solar utopias maintain an “extraction unconscious” that continues to produce sacrifice zones where primary commodities needed for the energy transition can be found. By analysing …

Queer Ga(Y)Ze And Desire In Flesh And Pink Narcissus, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

Through their portrayals of gay-for-pay hustlers, the films Flesh and Pink Narcissus, offer an expansive view of queerness and illuminate the queer history of Times Square.

American Utopia: The Evolution Of David Byrne’S Viewpoint Of America From 1977 To Present, Morgan A. Prince

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

David Byrne is a multimedia artist known primarily as the lead singer and main songwriter for the new wave band Talking Heads. Throughout Byrne’s career he has continually written about America and Americans. This thesis traces his writings about America from the beginning of Talking Heads to his most recent projects. In doing so, the thesis puts forward that Byrne’s opinion on America has changed from one that is centered on the American people to one that is instead focused on American institutions. Additionally, the thesis traces how Byrne’s work has evolved from idealization to realism, as his early work …

As Above, So Below: The Cognitive Impact Of Found Footage Horror, Josephine Railston

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

What makes a horror movie good? Why do we like horror movies? Using the 2014 movie As Above, So Below my poster presentation explores the cognitive impact of found footage horror on its viewers. Employing the use of a handheld camera and first person perspective, the film is able to immerse its audience in a supernatural version of the Paris Catacombs. I discuss found footage as a narrative tool, particularly focusing on how it amplifies psychological and physical responses like fear and anxiety.

Resurrected Criminals, Time-Loops, And Faustian Bargains: The Speculative Edge Of 1940s Film Noir, Tyler P. Bolden

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

In the 1940s, as film noir reached the height of its generic consolidation, a more uncanny and supernatural variant emerged in its shadow: speculative noir. While the genre's hard-boiled lineage, Expressionist aesthetics, and the lyrical fatalism of French Poetic Realism define its conventional form, certain films of the period reconfigured noir through Lovecraftian horror, gothic motifs, weird science, and ontological rupture. This neglected strain of noir stretched the genre's murky boundaries beyond fatalistic crime narratives into what science fiction writer Fritz Leiber calls the "dark dangerous forest"—a space of eerie, indeterminate forces. Although critics such as James Naremore and Christopher …

Stitch Theory, Brittany Adeline Adama King

Theses and Dissertations

This paper weaves personal history together using “stitched” citational text, supporting the concept that an archive can function as support, as worn; as garment.

Space And Subjectivity In The Emerging American West, Scott Hendry

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The American West resists theoretical definition. As myth, ideal, region, contact zone, place, space, symbol, territory, home, assemblage, dream, and home, the West is continually changing. As a region, the West is not a closed space; it is an open, ongoing constellation of processes, an unfolding simultaneity of storied events or happenings. This dissertation, “Space and Subjectivity in the Emerging American West,” explores literature and cinema of the modern West. My project seeks to answer the question “What is the American West?” by examining the work of novelists, poets, filmmakers, cultural geographers, philosophers, and photographers who reimagine identity, locality, and …

"Next Time Is Next Time. Now Is Now": A Review Of Perfect Days, Bob De Smith

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"The best films, the best art, not only examine life, helping us to notice what we haven’t seen before, but they ask us to change our lives. And this is one of those films."

Posting about the movie Perfect Days from In All Things, an online hub that offers insight into maintaining and faithful and orthodox Reformed Christian worldview while fearlessly engaging in every aspect of contemporary life – until all is made new.

Perfect Days

Content Worth Consuming, Mark Volkers

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Could it be that a workplace (or film set) that actively pursues shalom in the way people and creation are treated, is honoring to God who seeks the restoration of all things?"

Posting about ­­­­­­­­defining Christian film from In All Things, an online hub that offers insight into maintaining and faithful and orthodox Reformed Christian worldview while fearlessly engaging in every aspect of contemporary life – until all is made new.

Content Worth Consuming

La Vida Es Sueno's Segismundo, A Case Study On Isolation, Kiel Garrett

Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Queering The Mean Girl: Spectating The Post-Feminist Melodrama, Anne Gregg '25

Honor Scholar Theses

Ultimately this thesis will examine how Mean Girls melodramas moralize gender and sexuality. The Mean Girl is not an embodiment of moral hegemony. She may look like the perfect subject, but she is imperfect, because she tries to be perfect. She is a failure of femininity, because her attempts to be feminine reveal the masquerade. Womaniliness is not inherent; it is not real. The Mean Girl is attractive to the sapphic spectator because she exposes the alienation and artifice of gender and heterosexuality. The stereotypical image of the Mean Girl is plastic perfection, but she is not.

A Labor Of Love: Wall-E'S Redemption, Rosamund M. Gammie

Journal of Religion & Film

Inaugurated into the Criterion Collection in 2022 this paper re-examines some of the initial responses to the 2008 Disney-Pixar animated film, WALL-E. The movie received a mixed reception, largely celebrated (but occasionally viewed as “too leftist” by others) for its environmental, anti-capitalist message by many public critics, yet disparaged or dismissed as being superficially empty, shallow, and hollow in academic circles. Labor has been the focus of some academic criticism of the film, particularly as it relates to commoditisation, but this paper recontextualises labor not with capitalism, but with love. By viewing the film through the dynamic of labor and …

Deuce Redemption: Grindhouse Cinema, Moral Panic, And Urban Renewal, Robert Brenner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you consult standard histories of the “redevelopment” of 42^nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, AKA “the Deuce,” you will read that it was filled with nothing but criminals and pornographers, that decent people avoided it at all costs, and the only way the block could be “saved” was by seizing it via eminent domain, evicting all the current tenants, and replacing them with Disney and its fellow entertainment corporations.

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a more nuanced alternative to these standard histories. I will argue that the Deuce was a lower-class, multiracial, queer entertainment …

David Lynch Exposed The Rot At The Heart Of American Culture, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

Stratton discusses cultural commentary and impact in the films of David Lynch, following the director's passing.

Queen's Pride: A Queer Reading Of Star Wars Character Padmé Amidala, Madeleine Loewen

Mythopoeic Society Seminar Proceedings

Ever since Luke Skywalker and Han Solo first appeared onscreen together in 1977, LGBTQ+ Star Wars fans have harnessed the power of queer reading to write themselves back into a galaxy far, far away, despite Lucasfilm’s long-term disapproval of such practices. Nonetheless, there exists little scholarly literature on queerness in the franchise, and even less on the potentially sapphic characters. Queen Padmé Amidala, first introduced onscreen in Episode I: The Phantom Menace, proves a surprising—but no less salient—queer figure in Star Wars. From her intimate relationships with her handmaidens, to her experimentation with gender performativity, to her quiet yet …

Voices To Faces: The Midnight Cowboy’S Picaresque Journey, Dave Patterson

Anthós

John Schlesinger’s 1969 film, Midnight Cowboy, tells the story of Joe Buck, a Texan who dreams of working as a hustler in New York. Schlesinger’s resulting tale follows the framework of the picaresque, wherein a naive rube ventures to the big city to pursue a better life and exposes societal ills along the way. In this article, Patterson reveals how Joe Buck’s internal tension derives from his materialism, symbolized as disembodied voices, and his devaluing of human connection and empathy, symbolized as faces. The voices from his radio’s advertisements and game shows reinforce his flawed assumptions about life. A midpoint …

Operation Dumbo Drop: Cultural Memory, And Representations Of The Vietnam War In The 1990s, Sylvie Kromer

Scripps Senior Theses

In 1995, the film Operation Dumbo Drop was released by Walt Disney Pictures. This film, based on a true story of elephants being airlifted across Vietnam in 1968 by the American military, holds a unique position as a rare family-friendly comedy about the Vietnam War. As a reflection of 1990s-era cultural memory of the Vietnam War, the film rehistoricizes and sanitizes the war, following a similar trend in other pieces of media from the same era. Operation Dumbo Drop must be seen in this context and as a product of the moment in which it was made. In taking a …

Hidden Wounds And Secret Scars: The Post-World War Ii Western As A Cinema Of Trauma, Maggie Sue Scanlan

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

In this project, I consider the post-WWII Western film as a site that represents and navigates war traumatized American masculinity. Through a discussion of the significance of the Western as a national myth that speaks directly to American masculinity and nation-building through individual violence, I situate the genre as an ideal vehicle to reframe war traumatized masculinity and analyze seven Westerns through a threefold analysis: metaphoric (a cinema of trauma), psychoanalytic (the traumatic gaze), and therapeutic (recovery and reintegration). In Chapter One, I track anxieties and preoccupations signaling the cultural concern with war trauma in genres more routinely associated with …

Mirrors Of The Reel: Black Women's Identity In American Cinema (2009-2024), Melanie-Penny Harrison

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This study investigates whether white supremacy structures, embodied in Hollywood’s predominantly white leadership, drive negative portrayals of Black women in 31 mainstream American films from 2009 to 2024. Employing a mixed-methods approach—quantitative content analysis, qualitative content analysis (QCA), and narrative methodology—I code portrayals for racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, colorism, and internalized racism, classifying them as progressive (e.g., empowered roles), regressive (e.g., subservient stereotypes), or hybrid. Guided by Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, the analysis examines narrative structures, character agency, symbolism, and dialogue to uncover intersectional patterns (e.g., race, gender, class) across three periods: 2009–2013, 2014–2018, and 2019–2024. Across these periods, cultural …