English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Fragmentation Of Helcar: A Paratethyan Model For Rhûn, Núrnen And The Dead Marshes, Federico Manzoni

Journal of Tolkien Research

This work proposes a conjectural paleogeographic model linking the Sea of Rhûn, Núrnen and the Dead Marshes to the former Sea of Helcar. Beginning from Christopher Tolkien's suggestion that Rhûn may represent Helcar ``vastly shrunken,'' the study combines textual evidence, the Ambarkanta, Fonstad's cartographic reconstructions, and terrestrial analogues drawn from the evolution of the Paratethys, the Messinian Salinity Crisis and other endorheic basins. Helcar is interpreted not merely as an isolated body of deep water but as the centre of a broader hydrological province subsequently partitioned by relief change, sedimentary infilling, basin isolation and drainage reorganization. Within this model, Rhûn …

Moral Ecology In Shakespeare's Tragedies: Nature, Animals, And Conscience As Ethical Agents In Hamlet, Macbeth, And King Lear, Md. Abu Bakkar

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

Shakespeare's tragedies repeatedly dramatize a universe in which moral transgression produces consequences that extend beyond individual psychology to affect society, nature, and the non-human world. This study examines how Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear construct a system of moral ecology, understood as a framework of ethical causality in which human actions generate interconnected consequences across psychological, social, and natural orders. Using qualitative close reading informed by moral criticism, ecocriticism, animal studies, and early modern cosmology, the study analyzes selected passages representing natural disturbance, animal imagery, and conscience as forms of ethical response. The findings show that the three …

Unsex Me Here: Gendered Psychology In Shakespeare's Major Tragedies And Comedy, Md. Abu Bakkar

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This study examines how gender shapes psychological experience across five of Shakespeare’s major plays: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Existing scholarship treats Shakespeare’s tragic women, tragic men, and comic heroines as separate problems; this article asks whether one framework connects them. Its starting point is the reversal in psychological positions between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: he resists killing on moral grounds and then grows recklessly violent, while she plans the murder with cold resolve and is later overwhelmed by guilt. The study asks whether this pattern recurs more broadly, and why. Drawing …

Remixing Dialogue: A Case Study On Perceptions Of Hip Hop Pedagogy In A Professional Learning Course, Kelly J. Thelen

Dissertations, Theses, and Projects

This qualitative case study examines how teachers’ decision-making and professional autonomy shift while participating in a Hip Hop Pedagogy Professional Learning course supported by structured FIXIT (Lo & Wachter, 2023a, 2023b, 2023c, 2023d; Wachter & Lo, 2024) game-facilitated dialogue in a rural, culturally and linguistically diverse Midwest community. Grounded in Freire’s (1970) Critical Pedagogy, Ladson-Billings’ (1995) Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (Paris and Alim, 2017), and Adult Learning Theory (Knowles et al., 2005), the study explores the reclamation of agency by teachers in a time of constrained creativity and educator autonomy shaped by strict policy environments, an emphasis on …

Nice White Ladies: Exorcising The Ghost Of Lady Bountiful, Renee Lynch

Journal of Comparative & International Higher Education

This article explores how individuals with racial privilege can both acknowledge and start to move beyond the ways they are implicated in systemic injustices in internationalization through collaboration. The study examines how the author acted in complicity with colonial power in an international collaborative research project in English language education at a university in Tanzania. Critical ethnographic data was analyzed using positioning theory and applying the archetype of Lady Bountiful - a “nice white lady” who graciously participates in the civilizing work of colonization. This construct illuminates how the author perpetuated colonialism at the intersection of whiteness and femininity while …

A Case For Societal Provenance: Marguerite Harper As Told By The Men She Represented, V. Emily Cranwell Deinert

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This paper argues for making societal provenance the grounding framework for archival descriptive standards to ensure that important voices already present in archives are no longer buried. This study reclaims from archival obscurity the career of literary agent Marguerite E. Harper to illustrate the need for this expansion. Harper proves strikingly absent from some of the archives for the authors she represented. Likely an unwitting omission from archivists that uncritically accepted the narratives of these male authors, Harper’s erasure provides a potent example of the ways that archival descriptive standards may unintentionally further silence historically marginalized voices within archives. The …

A Poetic Call For And A Reflection And Commentary On Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, And Compassion, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Finding a published poem I had written as a teenager, titled “The Heavens Weep.” this article uses that poem as the basis for a commentary that reflects on the state of the world today (2026),  As a commentary, the article uses the poetic and metaphoric words in the poem as a relevant "reality check" for what is still going on today.  In essence, the commentary is about a call for Clarity, Understanding, Hope, Courage, and Compassion, or what I call Archetypal Energies, Higher Vibrational Energies that operate deep within our individual and collective psyches to creatively urge us to "see" …

A Comparative Critique Of Masculine Domination In Madame Bovary (1856) And Gemma Bovery (1999), Aqeela Hamarthya Czecheska Humayra, Diah Kartini Lasman

International Review of Humanities Studies

This study examines how social construction influences the representation of female autonomy through the transition of medium and temporal context. Its primary focus is to compare the mechanisms of masculine domination in Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel Madame Bovary (1856) with Posy Simmonds’ graphic novel adaptation Gemma Bovery (1999). Utilizing Hutcheon’s adaptation theory (2013) and de Beauvoir’s existential feminism (1949), complemented by Freytag’s dramatic structure analysis (1900) as the main framework, this research proceeds from the premise that the transposition from text to visual medium has significant implications for changes in narrative strategies and plot. This study highlights the differing manifestations …

Continuing Christopher Tolkien’S Work In A Digital Age, James K. Tauber

Journal of Tolkien Research

Christopher Tolkien’s 12-volume History of Middle-earth is a remarkable achievement, yet Christopher repeatedly acknowledged how difficult the material was to present in print form and that “that there was no really satisfactory solution”.  This paper contends that a printed book is not scholarship but just one way of presenting its results. It explores how digital philology can overcome some of the limitations of print, giving examples from the Digital Tolkien Project. It shows how structural markup, version alignment, parallel reading environments, and other approaches can make relationships between drafts and published texts clearer. Importantly, these methods do not replace Christopher’s …

A Modest Proposal For Discourse Analysis In Nonbinary Communities: Method And Case Study, Nikoli Michael Daigneault

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While linguists have long used discourse analysis to study language variation in binary and nonnormative gender groups, nonbinary people have often been excluded from analyses or treated without a nonbinary-informed framework. Nevertheless, nonbinary language use can provide key insights into the relationship between gender and language. In this thesis, I propose Nonbinary Discourse Analysis, a set of recommendations and best practices for conducting discourse analysis in nonbinary communities. These methods are informed by previous empirical research on nonnormative gender identities and theoretical work in trans linguistics (Zimman, 2020) and trans epistemologies (Nordmarken, 2019; Raclaw, in press). To demonstrate the methodology, …

Ideology In Translating Indonesian Political News Headlines From Indonesian To English: A Cda Study Of Antara, Ferina A. Lestari, Haru Deliana Dewi

Journal of Language, Literature, and Arts

This study examines how ideology is constructed in the translation of Indonesian political news headlines into English by ANTARA News Agency. Moving beyond the notion of translation as mere equivalence, it conceptualizes headline translation as a process of discursive recontextualization shaped by institutional practices and audience design. Using a qualitative comparative approach, the study analyses 20 pairs of Indonesian English political headlines. The analysis implied Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The dimensional focusing on textual features, discourse practice, and social practice. The findings reveal transformations, including omission of culturally specific details, addition of evaluative elements, lexical reframing, …

Desert Desires And The War On Terror: Pre- And Post-9/11 Sheikh Romances, Leena Altamimi

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

The existence of sheikh romances as a subgenre has prevailed for well over a century in Western literature. Therefore, would one be able to discern whether the book cover imagery as well as the textual content showcases any tangible differences pre and post 9/11, and America’s “war on terror” campaign? A total of five books are observed: The Sheik by E.M. Hull published in 1919, Sarah Holland’s Desert Destiny published in 1991, Loreth Anne White’s The Sheik Who Loved Me and Penny Jordan’s Possessed by the Sheikh (both published in 2005), and lastly Crowned for the Sheikh’s Baby by Sharon …

Kicau Kericau: The Chirps And Warbles Of A Bird-Human Story, Airien Ludin

Masters Theses

This thesis tells the tale of bird-human relationships and what it means to live alongside one another, subverting the hierarchical view of humans as above birds inherited from colonial history. It asks how the practice of illustration can function as a site of Two-Eyed Seeing, where scientific and local knowledge are held together as an entangled narrative. It also examines how mendongeng (storytelling), as I have experienced it within Indonesian culture and everyday contexts, can help us understand birds as a companion species with their own agency.

This project takes two forms: first, a picture book titled Sun Bird …

Inherited By “Merit”: What Caste Carries Across The Indian American Diaspora, Aarushi V. Jaiswal

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project traces the rhetorical formation termed “meritocratic nationalism,” a political vocabulary that makes national belonging conditional on moralized merit, converting structural advantage into the language of individual character. Meritocratic nationalism is traced across three political figures whose rhetoric represents successive moments in a single ideological trajectory. Reading Narendra Modi’s 2014 and 2018 Independence Day addresses and his 2014 Madison Square Garden speech to the Indian American diaspora as the formation’s originating texts, this project argues that Modi’s recurring moral tetrad of conduct, values, traditions, and ability translated the structurally concentrated advantages of India’s upper-caste professional class into a universalist …

Project Wildest Dreams, Faith Bernier

Honors College Theses

“Project Wildest Dreams” is a hybrid psychological correlational study and short fiction collection based on anecdotes of vivid, frightening, or bizarre dreams. This collaboration of art and science explores the nature of dreaming, a phenomenon that has intrigued and perplexed both the humanities and the STEM fields for many years. The goal of this thesis was twofold: primarily, it was intended to utilize the outlandish, surreal, and unique feelings and images that dreams elicit in order to procure an anthology of surrealist and absurdist short stories across primarily the genres of horror, comedy, and fantasy. In addition to this, the …

Hope, Incorporated: Welborn Hope As B.A. Botkin's "Promising" Oklahoma Poet, Cullen Whisenhunt

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

In 1927, a letter by then-professor at the University of Oklahoma, Roy Temple House, was published in the Ada Evening News complimenting Ada, OK, poet Welborn Hope and suggesting Hope get in touch with folklorist and literary scholar BA Botkin, also an OU faculty member. That same year, Botkin published “Oklahoma Poets, Inc.,” in which he detailed what he believed to be the three stages of a state’s literary development: the pioneer stage, the popular rhymesters stage, and finally, the union of art and life (30-31). In 1935, Botkin presented a lecture in Tulsa in which he cited Hope among …

Fighting Like A Girl: The Trauma, Power, And Resistance Of Heroines In Young Adult Fantasy, Sara L. Chappell

ATU Theses and Dissertations 2021 - Present

This thesis examines the evolution of female rage in young adult fantasy literature, focusing primarily on Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series while drawing comparisons to other contemporary heroines. It argues that female rage is not a sign of instability but a politically meaningful response to trauma and systemic oppression. Using trauma theory, affect theory, and narrative identity theory, this project traces how Aelin Ashryver Galathynius’s rage develops from a physiological survival response into protective care, political resistance, and ultimately reclaimed agency. Early in the series, her anger emerges as dissociation and emotional shutdown shaped by trauma and institutional …

An Invasion Of The Intimate Sphere: The Manipulation Of Libido Under Totalitarian Regimes, Elyssa Lucero

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This paper examines the temporal nature of libidinal control in the totalitarian systems represented in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Arguing that the most enduring forms of domination operate through the reorganization of desire, the essay explores how regimes intervene in familial, romantic, and social attachments to redirect affective energy towards the state. Orwell depicts a primitive, reactive phase of control in which attachments are violently ruptured, whereas Huxley imagines an advanced system that operates through preemption, never allowing attachments to form. Drawing on Freud’s theory of redirected libido, Berlant’s theory of Cruel Optimism, Marxist …

Awe As Signpost: An Argument For The Consistency Of Lewis’S “Joy” And Psychological Awe, Audrey Hendricks

Senior Honors Theses

C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy details Lewis’s autobiographical apologetic for the existence of God through his experiences of “Joy,” a technical term invented by Lewis. Upon close study, his experiences of Joy contain many similarities to psychological awe. This investigation compares Lewis’s Joy with psychological awe using the Awe Experience Scale (AWE-S) to determine consistency. Lewis’s Joy was found to be consistent with all six criteria of the AWE-S in addition to other recognized psychological characteristics of awe. In addition to qualitative consistency, this review also argues for the teleological consistency of the two concepts, contending for a Christian teleological …

Volume 17, Christian O’Neill, Kyara Greene, Savva Sidorov, Laura Bisaillon, Luke Clemmer, Hannah Gordon, Kitt Benson, Taylor Blount, Rachel Danzitz, Nicholas Duellman, Chase Gionis, Hima Fernando, Seth Franzyshen, Onyx Gonzalez, Bryan Lin, Samantha Start, Ysabel Wells, Maggie Duncan

Incite: The Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

Introduction Dr. Amorette Barber, Director, Office of Student Research

From the Editor Dr. Hannah Dudley-Shotwell

Cover Artist’s Statement Maggie Duncan

On Mentoring Dr. Yulia Uryadova

Ukrainian Resistance in the Face of Russification: Nestor Makhno and Anarchism

by Christian O’Neill

Life Vest by Kyara Greene

Isolation and 16S rRNA Identification of Bacteria from Fire Department Connection Pipe by Savva Sidorov

The Effectiveness of Planned Exercise in Reducing ADHD Symptoms in Children by Laura Bisaillon & Luke Clemmer

Linguistic Analysis on Confidence and Communication Strategies with Disparities Between Sign Fluency and Hearing Impairment by Hannah Gordon

Freedmen in Indian Territory by Kitt …

Psychological Principles In Writing Center Consulting & Ai, Ella S. Hansen

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

A third of those ages 18 to 24 have engaged with ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2025). The newest form, ChatGPT-4, is better at generating more plausible long-form essays and creative writing than ever before (Imran & Almusharraf, 2023), meaning that AI-assisted writing is prevalent at higher education institutions (Cardon et al., 2023) and in writing centers (Goulet, 2025). Limited research has investigated the impact of this on writing center consultants. This multidisciplinary study investigated how consultants feel about large language model artificial intelligence (LLM AI) and how it can impact the consulting process, through the lens of three psychological principles: empathy, social …

The Sacrificial Vs. The Luzhinian Figure: Comparing Sacrificial Love In Crime And Punishment, Pride And Prejudice, And A Tale Of Two Cities, Natalie Rose Kubala

Masters Theses

Many works of art and literature exploring the theme of love focus on trying to define what love is; in contrast, this thesis dives deeper into defining what love is not, specifically focusing on the relationship between love and sacrifice. This thesis argues that love is not the same as sacrifice because a true sacrifice requires that love is already present prior to the sacrifice being made. This thesis will compare those who perform true sacrifices to those who perform sacrifices for their own personal gain by exploring grandiose narcissistic characters who perform (or attempt to perform) sacrifices without love …

Taylor Swift, Gender, And Feminism: What Do The Data Say?, Maxine Lewis

The Manuscript: Journal of Taylor Swift Studies

In the world of Swiftian scholarship, several scholars have credited Taylor Swift with feminist impact, while others have criticized both her type of feminism and claims to be a feminist. Many arguments rest on a narrow group of protest songs (“The Man”, “You Need To Calm Down”, and “Only The Young”) and a short period of Swift’s career in which she made many paratextual political gestures (2019-2020). However, claims about a songwriter’s feminism (or lack thereof) will be more accurate, robust, and nuanced if they draw on data from her whole career.

This article provides the first systematic survey of …

Tolkien’S Thomist Triad: A High Medieval Response To Contemporary Jus Ad Bellum, Jeffrey S. Dixon

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

This paper reviews the development of the component of just war theory dealing with whether it is just to wage a war in the first place (jus ad bellum) from the early medieval to early modern eras and compares its principles to J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels about Middle-Earth. Tolkien’s views on the concept of jus ad bellum can be dated to a specific point in the medieval era, just before a number of modern, consequentialist criteria were added to Catholic thought on just war. I conclude that Tolkien’s fictional works permit broader justifications for war than do most modern just war …

“The Left Leg Is Not Well”: Identity, Economy, And Ability In Early Modern Drama, Emma D. Whaley

Department of English: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The human reality of the disabled experience often goes overlooked by scholars analyzing early modern literature. Most scholarship seems to interpret disability as metaphorical without examining the human who experiences it. In this paper, I will be examining disability in three early modern texts as literal and inquire into the realities of the disabled experience for the characters. A Larum for London, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and The Fair Maid of the Exchange all prominently feature a disabled character—Stump, Ralph, and Cripple respectively. These characters offer a depth of personhood rarely examined in early modern literary scholarship, even in …

Yellowjackets And White Hoods?!: The Mistreatment Of Bipoc Characters, Suki Shepherd

KUCC -- Kutztown University Composition Conference

In 2021, a psychological horror television series inspired by Lord of the Flies, reimagined as a high school girls' soccer team, was released. The highly skilled team from Wiskayok High School is on the way to the national championship game when their plane crashes in the Canadian wilderness. With both a teenage timeline and an adult timeline, the show switches between the girls' desperate survival and descent to madness in the woods and modern times, where the truth of how they made it out starts to be revealed.

Rhetorical Strategies In Writing-Based Suicide Prevention: A Qualitative Study For Navy Chaplains And Command Leadership In Region East, Herode Jean-Vilien Thomas

Masters Theses

Suicide prevention remains a critical challenge within military environments, particularly in operational settings where communication between leaders and service members often occurs under conditions of stress and urgency. While the United States Navy has implemented numerous prevention initiatives, limited attention has been given to the role of written communication as a relational and persuasive tool in crisis response. This study examines how rhetorical strategies influence writing-based suicide prevention communication within Navy Recruiting Command Region East. Drawing on classical rhetorical theory and contemporary communication research, the study explores how tone, clarity, message structure, and audience awareness shape the effectiveness of crisis …

Lexical Selection And New Word Formation In Apex Legends, Genevieve Dickerson

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This research observes the use of language within FPS gaming. Data was collected by solo queuing into the battle royale FPS, Apex Legends, and analyzing the way the player group develops different verbiage to meet the communication needs of the game. Four forms of word-formation mechanisms were observed: compounding (hitbox), borrowing (heaven), noun-verb conversion (spawn), and new-word formation (int-ing). This work supports the hypothesis that the lexical formations which are most-opted for within these games result from noun-verb conversion, due to the fact that these formations are typically monosyllabic and thus more efficient within time-sensitive gameplay. This research explores …

Voice And Pain: Representations Of Disability In Adaptations Of “The Little Mermaid”, Ace Molloy

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 story, “The Little Mermaid,” is a popular fairy tale that has been adapted several times by writers, filmmakers, and game developers. It is one of the few fairy tales with explicit portrayals of disability; the mermaid in the tale is nonspeaking and experiences chronic pain, as well as being a mermaid—a nonnormative figure who is aligned with disability. This paper looks at the ways that the mermaid is portrayed in literary, film, and new media adaptations from a disability-justice perspective. Examining multiple representations of the character, I argue that while feminist adaptations erase her disability and …

Humanity Is Evolving Its Consciousness: The Role Of Archetypal Energies As Guides During An Unfolding Weeding Out And Alignment Process, Carroy U. Ferguson

Psychology Faculty Publication Series

Humanity is evolving its consciousness at individual and collective levels.  Given these seemingly tumultuous times, as of this writing (January 2026), to make such a statement may sound like a strange thing to say.  However, I suggest that if you are alive today and if you are reading these words, these are the very times for which you were born—to assist Humanity as it evolves its consciousness with your unique gifts, whatever they may be.  That is, this period of our individual and collective human being-ness may be characterized as an unfolding period of weeding out and alignment with the …