English Language and Literature Commons^™

Regenerative Writing: The Rhetorics Of Indigenous Futurisms As Pedagogical Praxis, Madeline R. Mendoza

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation explores how land-based writing and Indigenous Futurisms can reshape writing pedagogy in higher education, focusing on English courses at the University of New Mexico. At the center of this project is the Land Memoirs assignment, which I designed to encourage students to engage land as a living relative and active participant in the learning process. Through the frameworks of Indigenous Futurisms, Land as Pedagogy, Rhetorical Sovereignty, and Pueblo understandings of marking, I analyze the rhetorical choices across student multimodal narratives, reflections, and interviews to examine the assignment’s pedagogical impact. My findings reveal epistemic differences in how Indigenous …

Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies And Southwest Cities In The Mexican American Spatial Imaginary, Jorge A. Hernández Jr.

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

Corazones Urbanos: Literary Cartographies and Southwest Cities in the Mexican American Spatial Imaginary examines how Mexican American writers from Tucson, San Antonio, and Albuquerque narrate, critique, and reimagine urban space across the U.S. Southwest in the twentieth century. Integrating literary studies, cultural geography, urban history, and critical regionalism, the project analyzes responses to racialized development, urban renewal, and gentrification that have displaced Mexican American communities from historic downtowns. Moving beyond borderlands and transnational models, it advances a critically regional approach attentive to local histories, municipal policies, and community pressures shaping urban life. Through close readings of creative and nonfiction texts …

Re-Membering Self, Rewriting Histories, Reclaiming Futures: Chicanafuturist Agency In V. Castro's The Haunting Of Alejandra, Julia Reade

Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal

Re-membering Self, Rewriting Histories, Reclaiming Futures: Chicanafuturist Agency in V. Castro's The Haunting of Alejandra by Julia Reade.

Negotiating (Im)Migrant Identity In The (Un)Assimilated Nation: American Literature Of The Late Nineteenth Century, Haley M. Steffens

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation examines representations of immigration, assimilation, and multinational cultural identity in late nineteenth-century American literature, autobiography, and print culture. Through a comparative analysis of diverse authors and immigrant communities, the project explores how literary and popular culture narratives framed the expectations and limitations of assimilation for disparate populations. By contextualizing these works within historical immigration policies, labor economies, government instability, and burgeoning nationalism, this study reveals how fiction and media shaped public attitudes toward assimilation and influenced policy. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that late, long-nineteenth-century literature functioned as both a reflection of and response to national debates about immigration, …

Sharp Knives, Dark Hearts: Class, Colonialism, And Rebellion On Anthony Bourdain's Bookshelf, Carl Cactus Warmuth

American Studies ETDs

Though often characterized as a celebrity chef, Anthony Bourdain achieved stardom from his lively writing rather than skills in the kitchen. As such, the sociopolitical importance of his life and work is greatly illuminated by his compulsive literary references. Through George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Émile Zola’s The Belly of Paris, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the personas of William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, the tensions central to Bourdain’s legacy are unveiled. This thesis offers a portrait of Bourdain as a complicated figure of …

What Is A Nation? Colonial Legacies, Identity, And Reclaiming In Métisse Autobiographical Narratives – A Case Study Of Sugar And Slate And Garçon Manqué, Thaïs Maëlle Autin

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines the question of national belonging in autobiographical narratives of second-generation immigrant métisse women. I study the similar aesthetic manner in which individuals with different regional and cultural influences grapple with concepts of identity, gender, racism, exile, and negotiation, and the way in which the authors anchor themselves in a broader familial and national heritage. I argue that such an enterprise can be understood as part of the alternative heritage wave, based on Andrew Higson’s theory. The texts put in question traditional understandings of nation. Doing so opens the possibility of engaging in a dialogue that expands the …

Foreign Language And Study Abroad Funding Opportunities, Dr. Todd Karr, Dr. Lenny Ureña Valerio

LAII Events

Join LAII and GEO to learn more about foreign language and study abroad funding opportunities, including: Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships, Boren Awards, Critical Language Scholarships (CLS), Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships, and the Freeman-Asia Program.

Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship: The FLAS Fellowship supports the study of less-commonly taught languages, area studies, and international competencies related to Latin America.

Boren Awards: Boren Awards support the study of critical languages and cultural field studies ofworld regions that are underrepresented in study abroad.

Critical Language Scholarship: CLS provides opportunities for American college and universitystudents to study languages …

Teachers’ Self-Reported Practices Of Teaching Academic Writing In Pakistani Universities, Hafiz Yar

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

This study has explored teachers’ self-reported practices of teaching academic writing in Pakistani universities. The English language based developmental literacy courses in Pakistani undergraduate degrees are offered as part of the curricula rather than through specialized language centers. The three-course progression of developmental English literacy in Pakistani undergraduate curricula aims to develop academic writing proficiency besides effective business communication and technical report writing skills.

This study has used generic qualitative research methodology (Caelli et al., 2003; Kahlke, 2014; Kostere & Kostere, 2021), snowball sampling for participant recruitment, and a combination of survey and one-to-one semi structured interviews for data collection. …

Grievability And The Contingency Of Life Value In Twenty-First-Century Science Fiction, Emily A. Reiff

English Language and Literature ETDs

Using Judith Butler’s framework of grievability, this dissertation explores twenty-first-century science fiction by British, Irish, and Caribbean authors whose novels grapple with legacies of colonialism and imperialism that relied on dehumanization and subjugation. Beginning with Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts (2016), chapter one explores neocolonial rationales—purportedly based on health—which recreate colonial divisions of class and labor and enforce systems of diminishing grievability in a post-apocalyptic Irish context. Chapter two contends that Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) illustrates the danger inherent to value systems that center “normative” embodiment in worlds that reconfigure hypercapacitated human beings as the …

The Borders Of Embodiment: Transgression, Transformation, And Corporeality In Chicanx Speculative Fiction, Chrysta Carson Wilson

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation develops a clearer vision of Chicanx Speculative Fiction (SF) as its own genre anchored to the experiences and histories of the Chicanx community, with a particular interest in the avenues through which race and gender shape the experience of embodiment. SF resists hegemonic narratives that justify racial hierarchies and reveals both the cultural and concrete pressures exerted on Chicanx bodies in the United States as a minoritized and often exploited community. Furthermore, my analysis illustrates that Chicanx writers utilize elements of SF to defamiliarize traditional notions of race, class, and nationality. Through the use of defamiliarization, Chicanx SF …

The Reading Rooms: Reading For Pleasure In The Literature Classroom, Kalila Bohsali

English Language and Literature ETDs

The act of reading is the primary thing the literature classroom is concerned with and that is what this project seeks to claim and to understand, specifically the practice and process of reading for pleasure. This dissertation seeks to understand reading as a process, and reading for pleasure and to propose that students and instructors would benefit from paying more attention to reading for pleasure in the literature classroom, and being more transparent in how reading for pleasure is communicated as a shared value. Through a grounded theory interview project and an in-depth exploration of the different "rooms" in which …

Long In The Tooth: The Commodification Of Teeth, Land, And Character; Resistance To British Oral Culture In Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, And The Americas 1770-1900, Emma B. Mincks

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation is about teeth- rather, how they are portrayed in British colonial discourses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and their development as a commodified material object associated with purity, lands, and visceral emotionality. What do teeth specifically, and orality more generally, mean to eighteenth and nineteenth-century readers in relation to the logics of white possession? How did objectified subjects react to and respond to the affective tension created by this objectification? Teeth are represented in relation to feminine purity throughout British writing from at least the 1600’s. However, between 1770-1900, teeth gain additional cultural meanings, most …

Sociolinguistics Of Saudi Vision 2030: Paradigm Shift Through English Faculty’S Perspectives Of Translanguaging At A Saudi University., Naif Masrahi

Language, Literacy, and Sociocultural Studies ETDs

Many educational systems around the world insist on applying an English Only Policy (EOP) when teaching the English language at universities without addressing their contextual needs. In Saudi Arabia, this problem leads to reduced satisfaction among faculty regarding students’ English level (Alharbi & Alqefari, 2022; Alkhairy, 2013; Alqahtani, 2020; Alsaawi, 2019; Alshammari, 2022; Altale & Alta’ani, 2019; Alzahrani, 2019; Elyas & Picard, 2010). However, the new educational transformation promised by Saudi Vision 2030 (2016) supports the Arabic language as a mother tongue for Saudis, English as an important language, and the teaching of critical thinking to respond to current global …

Witchy Politics: Witches And Witchcraft As Political Tropes From Malleus Malleficarum (1487) To Les Sorcières De La République (2016) And The Mercies (2020), Mallaury Joëlle Marie Gauthier

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

The focus of this thesis are two recent novels featuring witches: Chloé Delaume’s Les Sorcières de la République(The Witches of the Republic, 2016) and Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Mercies (2020). The first is a futuristic dystopia set in 2062, during the witch trial of the Sibyl of Cumae. The second is a work of historical fiction based on witch trial records and set in seventeenth-century Finnmark (Norway). Both are feminist novels, and both emphasize the political valence of the witch as a gendered figure. This figure emerged from the misogyny of early modern demonology but acquired its contemporary contours …

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling Of Transnational Insurgencies In 1960-70s Us And Mexico, Tania Libertad Balderas

English Language and Literature ETDs

Resistance Narratives: Storytelling of Transnational Insurgencies in 1960-70s US and Mexico emphasizes how the narratives from the Mexican Insurgency, the American Indian Movement (AIM), and the leftist faction of the Chicana/o Movement in the 1960s and 1970s articulate intersecting notions of resistance, liberation, and transnational solidarity. The comparative analysis of the testimonial novel Las mujeres del alba (2019) by Chihuahuan novelist Carlos Montemayor, the autobiographies Lakota Woman (1991) and Ohitika Woman (1993) by Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta writer and AIM militant Mary Brave Bird (formerly Crow Dog), and the memoirs and plays by the San Diego-based group Teatro de las Chicanas, collected …

Digitally Rural: Identifying How Technological Inequity Impacts Rural Students In First-Year Writing Courses, Jo Anna M. Nevada

English Language and Literature ETDs

To teach composition in this era means to engage students with technology; it is all but an unspoken requirement at the majority of universities. This dissertation theorizes, however, that the imbricated use of technology in first-year writing (FYW) classrooms places rural students at an inherent disadvantage, with issues of inadequate technological proficiency and inconsistent access causing a substantial learning disparity between this student population and their urban peers. Through mixed-methods data analysis of student survey responses and final FYW course portfolios, this study reveals that the expectation of technological access and presumption of digital literacy is detrimental to rural student …

Cinematic Camouflage, Jared Valdez

English Language and Literature ETDs

There is a war for recognition happening on the Hollywood battlefield. Traditionally, in every war there is an enemy and an alley; in this study, the enemy is systemic racism, and the alley is Black culture. That is, this dissertation seeks to detail the past, present, and future implications of this battle for truth, inclusion, and recognition in American pop culture. This discussion examines how various multi-media forms like literature, film, television, and comic books work as tools to combat racism in American society. More importantly, the theories presented in this text are all linked to actual tactics of military …

From Peer Review To Peer Conference: Increasing Collaboration In Asynchronous And Synchronous Computer-Mediated Modes In A Technical And Professional Communication Class, Sofia Tarabrina

English Language and Literature ETDs

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of different modes of peer review on students' interactions through a mixed-methods case study. The researcher recruited six students and conducted three peer review sessions in the asynchronous anonymous, asynchronous identifiable, and synchronous mode. The data sources were student pre- and post-peer review drafts, peer review comments, and the researcher's observations of student interactions. The data analysis included transcribing, coding, enumeration, classification, ethnographic analysis, and comparison.

The data analysis showed that tension in peer review interactions that might have caused dissatisfaction in students could be reduced if students performed more …

Disrupted Ambitions And Unmasked Identities: An Analysis Of Doubleness In Sylvia Plath’S The Bell Jar And Ralph Ellison’S Invisible Man In Cold War America, Laura Anderson

English Language and Literature ETDs

This thesis conducts a literary analysis on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) with a primary investigation on the protagonists and their convergence of identity in Cold War America. One of the critical discourses evaluated throughout the project’s literary analysis includes the protagonists’ complications of doubleness. This essay argues that since these two texts sit between W.E.B DuBois’s “Double Consciousness” and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1988 theory on intersectionality, these protagonists are forced to contend with an identity crossroads. Secondary to the context of this analysis is the use of “post-war” and “Cold War,”; neither are …

Zur Ästhetik Des Widerstands Im Afrodeutschen Theater: Am Beispiel Von Olumide Popoolas Also By Mail, Bertrand Collins Ngong M.A.

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This research is titled On the Aesthetics of Resistance in Afro-German Theater: A Case Study of Olumide Popoola's Also by mail. The main purpose of this research is to show how Afro-German theater resists through creative processes on a symbolic and aesthetic level to address crucial challenges faced by the black minority in Germany. The play Also by mail by Nigerian-German playwright Olumide Popoola is an interesting example of this, as it is situated at the intersection of gender, race, and identity. Popoola’s engagement with the aesthetics of resistance provides a way to understand how Afro-German activism today uses …

Menetekel: Ishmael's Black Whale And The Semiotics Of Doom, Todd Tyner Cronkhite

English Language and Literature ETDs

This study employs the narrator of Moby Dick, Ishmael, as a focal critic to interpret several potential examples of ominous writing on the wall, or menetekel. It concludes that the message of such writing, owing primarily to its irrevocably deictic relationship with the surface it is written on, is fundamentally apocalyptic in nature, regardless of its explicit content. The physical walls of the “kingdom” are incorporated into the grammar of the menetekel as object, so that its elemental message, “I was here,” becomes not only an admission of criminal trespass, but also a direct threat to the current order and …

Maneuvering Mestizaje In Shakespeare's Tragicomedies, Andrea Phiana Borunda

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project explores and wades through the implications of mestizaje in the murky depths of Shakespeare’s oceans. Disguises and mistakes in identities and in gender and “race” draw on the hybridity and indeterminacy of the early modern stage and its fluidity and lack of order to reflect an unhomed and unmediated formation of nationhood, diaspora, and (trans)global identities. Drawing on ecocritical and critical race theories, I contend the tragicomic works of Shakespeare expose and dismantle ecoracial fantasies of white male supremacy to curate a space of mestizaje for a new generation of BIPOC scholars.

Beyond Seeing: Sight, Mind, And Power In Early-Medieval England, Kevin S. Jackson

English Language and Literature ETDs

Before the development of optical science, sight was largely understood to function extramissively, with rays emitted from the eyes effectuating sight as they came into contact with the physical world. In early-medieval England in particular, a very strong correlation between extramissive sight and an extracorporeal mind is evident, based in part on a potential source for this model that has yet to be identified in scholarship: De opificio Dei, by Lactantius. The connection between sight and the mind accounts for anxiety about the possibility of seeing God, manifest in some early-medieval English translators’ careful revision of biblical texts. Sight …

Making Space For Central American Diasporic Decolonial Imaginaries: An Autoethnography Of A 1st Generation Central-American-American, Melisa N. Garcia

English Language and Literature ETDs

This autoethnography argues that alternative discourses are necessary to give voice to non-dominant narratives and to engage with underrepresented identities and experiences. I use the frameworks of constellating identities and decolonial imaginaries to explore the narratives of my Central American immigrant parents and my own first generation Central American-American experiences. Specifically, I examine a graphic narrative and multimodal installation that I created in order to discover enacted constellating identities that are not fixed but disbursed and change over time. I also describe the decolonial imaginaries, the “third spaces” that are created from the lived experiences of underrepresented individuals, made visible …

Whose Body Is Deserving: Discourse, Power, And Ideologies Concerning Non-Normative Bodies On Instagram, Misty Thomas

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation uses FCDA to investigate the construction and control of the boundaries of normativity as they relate to the body. Data in the form of comments was collected from three different Instagram accounts run by individuals with non-normative bodies. From the data, I argue that not only are non-normative bodies controlled through the coded language of health, but through racialized dehumanization. Even alleged demonstrations of support are problematized through what is being supported. The Instagram comments left on the accounts of non-normative bodies demonstrates that these bodies are suppressed as a way to maintain normative ideologies.

More Than The Defiant Few: Lost Womanhood And Necro Women Dismantling Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideologies, Vicki Vanbrocklin

English Language and Literature ETDs

Too many scholars still rely on adjectives such as deviant, unruly, dangerous, and wild to describe women who interrogate rigid forms of womanhood, especially women of color. My project intervenes in nineteenth-century womanhood discussions, which have traditionally solidified three main categories: Republican, True, and New Womanhood. Between True Womanhood in the mid-nineteenth century and the late nineteenth-century concept of New Womanhood lies an overlooked category aptly understood as Lost Womanhood. I focus on newspaper archives, archival research, and imaginative literature to find “lost” women who critiqued a patriarchal system that thrives on women living in a status akin to being …

Literacy, Rhetoric, Tradition, And Truth In The Age Of Bede, Gerard A. Lavin Iii

English Language and Literature ETDs

Despite his own high level of literacy and education, the Venerable Bede (672/3–735) inhabited a world in which nearly all personal, social, educational, and political discourse was conducted orally. A thorough understanding of his works will require an understanding of this discourse, but attempts to apply broad theories of “orality” derived from other cultures to early medieval England have repeatedly foundered. This dissertation establishes a set of guiding principles to produce a more nuanced and localized model of discourse in Bede’s England and observes a variety of ways oral and literate forms of rhetoric were employed by political actors in …

“The End Of One Shall Be The End Of All”: Solidarity In 19th Century African American Texts, David Puthoff

English Language and Literature ETDs

This project examines how African American authors imagined solidarity through documents before, during, and after the Civil War. While solidarity as a framework has yet to be elucidated for literary studies, I draw on political theory and especially the works of the authors themselves to examine how solidarity as a strategy operates to facilitate cooperation between people of different or similar races or occupations in the periods of abolitionism, war, Reconstruction, and Redemption. I argue that these authors remember, imagine, and articulate small scale acts such as listening, organizing, making material aid, promoting literacy, and fundraising in the pursuit of …

Regional Domesticities: Recalling, Rewriting, And Redefining Gender And Domesticity In The Greater Southwest, A. Laurie Lowrance

English Language and Literature ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native American and Mexican American women in the greater Southwest negotiated domestic expectations within their own cultures while navigating the demands of encroaching Anglo culture to produce something new: hybrid domesticities rooted in the region, which I call regional domesticities. Chapter 1 focuses on María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and connects her novels Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don to the rhetoric of the Overland Monthly. Chapter 2 explores bicultural collaborations between Native American and Anglo women and focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes and Helen Sekaqueptewa’s Me …

Spirit Of The Mound: An Illustrated Story, Tom Montoya

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

This short story depicts the youthful trials and ambitions of rural dwellers and the daily celebratory aspects of life in northern New Mexico. The illustrations by Francisco LeFebre offer a visual panorama of the Wagon Mound, a unique natural formation, in Mora Country.